“She Becomes a White Man”: Native American Women, Property Rights, and the Dawes Act

The 1887 General Allotment Act provided for individual Native Americans to own acreage on the reservation.  This policy, designed as part of the overall attempt to “civilize” Native Americans resulted in widespread change on reservations, including the conferring of citizenship on those who received allotments.    Supporters of allotment saw private property as the answer to the Indian question.  This assumption did not require that native women gain any true property rights, however; rather, the belief was that Indian families would come to mirror American families where men owned and worked the land, while their wives created islands of domestic bliss as a haven from the harsh demands of the world.  Such a vision did not require that women own the land on which their home sat, or even the furnishings within.  This paper first explores the reasons for gender-specific rules relating to the allotment of land among native women, then considers the ways in which Nez Perce women’s status as citizens impacted their rights as property owners under Idaho state laws and tribal efforts at reform.

The unintended consequence of the General Allotment Act, particularly after the 1891 amendments to the law, was federal legislation granting married native women property rights on a more liberal basis than any other piece of federal land legislation.  While reformers saw allotment as a means to force native peoples to adopt typical Christian America’s way of life, including its legal provisions for governing home and inheritance, the reality of the Dawes Act proved to be a law that established for native women greater federal protection of their property rights than those guaranteed to white women.  The irony, of course, is that native women had not asked for such protection, nor would they have been granted it had they petitioned Congress for such a law.