Tribal lands were held in common before an 1887 law called the Dawes Severalty Act. The government wanted to assimilate Native Americans into US culture, and to do this they began dividing tribal lands into individual plots. Only those Native people who accepted this were allowed to become US citizens.
Plots left over after the division were then sold to non-Native people. This resulted in a loss of about 90 million acres of tribal land nationwide.
Native farmers faced multiple difficulties. The government retained title to the individual plots for 25 years; the idea was to protect Native allottees while they learned to survive as farmers and ranchers. But farming relies on credit, and without title to their land, Native farmers could not get bank loans—even if they had learned the intricacies of how the credit economy works.
On the Omaha Reservation, commissioners decided in the early 1900s to speed up the process of granting unrestricted title to land, but as a result many Native people lost their land to speculators or to outright fraud. By the 1930s most of the reservation was in the hands of non-tribal members.
Read more in a 1982 Nebraska History article (PDF).
(Photo: A farmstead on the Omaha Reservation, 1910. NSHS RG4963-1-17)
–David Bristow, Editor, 8/20/2025
Sources:
“The Dawes Act,” Badlands National Park, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/dawes-act.htm
Janet A. McDonnell, “Land Policy on the Omaha Reservation: Competency Commissions and Forced Fee Patents,” Nebraska History 63 (1982): 399-411. https://history.nebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/doc_publications_NH1982LandPolicy.pdf
