Title to Indian land, part one

Back around the turn of the 20th century the US government divided up Indian lands into individually-owned parcels. Naturally, they didn’t ask the Indians if they liked the idea. But what could be more American than private property? And the US government wanted the Indians to be as American as possible. The policy was called “allotment.” As Peter Nabokov, editor of Native American Testimony, puts it: “[T]he parcels soon became so diced up among descendants that no single heir could possibly sustain a family [on their small piece]. … A non-Indian with enough money and know-how could lease adjoining squares from Indians to create a big, promising cattle operation — a practice on many reservations today.” 

Nabokov then quotes from Indians are People, Too (1944) by Ruth Muskrat Bronson: 

The usual way a white family handles [inheritance] is for the family member who wants to keep the farm to mortgage the land for enough to buy out the other heirs. [Indians] can’t do this for this land cannot be sold because [they are] ward[s]. … In a country ill adapted to agriculture, [even] thirty-five acres are not worth much money, so the land will probably not be partitioned. Instead, the government will go on leasing the land, dividing the lease money among the heirs down through the generations.  

There are pieces of land on the books of the Indian Office so divided among heirs that the annual lease income therefrom to any one heir is less than one cent. Yet the annual cost to the government to administer the estate is estimated at approximately fifty times as much as the annual lease the heir receives.

Indians were considered wards of the state. They did not, in other words, have full US citizenship and the rights that come with it. They lived in a separate nation, sort of, though not a nation allowed to make its own decisions. (The South African government took inspiration from the US system when setting up its own sovereign-in-name-only “homelands” for black South Africans.) 

Growing up I was told I had Indian heritage through my father. Sioux, he said. I didn’t have any more information than that until well into adulthood when I learned that some Ingersoll cousins were registered as heirs to property on the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles the border between North & South Dakota. My blood siblings and I registered as heirs, too. I don’t think Dad knew we could do that. Not that registering came with much benefit. I’m not a member of the Sioux Nation, a Lakota, not officially. I did start receiving lease income statements. Which was cool. Except that, as Ruth Bronson says, the money earned was eaten up by administrative costs. Pretty easy, as the amount earned was less than the postage spent on the envelope. Yup, I found myself looking at statements recording income of less than fifty cents.  

This seemed silly. But, like I said, here was evidence to back up the family story. I liked having that evidence. That it meant nothing as far as money was concerned didn’t bother me. If there had been money, I thought, better it go to the people on the reservation than me. Seems to me they ought to have it. 

source: 

Native American Testimony: a chronicle of Indian-White relations from prophecy to the present, 1492 - 2000

by Peter Nabokov

1999. Penguin Books, New York