Why Did Dakota Women Shoot the Arrow? Citizenship, Spectacle, and Land Ownership

In 1916, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs devised a ceremony, mimicking the earlier Wannamaker photographic expedition, in which select individuals would “shoot the arrow” to sever their tribal affiliation. As members of an independent nation, the Dakota were not U.S. citizens. In defiance of custom but in accordance with the newly fashioned ritual, seven Dakota women joined nineteen men at the Fort Totten Agency to take a bow and arrow in hand and symbolically shooting away their formal legal status as Indians.  The act transformed them into Citizen Indians which meant they could own land outright, pay taxes, and vote.

While the Spirit Lake Dakota were allotted land primarily in 1890 and 1891, they did not make unallotted land available to white homesteaders until 1904.  By 1910, the Dakota owned only slightly more than half of reservation land. Importantly, thirty-eight percent of the Dakota landowners were female.  Although adult women were allotted only half as much acreage as adult men (80 versus 160 acres), unless they were widows or otherwise heads of households, they nonetheless constituted a large landowning group in the tribe.  Children were allotted 40 acres, male or female.  By 1910, the size of women’s individual land holdings was almost at parity with men (96 versus 101 acres).

Through the analysis of historical plat maps, newspapers, and oral histories, this paper explores the Spirit Lake Dakota women’s unique path to citizenship in the early twentieth century.  It underscores the importance of  women’s landowning to their economic well-being and political representation.