During the 1870s and 1880s, advocates of policy reform – the self-styled “Friends of the Indian,” led by the Indian Rights Association and Women’s National Indian Association – as well as federal officials and corporate leaders coalesced around allotment as the focus of federal Indian policy. Promoted for over a decade, proponents of allotment secured the passage of the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) in 1887, the Curtis Act in 1898, and additional laws that applied to individual or select Native nations. In historical scholarship and Indian law, allotment marks a definitive before-and-after, a final massive land grab to close out the nineteenth century.

Allotment resulted in a range of disastrous outcomes, including land loss, deforestation, environmental destruction, the homicides of allottees, and personal traumas through coercive assimilation programs like boarding schools. Early scholarship published between the 1940s and 1980s emphasized the evolution of policy and policy reformers' goals, the policy’s failures, and the corruption of those charged with managing Native resources during transitional periods. A second phase of scholarship on allotment, beginning in the 1990s, has broadened our understanding by contextualizing the policy within the larger social and political landscape of the period, exploring specific Native nations’ experiences of implementation, and highlighting numerous forms of resistance and adaptation that enabled the survival of those allotted.

This panel features scholars whose work builds on this historiographical legacy to clarify the negative outcomes of allotment while also demonstrating how Native peoples survived and resisted the bureaucracy, impoverishment, and violence it produced.

The papers on this panel examine allotment as a lived, contested process shaped by law, health policy, education, and Indigenous place-making rather than as a singular legislative rupture. Anne Gregory’s paper centers on the “famous Annie Carter Oil Case” to recover Native women’s legal resistance to corporate fraud and coercive guardianship in early-twentieth-century Oklahoma, revealing how gender, race, and competency structured both dispossession and survival within allotment-era jurisprudence. Juliet Larkin-Gilmore introduces the concept of “hygienic dispossession” to show how public health campaigns, ableist ideologies, and allotment policy worked together to pressure sick and disabled Indigenous people into selling their lands, linking land loss directly to disease, disability, and state power. Lena Lannutti’s research shifts attention to coercive assimilation and urban boarding schools, demonstrating how Indigenous boys at Philadelphia’s Educational Home leveraged city networks, testimony, and advocacy organizations to expose abuse and ultimately force the school’s closure, foregrounding youth agency. Jonathan Radocay’s paper reinterprets allotment-era bureaucratic documents—plat maps, land records, and enrollment materials—as sites of Indigenous place-making, arguing that Native peoples repurposed these records to sustain kinship, community, and sovereignty through what he theorizes as “cartographic kinscapes.”