Dawes Commission: Map Showing Progress of Allotment in Cherokee Nation
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Cartographer:
|
Dawes Commission
|
|
Title:
|
Map Showing Progress of Allotment in Cherokee Nation
|
|
Date:
|
1904
|
|
Published:
|
Washington, D.C.
|
|
Width:
|
26 inches / 67 cm
|
|
Height:
|
35 inches / 89 cm
|
|
Map ref:
|
USA9078
|
|
Description:
|
|
This map shows the section of Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) granted to the Cherokee Nation by the United States Government after the tribe was forced to leave its ancestral home during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. It was published to accompany a report to the Department of the Interior by the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, also known as the Dawes Commission after its first chairman, Henry Dawes.
The Dawes Commission was created in 1893 to negotiate with the five "civilized tribes", the Creek, the Seminoles, the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Chickasaw, all of whom had been forcibly relocated to Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. The Commission's goal was to convince the members of these nations to abandon their communal tribal land rights, to divide these lands into individual parcels, and to grant these lots to individual members of the tribe. By this method, the US government hoped to compile citizenship rolls for each of the five nations.
The grid which overlays this map of the Cherokee Nation shows the individual lots which were to be allotted to members of the tribe, with areas already parceled out coloured in orange. Lands reserved for towns, mission schools, or tribal government use are marked in blue.
The results of the Dawes Commission were devastating to many member of the Five Nations, some of whom are still fighting court battles to this day to reclaim nationhood which was unfairly stripped away from them. African Americans with some Native American ancestry were particularly affected by the Dawes Commission as an individual's outward appearance was often used to determine whether they could belong to a tribal nation. The Five Nations also lost enormous swathes of their former land grants as the Dawes Commission was authorized to auction off any "surplus land" after all of the members of a tribe had been allocated a plot. This, of course, created a perverse incentive for the Commission to undercount or reject members of the tribes so that more land could be sold to European-American settlers. Individual members of the tribes were also allowed to sell their parcels if they wished, something which had not previously been allowed when land was held communally by the whole Tribal Nation.
Compiled and drawn by R.L McAlpine, lithographed by Julius Bien & Co., and printed by the Office of Government Printing for the Department of the Interior. Printed colour. (SL) [USA9078] |