Negotiating Citizenship: Land, Gender Roles, and Power among Citizen Potawatomi Allottees, 1861–90

The historiography of U.S./Native American relations categorizes the policy of allotting private parcels of land to Native Americans as a failure and detrimental because it damaged Native Americans’ capacity for self-sufficiency and failed to assimilate them into Euro-American farming culture.   This conclusion does not consider the complexity of Native American reactions to allotment efforts or the significant ways that land ownership and citizenship (re)shaped power and gender roles among allotees.  While most Native Americans exhibited various levels of resistance to the policy, a small number, including women, sought the right to have titles to land years before the government made allotment an official policy because they wanted the social status, economic advantages, political agency, and assurance of protection from further encroachment by white settlers that they believed private land ownership would entail. 

In 1861, dozens of Potawatomi men and women living on a reservation in Kansas signed a treaty with the U.S. government whereby the majority of tribal members became allottees and U.S. citizens and subsequently became known as the Citizen Potawatomi.  This paper examines the contested meaning of being a citizen of the United States and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation in regard to land ownership.  Particularly, I examine efforts by the Citizen Potawatomi to ensure that only tribal members, not non-Indian spouses, be allowed to sell allotted lands.  These efforts included protests by the all-male Potawatomi business committee and individual Citizen Potawatomi women that non-Indian men be prohibited from acting on behalf of their Citizen Potawatomi wives, since the men were not members of the Citizen Potawatomi.   Similarly, the business committee demanded the more favorable conditions of an allotment treaty they signed in 1872, which allowed women to receive full allotments as heads of families, were applied to their allotments, as opposed to the conditions of the Dawes Act.