The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Chapter 10 addresses drastic changes in Native American policy adopted by the federal government in the wake of the Civil War. At the core of these policy changes was a federal assertion of plenary power over Native American affairs despite the Constitution’s supposed enshrinement of Indigenous sovereignty through treaty law. Blackhawk locates the legal origins of the federal government’s absolute power in the 1887 General Allotment Act, which legalized the division of reservations into individual plots of land, sellable by Native male “heads of household.” The Allotment Act was part of a new government campaign of assimilationist policies that promoted the cultural erasure of Native tribes as well as the dissolution of their sovereignty. Though these policies violated treaties, federal policy makers did not seem to care.

In addition to land alienation, the federal government also began to enforce the systematic kidnapping and relocation of Native American children into so-called “boarding schools.” These institutions operated with the express mission of assimilating Native American children to Euro-American culture. Blackhawk recounts: “Untold numbers suffered physical and sexual abuse, and thousands died due to disease, overly strict discipline, and deprivation” (490).