The Dawes Act and the origin of the term $5 Indian

In 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Act (named after Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts). The law regulated land rights on tribal territories in the United States. It converted the Native American traditional system of communal land ownership into the private property land ownership we are all familiar with today.

Before it could convert the land into private property, the government had to determine which Native Americans were eligible for property allotments. For this to happen, the U.S. government had to make a criterion of what makes a person Native American and therefore eligible. The U.S. government also had to make an official list of who was Native American, this list became known as the Dawes Rolls.

The goal of the law was to protect the property of the Native Americans as well as to force their absorption into the American mainstream. A side goal of the act was to open up the reminder of unused Native American tribal reservation land to white settlers for a tidy profit.

The U.S. government came up with the idea of blood quantum laws to determine who were and were not Native Americans. A person’s blood quantum is defined as the fraction of their ancestors, out of their total ancestors, who are documented as full blood Native Americans. For example, a person with a parent who is full-blood Native American and another parent with no Native ancestry is considered 1/2 Native American. For comparison, many tribes and nations did not use blood quantum to decide who is a member of their tribe.

One of the many problems with the blood quantum law criteria was that recognized Native Americans who were not considered either full blood or mixed-blood by the test, were essentially detribalized. They were stripped of their Native American heritage and displaced from their homelands.

Gregory Smithers, who’s an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University explained another issue with the new law. He stated, “these were opportunistic white men who wanted access to land or food rations,” these were people who were more than happy to exploit the Dawes Commission-and government agents, for $5, were willing to turn a blind eye to the graft and corruption.” In translation, white men with a hunger for more land acquisition paid corrupt government agents $5 to register on the Dawes Rolls. They and their offspring therefore were fraudulently enrolled in Native American Tribes and got access to the land allotment and benefits that came with the designation. This is where the term $5 Indian comes from.

Many authentic Native Americans didn’t trust the U.S. government (rightfully so!) and chose not to register with the Dawes Rolls. The U.S. government never acknowledged these people as Native Americans and it excluded them from the land and benefits.

Because of the Dawes Act, Native American owned land decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934. 90,000 Native Americans were made landless.

The Dawes Act had a horrible permanent effect on the Native Americans.

1. The law legally preempted the sovereign right of Native Americans to define themselves

2. The law implemented the notion of blood quantum as the sole legal criteria for defining Native Americans

3. The law institutionalized divisions between “full-bloods” and “mixed-bloods”

4. The law detribalized a large segment of the Native American population

5. Last but not least, the law gave the U.S. government the right to legally sell large tracts of Native American land.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt helped pass the U.S. Indian Reorganization act in 1934. The law reversed portions of the Dawes act, prohibited any further land allotment and gave the Native Americans the right to reorganize and form self governments again.

Today, the heirs of those $5 Indians still reap the unearned benefits, they also lay claim to tribal citizenship and associated privileges. There is no official estimate of how many $5 Indians enrolled.

The Dawes Rolls remain a murky and inaccurate snapshot of Native American citizenship. In the 2000 Census, the number of people claiming Cherokee ancestry was 3 times that of the official tribe enrollment.