You know, usually when we talk about inheriting
property, there's this this ingrained expectation
of wealth, or at least some kind of tangible,
practical benefit. Right, like it's the ultimate
symbol of passing down a legacy. You inherit
a house, you live in it, generational stability.
Exactly. You inherit a piece of land, you build
a cabin on it, or maybe you sell it to put your
kids through college. I mean, it's a foundational,
almost mythological part of the American dream.
It's how families build wealth over time. But
I want you, the listener, to imagine a completely
mind -boggling scenario that just turns that
entire concept on its head. Oh, this is such
a wild scenario. It really is. So imagine you
receive an official government -stamped notice
in the mail. You open it up, and it says you
have inherited a piece of property. Sounds great
so far. Right. But then you look closely at the
deed. And your ownership share isn't half. It
isn't a quarter. It's not even like 1%. Your
legal share of this land is one nine millionth
of a fraction of the whole. A mathematical sliver
that is so small you couldn't even stand on it
if you tried. And it gets wilder. You sit down
at your kitchen table, you pull out a calculator,
and you do the math on the income this piece
of land generates. And you realize that based
on your one nine millionth share, it would take
exactly 177 years for your specific piece of
this inheritance to generate a single solitary
penny. I think the wildest part of that scenario
is that it isn't some hypothetical math puzzle.
I mean, that is a documented daily reality for
thousands of descendants who are currently navigating
this exact system. It sounds like a glitch in
the matrix. I mean, how does a modern legal system
even arrive at a mathematical absurdity like
that? It takes over a century of very specific,
very destructive policy to get there. Well, welcome
to today's Deep Dive. We are going to be looking
at a piece of legislation from 1887 called the
Dawes Act, which is also known in the history
books as the General Allotment Act. Yeah, and
it is arguably one of the most profound and honestly
destructive pieces of social engineering in American
history. And its shockwaves are still actively
shaping reality today. To really get to the bottom
of this, we've pulled from a stack of incredible
sources. We're looking at extensive historical
records from the 19th century, detailed demographic
and administrative data we found compiled on
Wikipedia, and legal case summaries. Specifically,
we're looking at a fascinating and really mind
-bending 1987 Supreme Court case called Hodel
v. Irving. Right, and the mission here is to
explore the profound long -term impacts of the
Dawes Act on Native American land loss, because
we don't just want to look at what happened in
the 1880s as some dusty historical event. No,
we need to understand the compounding mathematical
effects over time. Exactly. Specifically, we
are going to unpack the modern administrative
nightmare known as fractionation. It's this bureaucratic
black hole that continues to haunt the descendants
of these policies, literally paralyzing millions
of acres of land today. OK, let's unpack this.
Let's do it. Because before we can possibly understand
the modern mathematical nightmare of waiting
two centuries for a single penny, we have to
travel back to the 1800s. We have to understand
the mindset of the U .S. government at the time
and what policymakers in Washington broadly termed
the Indian problem. Right. To set the stage properly.
We have to look at the sheer demographic pressure
that was building in the early 1800s. The United
States was experiencing this unprecedented influx
of European immigrants. And they needed somewhere
to go. Exactly. These new arrivals were constantly
pushing westward, pressing violently against
the eastern borders of Indian territories. And
remember, this is where the federal government
had already forcefully relocated most Native
American tribes during earlier removal policies.
Like the Trail of Tears. Yes, exactly. You essentially
have a pressure cooker situation. On one side,
you have unending waves of settlers operating
under a European legal system of private property
and land speculation. And on the other side,
you have indigenous nations operating under entirely
different cultural, legal, and, well, communal
systems. And the friction was just continuous.
So searching for a quote unquote, quick solution
to this fiction. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs
at the time, a man named William Medill, proposed
establishing what he termed colonies. Which today
we know as reservations, right? Exactly. His
policy was to carve out territories exclusively
for Native Americans located far out in the region
beyond the Mississippi River. I'm trying to wrap
my head around the logic of the time. The idea
was basically a policy of total physical segregation.
That was the explicit goal, yeah. Yeah. physical
separation. Just move the tribes far enough west
so that the highly coveted southeastern land
is entirely freed up for white settlers who are
actively lobbying the government for access to
new territories. But Native American tribes didn't
just quietly accept this imposition. I mean,
they resisted fiercely. Yeah. And this resistance
led to decades of what were broadly categorized
as the Indian Wars in the West. A prolonged bloody
period of conflict. Very bloody. It was a clash
between indigenous nations defending their homelands
and the expanding United States Army. But the
military disparity and those unending waves of
settlers eventually forced a tipping point, didn't
they? Yeah, the tribes facing the full industrialized
force of the U .S. military. eventually negotiated
treaties and agreements to resettle on these
designated reservations. And the scale of what
they retained is actually massive. I mean, according
to the historical records we're looking at, Native
Americans ended up holding over 155 million acres
of land in this reservation system. Which is
huge. To visualize 155 million acres, you have
to picture a landmass roughly the size of Texas.
Wow. And this wasn't just barren wasteland either,
as it's sometimes mistakenly portrayed. This
land range from arid deserts in the southwest
to incredibly rich prime agricultural land in
the plains and dense resource -rich forests in
the northwest. Let me stop and ask a crucial
question about how these reservations actually
functioned back then. Once they were relocated
to this Texas -sized amount of land, how were
they living? Because my understanding is that
they weren't just given individual deeds to houses
like a modern subdivision. No. Not at all. Crucially,
under the reservation system established by these
treaties, the tribes maintained the legal right
to govern themselves. OK. They certainly had
to adjust to new, often really challenging locations.
But they retained their highly cohesive tribal
units. They were still led by their chosen chiefs.
They operated through their ancient traditions.
And most importantly, for our deep dive today,
they held the land communally. Communally. Meaning.
The tribe as a sovereign entity owned the land,
not like John Smith as an individual. Right,
exactly. Everyone in the tribe had a right. to
live there, to hunt, to farm. The tribe, as a
social cohesive unit, was completely intact.
So the land was the physical manifestation of
their community. Yes. But as we move out of the
Indian Wars and into the late 1880s, the ideological
winds in Washington change abruptly. Oh, here
we go. The era of physical separation ends and
the era of forced cultural assimilation begins.
I need to play devil's advocate here for a second.
Why change a system that had just been established
after decades of horrific war? They finally have
a system of Why upend it? Well, the reformers,
politicians, and East Coast philanthropists looked
at the reservations and decided that keeping
Native Americans isolated just wasn't working.
Working for who, though? Right, exactly. They
argued that the frontier was closing, white settlement
was going to surround these reservations anyway,
and that completely assimilating Native Americans
into mainstream white American culture was the
only way to ensure their survival. It's a dark
irony. Even the people who claim to admire Native
Americans, you know, the self -proclaimed friends
of the Indian, believed this. They genuinely
did. They fundamentally believed that for the
indigenous person to survive, the indigenous
culture had to die. They believed the tribes
needed to abandon their communal land holding,
their ancient traditions and their very identities.
And the central champion of this new aggressive
assimilation approach was Senator Henry Dawes
of Massachusetts. He launched a massive legislative
campaign to, in his exact words, rid the nation
of tribalism. Wow. And the weapon he chose to
accomplish this wasn't the US cavalry. It was
the legal concept of private property. I want
to pause here because this is such a massive,
almost incomprehensible paradigm shift. Let's
try to visualize this. Imagine you, the listener,
live in a town where everyone shares a massive,
thriving community garden. OK, I like this analogy.
Right. It's just how your people have lived for
a thousand years. The land belongs to everyone.
It provides for everyone. And your social status
is based on how well you contribute to the whole.
It's a completely interconnected ecosystem of
survival and social bond. Exactly. Then a bureaucrat
from a capital city 2 ,000 miles away shows up
in your town. They look at your thriving garden
and say, this is primitive. To make you better,
more civilized citizens, we are going to carve
this community garden up. We're going to put
up fences, give everyone a tiny isolated square,
and then we're going to sell the rest of the
garden to complete strangers. Strangers who just
want to make a profit. Yeah. You didn't ask for
it. You don't want it. But the military is backing
them up. So it's happening. That analogy captures
the exact violence of the policy, because the
core belief driving Senator Dawes and his allies
was that communal living was inherently uncivilized.
They literally thought it bred laziness. That
is so arrogant. It was very arrogant. In their
Victorian capitalist worldview, the only way
to be a prosperous, self -supporting American
citizen was to embrace the idea of land as real
estate. It had to be something you owned individually,
something you fenced off, developed for personal
profit, and could buy or sell. When you realize
that land wasn't just property to these tribes
but literally their cultural operating system,
this whole policy takes on a much darker tone.
It completely rewrites the DNA of a society when
you turn a shared ancestral home into a tradable
commodity. The destruction of the tribal unit
was the explicit goal. And that brings us to
the actual physical mechanics of how this was
executed. On February 8, 1887, President Grover
Cleveland officially signed the Dawes Severity
Act, the General Lawman Act, into law. OK, let's
get into the nuts and bolts. How exactly did
Senator Dawes and President Cleveland legally
mandate the carving up of this metaphorical community
garden? According to our sources, the legislation
had six very specific stated goals. Right. The
reformers intended to accomplish six things.
First, break up the tribes as a cohesive social
unit. Second, encourage individual initiative
and competition. Third, further the progress
of native farmers by making them reliant on their
own plots. OK, that's three. Fourth, reduce the
massive cost of native administration for the
federal government. Fifth, secure specific parts
of the reservation securely as Indian land. And
sixth, open the remainder of the surplus land
to white settlers for profit. That sixth goal
opening the remainder of the land for profit
is doing an unbelievable amount of heavy lifting,
and we will absolutely spend time on that. Oh,
definitely. But first, let's look at the actual
math of the allotments. When the surveyors showed
up, how much of the garden did an individual
actually get? The math was rigidly laid out in
the act. A designated head of a family would
receive a grant of 160 acres. A single person
or an orphan over the age of 18 would receive
80 acres. And any person under the age of 18
would receive a 40 -acre parcel. Now, I know
enough about property law to know you can't just
hand someone a deed and expect them to instantly
know how to navigate the American real estate
market, especially if they've never participated
in a cash economy. Did they just hand over the
deeds on day one? They absolutely did not. The
legislation came with major strings attached.
The allotments were to be held in trust by the
U .S. government for a period of 25 years. Let's
do a quick ELI 5 explain, like I'm five on what
held in trust actually means in this 1887 context.
If the government holds it in trust, what does
the Native American farmer actually have? Think
of it like a parent opening a bank account for
a teenager. The teenager can use the money for
approved things, but the parent's name is on
the account and the parent has the ultimate veto
power over major decisions. So they can't just
drain the account. Right. In this case, the U
.S. government held the actual legal title to
the land. The Native American al -Ati had the
right to live on it and farm it, but they legally
could not sell it. lease it to outsiders or use
it as collateral for a loan for 25 years. And
what was the reasoning behind that? Well, the
paternalistic theory was that this 25 year window
would protect the new property owners from predatory
white land speculators while they learned how
to be quote unquote civilized subsistence farmers.
There was also a massive legal carrot dangled
in front of them regarding citizenship, wasn't
there? There was. The act included a specific
citizenship clause. It stated that Native Americans
who accepted their land allotment and voluntarily
adopted the habits of civilized life, which was
explicitly defined as moving away from the tribal
community and living separately, were granted
United States citizenship. What's fascinating
here is the sheer suffocating paternalism of
the entire framework. It's astounding. The government
is looking at sovereign people and saying, we
are going to force you to assume a capitalist
proprietary relationship with property, a concept
that doesn't even exist in your language. And
if you perform this role well enough, we'll let
you be citizens. And they didn't even give them
time to think about it. The act put them on a
ticking clock. Eligible Native Americans were
given exactly four years from the time the act
was applied to their reservation to select their
specific piece of land. Wait, what happens if
someone fundamentally disagrees with this? What
if a tribal member says, you know, I reject this
premise. I am not picking a plot of land. I refuse.
The law actually anticipated that resistance.
If an eligible person refused to choose a plot
or simply didn't pick one within the four -year
window, the Secretary of the Interior was legally
empowered to just pick the land for them. So
it was completely mandatory? Utterly mandatory.
There was no opting out of the Dawes Act. I'm
trying to wrap my head around the logical gymnastics
of this policy. The stated goal. Goal number
two is to encourage individual initiative. They
wanted to turn Native Americans into independent,
self -reliant yeoman farmers. Right. But the
government is attempting to create this independence
by imposing a completely alien, mandatory, heavily
supervised system on people against their will.
You are literally forcing someone to be independent
by making every single life choice for them under
threat of federal law. It is the ultimate contradiction
of colonial policy. I mean, it was a massive
forced engineering project on human society.
But practically speaking, before the federal
government could hand out these 160 acre plots,
they ran into a monumental bureaucratic wall.
To hand out land to eligible individuals, you
first have to legally define who exactly is eligible.
You have to define what makes someone an Indian
in the eyes of a federal court. Which brings
us to what the sources reveal as one of the most
destructive, pseudoscientific, and long -lasting
aspects of the Dawes Act. The blood quantum.
Exactly. The process of deciding who was Indian
enough to get a piece of their own homeland.
To manage this staggering logistical nightmare,
Congress established the Dawes Commission in
1893. Their specific monumental task was to register
the members of the so -called five civilized
tribes in Indian territory. And that was the
Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole,
right? Yes. Now, these tribes had initially been
exempt from the 1887 Act due to prior treaties.
But of course, the government eventually reneged
on those promises and brought them under the
allotment system as well. So you have federal
agents, bureaucrats from Washington showing up
in Indian territory. Paint a picture of what
this actually looked like on the ground. How
do they actually register people? Imagine federal
agents setting up large canvas tents in the middle
of these territories. You have long lines of
tribal members, many of whom didn't speak English,
standing with translators, facing clerks with
massive leather -bound ledgers. Just a completely
bureaucratic setup. Totally. And these clerks
were tasked with determining the racial makeup
of every single person who stepped up to the
table. And to do this, they implemented a concept
called blood quantum. Well, let's be crystal
clear about this based on the historical record.
The concept of blood quantum in the 1890s wasn't
based on genetics or DNA testing. It was a completely
specious, unscientific implementation. There
was absolutely zero scientific method available
in the 1890s for determining precise biological
bloodlines. None. The commission members, these
bureaucratic clerks, effectively created an arbitrary
division based heavily on outward appearance,
the clothes a person wore, and the perceived
level of assimilation. quite literally just looking
at people's faces, guessing their heritage, and
writing it down as unchangeable federal law.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And they
divided people into two very distinct legal categories,
full -bloods and mixed -bloods. And the consequences
of those two labels were drastically different,
right? I mean, they dictated a person's entire
economic future. Oh, entirely. Individuals who
were perceived as poorly assimilated or who appeared
phenotypically indigenous and were thus labeled
full -blood were legally gained incompetent to
manage. their own affairs by the federal government.
Wait, so if a clerk decided you looked like a
full blood, you were instantly declared legally
incompetent. What did that mean for your land?
It meant you were given relatively small parcels
of land beaded with trust patents. The government
retained complete control over the land, the
leasing rights, and any money it generated. And
what about the people the clerks categorized
as mixed -bloods? Well, those who most resembled
whites or who spoke English well and were deemed
assimilated were labeled mixed -bloods. The clerks
assumed that because they had white heritage,
they were inherently more capable of handling
business. Of course they did. Right. So they
were given larger, better tracts of land with
patents in fee simple. Let's do another ELI 5.
What does fee simple mean for someone walking
out of that tent? Fee simple is the highest form
of property ownership in English law. It means
you own the land completely outright. You can
sell it, mortgage it, leave it in your will to
whoever you want. You have complete control.
Sounds like a much better deal. But the catch
for the mixed bloods was that to receive this
fee simple land, they were forced to accept U
.S. citizenship and legally relinquish their
tribal status entirely. I have to stop and point
out the absurdity here. If there was no scientific
method to determine precise bloodlines in the
1890s, wasn't this entire categorization just
based on vibes and prejudice? They literally
just looked at people and guessed. It was purely
subjective categorization masquerading as legal
science. The historical record shows that family
members, full siblings, were often categorized
differently just because they spoke to different
clerks on different days. That is mind -blowing.
And the real tragedy is that the Dawes Act legally
preempted the sovereign right of Native American
tribes to define themselves. For centuries, tribal
belonging was cultural. It was familial. It was
communal. It was about who you claimed and who
claimed you. And overnight, it was reduced to
a biological fraction dictated by federal bureaucrats.
Exactly. What happened to the people who walked
up to the tent? But the clerks decided they didn't
meet the arbitrary criteria to be placed on these
roles at all. They were legally detribalized.
They were stripped of their American Indian identity
under the law, denied any land allotment, and
displaced from their homelands. Just completely
erased from the system. Yes. The source material
poignantly describes them as being discarded
into the nebula of American otherness. And the
devastating part is that this blood quantum system
didn't just stop with the Dawes Act. Right. It
became a long lasting federal tool. Exactly.
The federal government found this spreadsheet
approach to identity so administratively convenient
that they continued using for decades to dispense
or deny other vital resources like health care,
housing and educational funding. It's quite literally
identity by spreadsheet. So. The identities are
arbitrarily assigned, the tribal rolls are drawn
up, the ledgers are closed, and the 160 -acre
parcels are handed out to the head of each recognized
family. But let's do the math on the land itself.
Let's do it. Earlier, we established that the
tribes held roughly 155 million acres. Once you
carve out 160 acres for the men, 80 for the single
folks, and 40 for the kids, there is a massive,
staggering amount of land left over. What happened
to the rest of the reservation? This is where
goal number six of the Daw's Act comes crashing
down on the tribes, opening the remainder of
the land to white settlers for profit. Any land
within the reservation boundaries that was not
allotted to a registered Native American was
officially declared by the government to be surplus.
Surplus! Such a clinical, sterile word for someone
else's ancestral homeland. It was a legal fiction
designed to justify a land grab. The moment that
land was declared surplus, the federal government
swooped in and quickly sold it off. Just auctioned
it to the highest bidder. Pretty much. It was
optioned to non -native settlers, granted to
railroad companies pushing west, sold to large
timber and mining corporations, or converted
into federal parks and military compounds. OK,
so the surplus land is immediately gone, stolen
legally. But surely the allotted land, the 160
-acre parcels that were locked in that 25 -year
trust we talked about, surely that land was safe,
right? I mean, the whole point of the trust was
that it couldn't be sold. So how did they end
up losing that land, too? The math isn't math
-ing here. To understand how the protected land
was lost, we have to look at an amendment passed
in 1906 called the Burke Act, which historians
often refer to as the forced patenting act. OK,
what did the Burke Act do? It completely undermined
the 25 -year trust protection. It gave the Secretary
of the Interior the immense unilateral power
to look at any Native American al -Ati and declare
them competent and capable of managing their
own affairs before the 25 years were up. On the
surface, that sounds almost positive, getting
deemed competent by the government, like you
graduated to full citizenship. It was pitched
as a graduation, but it was actually a meticulously
designed trap for massive land transfer. When
the Secretary declared Inala T competent, their
land was immediately stripped of its trust status.
The Alati was issued that patent and fee simple
we discussed earlier. They owned it outright.
But if they own it outright, they don't have
to sell it. Why did this lead to them losing
it? Let's ELI -5 the trap. The trap was taxes.
The moment the land was taken out of federal
trust, it became subject to state and local property
taxes. Oh, wow. Now, remember who we were talking
about. These are newly designated subsistence
farmers who have been forced onto individual
plots. They have very little access to credit,
no access to modern agricultural markets, and
they are operating in an economy that has deliberately
marginalized them. So a government agent hands
them a piece of paper saying, congratulations,
you are competent. And a week later, the county
tax assessor hands them a bill for property taxes
payable in cash, cash they absolutely do not
have. Precisely. And when they inevitably couldn't
pay those new cash tax burdens, the local government
would foreclose on the property. The land would
be seized and sold to public auction to white
buyers, often for pennies on the dollar. That
is institutional cruelty masquerading as progress.
Did the people in Washington writing these laws
know this was going to happen? The Department
of the Interior absolutely knew. The historical
sources note that it was widely understood within
the department that virtually 95 percent of all
fee -patented land would eventually be lost to
white buyers through tax foreclosures, fraud,
or distress sales. Let's look at the final tally
of this era. What was the ultimate cost of the
Dawes Act and the Burke Act? The numbers are
almost too large to comprehend. In 1887, before
the Dawes Act was passed, Native Americans collectively
owned roughly 138 million acres of land. By 1934,
when the federal government finally stopped the
allotment policy, Native Americans owned just
48 million acres. I need everyone to hear that
math clearly. Over 47 years, they lost 90 million
acres of land. That is nearly two -thirds of
their entire 1887 land base simply evaporating
into white ownership. Yeah, it's staggering.
And the human cost. As a result of this policy,
90 ,000 Native Americans, which was roughly two
-thirds of their entire population at the time,
were made entirely hopelessly landless. They
returned into refugees in their own country.
And it's vital to note that this outcome was
not a surprise to everyone in Washington. There
were loud voices calling out exactly what this
was from the very beginning. Right, like Senator
Henry M. Teller of Colorado. He was an incredibly
outspoken opponent of the allotment policy. He
was. I read his quotes in the source material
and they are chillingly accurate. In 1881, as
the ideas for this act were being debated, he
stated plainly that the real aim of the policy
was to get at the Indian lands and open them
up to settlement. He actually went on the Senate
floor and called it a policy to despoil the Indians
of their lands and to make them vagabonds on
the face of the earth. Teller saw right through
the paternalistic rhetoric. He pointed out that
the provisions claiming to benefit Native Americans
were just a smokescreen. He argued that if this
dispossession were done purely out of naked greed,
it would be bad enough, but to do it under the
self -righteous guise of humanity and civilization
made it infinitely worse. And his warnings were
completely validated by later historians. Angie
Debo, a pioneering historian, wrote a landmark
explosive book in 1940 called And Still the Waters
Run. An incredibly important book. It is an incredibly
detailed, exhaustive account of the systematic
manipulation, the rampant corruption, and the
sheer moral depravity used by white administrators,
lawyers, and businessmen to deprive the five
civilized tribes of their resources. The evidence
of fraud was overwhelming. Even Henry Dawes himself,
the architect of the Act, the man who believed
he was saving Native Americans, seemed to recognize
the monster he had unleashed. Just three years
after the Act passed in 1890, he cynically remarked,
I never knew a white man to get his foot on an
Indian's land whoever took it off. It's an unbelievable
systemic transfer of generational wealth. But
the Dawes Act wasn't just a massive real estate
transaction, was it? We talked earlier about
destroying the tribal unit. The Act was simultaneously
a psychological and cultural weapon designed
to reach into the home and fundamentally restructure
the Native American family. That is a crucial
layer to this history. The Office of Indian Affairs
wasn't just trying to redraw property lines on
a map. They were actively trying to change human
behavior and psychology. How so? Well, the Dawes
Act actually included specific funding provisions
to instruct Native Americans in Euro -American
patterns of thought. This money was funneled
into the Indian service schools, including the
notorious boarding schools. They didn't just
teach English and math. They literally outlawed
Native American cultural practices. They established
a draconian code of Indian offenses that regulated
individual behavior, religious practices, and
ceremonies according to strict Euro -American
Christian norms. Right. And if you violated these
rules, you were tried in special courts of Indian
offenses set up directly on the reservations.
They criminalized the culture. They did. And
if we look closely at the sociological impact,
an incredibly important yet often overlooked
objective of the Dawes Act was to entirely restructure
indigenous gender roles. Here's where it gets
really interesting and where the sheer arrogance
of the colonial mindset is so starkly exposed.
In many indigenous tribes, particularly agricultural
ones, women performed what white Victorian settlers
considered to be strictly male tasks. Yes, like
heavy farm. farming, home building, construction,
and supply gathering. Right. And within the tribal
structure, these weren't menial tasks. These
gendered roles accorded indigenous women high
esteem, economic power, and significant social
status within the community. They controlled
the food supply. They owned the homes they built.
They were the primary providers and the economic
bedrock of the tribe. But when the white settlers,
the federal agents, and the East Coast reformers
arrived and saw this, they completely misinterpreted
it through their own patriarchal lens. They looked
at these powerful working women and judged their
labor as low status. The source material states
they saw this as a sign of indigenous women's,
quote unquote, disempowerment and drudgery. You
have to understand the evolutionary perspective
of the late 19th century white reformer. In their
Victorian worldview, the pinnacle of civilization
was a woman sitting indoors, performing light
domestic duties entirely dependent on a male
wage earner. So they viewed indigenous women
doing agricultural or construction work not as
empowerment, but as a primitive corruption of
natural gender roles. They saw it as an absolute
impediment to societal progress. I am continually
amazed by the hubris. They basically looked at
a society where women had economic independence,
property rights, and high social standing and
said, we are going to rescue these poor women
by taking away the very work that gives them
power and making them completely dependent on
men. That is exactly what they did. They used
environmental and property changes to force massive
social change. The legislators aggressively promoted
Christian marriage They forced extended communal
families to break apart and regroup under strict
nuclear households led by a designated male head.
They often enforced this by literally renaming
people on the Dawes Rolls, didn't they? Giving
them English surnames derived from the husband
or father. Yep. They erased matrilineal naming
systems overnight. Wow. They then trained the
men in wage -earning occupations or heavy subsistence
farming, giving the men the plows and the seeds.
Meanwhile, they actively pressured the women
to step back from the fields and retreat into
domestic, indoor activities, sewing, cleaning,
cooking, to merely support the men. So the explicit
goal was to create a system of economic dependencies
strictly within a small, male -dominated nuclear
unit. Precisely. So under the banner of civilization
and progress, they intentionally dismantled a
functioning system of female empowerment and
replaced it with forced economic domesticity.
It's profound how deeply this piece of real estate
legislation reached into the living rooms, the
marriages, and the daily lives of the people
it targeted. It was a totalizing, inescapable
policy. But as destructive as all of this was,
the sale of the surplus land, the attack on culture,
the rewriting of gender roles, we still have
to address the elephant in the room. Right. What
happened to the land that was kept? the 48 million
acres that somehow survived the Burke Act and
the tax foreclosures and remained in late of
American hands. What happened to those specific
allotted parcels over the next century? And this
brings us to the core issue, the absolute mechanical
heart of today's deep dive, the modern administrative
nightmare, the phenomenon known as fractionation.
Okay, let's unpack this concept clearly because
it is the engine of the bureaucratic black hole
we mentioned at the very start of the show. Explain
the mechanics of fractionation to me like I'm
a first -year law student trying to understand
trusts. To understand fractionation, you just
have to follow the basic mathematical rules of
inheritance applied to a trust property over
multiple generations. Let's start at the beginning.
An original a la T Let's call them Generation
1, receives his 160 -acre parcel in 1890. It
is held in federal trust. Okay, got it. When
Generation 1 dies, the federal government does
not physically divide the 160 acres into smaller
fenced -off plots for his children. Because the
land is held in trust, the physical boundaries
remain completely intact. Correct. The physical
land remains whole. Instead, the heirs receive
equal undivided interest in the entire parcel.
Undivided is the absolute keyword there. Let's
make this concrete. If I inherit property with
my sister, I don't get the north 80 acres and
she gets the south 80 acres. We don't get separate
deeds. No. You both own a 50 % undivided interest
in the whole 160 acres. You own 50 % of every
blade of grass and she owns 50 % of every blade
of grass. Okay, that makes sense for one generation.
But then I have four kids and my sister has four
kids. When we both eventually pass away, our
children inherit our shares. Instead of two owners,
those eight kids own an equal, undivided 12 .5
% interest in the exact same 160 acres. And when
those eight heirs die, their shares divide again
among their children. And because Native American
families, like any families, grow, marry, and
branch out, this fractionated interest doesn't
just grow linearly. It expands exponentially
with each passing generation. And the terrifying
part is this hasn't been happening for just two
or three generations. This mathematical splitting
has been happening continuously, generation after
generation, for over 130 years since the Dawes
Act was passed. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, the scale of this math problem today
is genuinely staggering. Let's look at the data.
In 2004, a man named Ross Swimmer, who was serving
as the Special Trustee for American Indians at
the Department of the Interior, testified before
Congress about this exact crisis. What did he
tell them? He presented the math. He stated that
there were approximately four million individual
owner interests spread across just 10 million
acres of individually owned trust lands. Wait,
four million distinct legally binding owner interests
on just 10 million acres? That's an average of
one owner for every two and a half acres, but
all mixed together in a giant legal suit. And
he warned Congress. that unless a radically aggressive
approach was taken to consolidate this land,
those four million interests were mathematically
projected to expand to 11 million interests by
the year 2030. Think about our community garden
analogy from earlier and let's update it for
the modern era to understand why this is so paralyzing.
Let's say you inherit a nice vacation cabin in
the woods with your four siblings. You all own
a 20 percent undivided interest. It's a little
annoying to schedule who gets it on Labor Day,
but you manage. Right, 20 percent is manageable.
Now imagine your kids inherited, and their kids
and their kids. Three generations later, a hundred
people, most of whom have never even met each
other, own an undivided interest in this one
cabin. Now the roof starts leaking. Exactly.
The roof leaks and you want to fix it. Or maybe
a logging company wants to pay you to harvest
some timber on the land. But legally, because
it's an undivided interest in a federal trust,
you can't just fix it yourself. You need a legally
binding consensus. Signatures from a hundred
different owners scattered across all 50 states
just to authorize a lease, a repair or a sale.
And that is exactly what happens on the reservations.
The land becomes completely utterly administratively
paralyzed. In fact, real estate appraisal studies
cited in the sources suggest that once a single
tract of land has between 10 and 20 individual
owners, the commercial value of that tract effectively
drops to zero. Drops to zero because the transaction
costs, finding everyone, getting a notary, getting
them to agree, processing the federal paperwork,
vastly exceed whatever money the land could possibly
generate. It becomes literally impossible to
lease the land for agriculture. to build a home
on it or to develop it for commercial use. The
land becomes dead capital. It's its empty growing
weeds while the people who theoretically own
it live in poverty nearby. To truly understand
how paralyzing this is, how deeply it breaks
the administrative system, we need to stop speaking
in abstracts. We need to look at a specific real
world example from the sources. Let's look deeply
into Tract 1305. Oh, Tract 1305. This is perhaps
the most famous piece of fractionated land in
legal history. It was a specific 40 -acre parcel
of allotted land located on the Pine Ridge Reservation
in South Dakota. It was highlighted as the prime
example in a pivotal 1987 Supreme Court case,
Hodel v. Irving. And the data on this single
tract is the perfect, terrifying illustration
of how fractionation destroys value, isn't it?
It really is. Let's walk through the numbers.
Lay out the exact reality of tract 1305 as it
stood in 1987 during the Supreme Court case.
Okay, hit me with the numbers. In 1987, this
40 -acre tract was appraised at a value of $8
,000. It was being leased out and produced a
total of $1 ,080 a year in rental income. But
because of continuous fractionation since the
allotment era, that 40 acres had 439 separate
legal owners. 439 owners for a plot of land the
size of a medium shopping center. Yes. And let's
look at how that $1 ,080 of income was divided
among those 439 people. One -third of those owners
received a rental check for less than five cents
for the entire year. Five cents for a whole year?
Two -thirds of the owners received less than
a single dollar. The absolute largest interest
holder, the person with the biggest chunk, received
just $82 .85 a year. I'm trying to imagine the
math the accountants had to do. It required supercomputers.
To calculate the fractional interest accurately,
the federal government had to use a common denominator
of over 3 .3 trillion. Trillion. With a T, they
are slicing 40 acres into 3 .3 trillion hypothetical
pieces to figure out who gets a nickel. And this
brings us back to the hook of our deep dive.
The smallest heir of track 1305, the person with
the most microscopic fraction of ownership, received
a fractional payout so small that it would take
exactly 177 years of accumulated rent to equal
one single penny. It is beyond absurd. It's a
comedy of bureaucratic errors. And let's play
this out. If they somehow miraculously got all
439 people to sign a piece of paper agreeing
to sell the land outright for its $8 ,000 appraised
value, what would that smallest heir get from
the sale? If the land were sold for $8 ,000,
that smallest heir would be legally entitled
to roughly four hundredths of a single cent.
But here is the thing that truly breaks my brain.
Someone has to do all this math. This isn't just
an abstract theoretical problem on a chalkboard.
Someone sitting in a government office has to
track all 439 of these people, update their addresses
when they move, legally process their fractions
of a cent, print the ledgers, and mail the notices.
That monumental Sisyphean task falls entirely
on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the BIA, which
is part of the Department of the Interior. And
in 1987, during the court case, the administrative
cost to the BIA, the taxpayer money spent paying
clerks, printing paper, and mailing envelopes
just to handle the yearly paperwork for this
one single 40 acre tract of land was estimated
at $17 ,560 a year. Wait. Stop. Let me make sure
I'm hearing you correctly. The land itself only
produced $1 ,080 a year in actual income. But
it cost the government $17 ,560 a year just to
manage the ledger dividing up that $1 ,080. Yes.
They were spending 17 times more money to manage
the land than the land actually produced. And
the horrifying part is it only gets worse. The
sources track the history of this exact same
piece of property, track 1305, forward to the
year 2003. OK. What happened? over those 16 years.
By 2003, the track's value had increased to $22
,000 and it produced $2 ,000 in annual income.
But the older generation had died passing their
shares to their children. The number of owners
had grown from 439 to 505. The common denominator
required to calculate the shares had ballooned
from 3 .3 trillion to 220 trillion. The exact
denominator was 220 billion, 670 billion, 49
million, 600 thousand. And the administrative
cost to the government in 2003? The administrative
cost to taxpayers balloon to $42 ,800 a year
for that single $2 ,000 a year piece of land.
This is an amazing tragic paradox. Let's think
back to the beginning of the deep dive. One of
the original stated six goals of the Dawes Act,
written by Senator Dawes himself, was to, quote,
reduce the cost of Native administration. Yeah,
that really backfired. They honestly thought
that breaking up the tribes and handing out individual
property would make things cheaper and easier
for the federal budget. Instead, they birthed
an eternal, bureaucratic black hole where the
government spends infinitely more money processing
the paperwork than the land actually produces.
And the most frustrating part is is that the
Department of the Interior has no choice but
to manage it. They are trapped in a prison of
their own making. Unlike most private trusts,
where a bank can simply refuse to manage an account
that holds less than $100 because it isn't profitable,
the federal government bears the entire legal
and financial cost of administering the Indian
Trust. They have no commercial incentive or legal
ability to disclose small accounts. So what happens
when someone who owns an interest that generates
two cents a year dies? The BIA has to process
that death, right? Yes. Under current federal
regulations, legal probates need to be conducted
for every individual account with trust assets
when the owner dies, regardless of the value.
Even if the account balance is literally between
one cent and one dollar, a federal judge has
to probate it. Let me - ELI -5, the probate process,
so people understand how insane this is. A probate
means lawyers, judges, gathering death certificates,
tracking down heirs, holding hearings, and issuing
legal orders. They have to do a full legal probate
for an account that holds 15 cents. They do.
A streamlined, bare -bones probate process costs
the government a minimum of $500 in administrative
overhead. So, the government reported to Congress
that to probate the roughly $5 ,700 total held
across all these tiny fractional accounts in
the entire system, it would cost the taxpayers
almost $10 million in administrative fees. Spending
$10 million to legally distribute $5 ,000, it
is a system completely irreversibly divorced
from logic, economics, or reality. So, how has
the government tried to clean up a mess that
has been spiraling so disastrously out of control
for over a century? Has there been any accountability?
Did anyone try to stop it before it got to 220
trillion denominators? The alarm bells were actually
rung fairly early on. In 1928, there was a major
comprehensive study commissioned by the Secretary
of the Interior called the Miriam Report. It
extensively documented the massive fraud, the
crushing poverty, and the misappropriation of
the allotment era. Oh, good. And buried in that
report it revealed that the government already
knew the math was failing. As early as 1922,
an audit by the General Accounting Office found
that for just 80 ,000 discrete Native American
owners, the government was already managing over
one million fractional ownership records. So
they knew in the 1920s that the exponential math
was broken. They absolutely knew. The GAO noted
back then that if the land were physically divided
by these fractional interests rather than held
undivided, many owners would receive less than
one square foot of ground. A square foot? You
couldn't even stand on your own property with
two feet. Did Congress do anything about the
Miriam Report? Eventually, yes. During the Great
Depression, the Roosevelt administration passed
the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which
is often called the Indian New Deal. This act
finally legally stopped the allotment process.
It formally prohibited any further carving up
of the reservations. But let me guess, it was
basically shutting the barn door after the horses
had already run away, been sold, and died. Exactly.
It stopped new allotments from being created.
But due to heavy lobbying and opposition from
white ranchers and corporate interests who were
making a fortune leasing these paralyzed, fractionated
lands for pennies on the dollar because the owners
couldn't organize to demand fair prices, the
final version of the 1934 Act was gutted. So
it didn't fix the fractionation problem at all?
No. It failed to meaningfully address the land
consolidation and fractionation that had already
happened. It left the existing trusts in place.
It didn't fix the math. Which leaves us with
the staggering multi -billion dollar bureaucracy
of today. Let's look at the BIA's massive trust
management responsibilities right now. How big
is this ledger today? Today, the Interior Department
is involved in the active management of roughly
100 ,000 leases on trust land, encompassing about
56 million acres. They collect and distribute
about $226 million per year for approximately
230 ,000 individual Indian money accounts, and
they manage billions in tribal funds. And it
doesn't take a genius to realize that when you
have a chronically underfunded government accounting
system trying to manage hundreds of thousands
of accounts using fractions of pennies based
on 130 -year -old ledgers, things are going to
go wrong. Massively, criminally wrong. The BIA
has alleged improper management, missing ledgers,
and outright loss of this trust fund money resulted
in decades of bitter litigation. This is the
Cobel case, right? Yes. The most famous and consequential
is the class -action lawsuit Cobell v. Kempthorne,
spearheaded by Eloise Cobell, a Blackfeet Nation
banker. That case was eventually settled in 2009.
The federal government had to pay out $3 .4 billion
to Native American account holders because the
government simply could not produce the paperwork
or properly account for the revenues they were
supposed to be holding in trust. They literally
lost track of the fractions. $3 .4 billion. And
that's just the financial accounting of it. That's
just the ledgers and the lawsuits. But I want
to pull back from the math for a second and look
at the actual human beings involved. That's the
most important part. You take away 90 million
acres of land. You break up the communal family
structure. You force people into a cash economy
with no cash. You throw generations into deep
poverty while they technically own land they
can't touch. That kind of sustained multigenerational
trauma has to leave deep physical scars on a
population. It does. And the data bears that
out in horrifying detail. Recent literature and
demographic studies have found empirical evidence
of profound health impacts stemming directly
from the allotment policy. The data shows that
for the communities subjected to the Dawes Act,
the policy led to sharp increases in child mortality.
And most staggeringly, it resulted in a 20 %
decrease in life expectancy for the affected
native communities compared to non -allotted
populations. Let's just, let's pause on that.
A 20 % drop in life expectancy. We spend so much
time talking about public policy in these abstract,
sterile, bureaucratic terms, trusts, allotments,
fee simple denominators. But a 20 % drop in life
expectancy means this wasn't just a bad real
estate deal. This wasn't just an administrative
oopsie. This was a lethal policy. It killed people.
systematically shortened the lives of the people
it claimed it was trying to civilize. And this
highlights a crucial reality that we have to
confront. The Dossack isn't just a dusty historical
artifact from 1887. It isn't a closed chapter
in a textbook. It is an active ongoing daily
crisis. Because the government hasn't fixed the
system. Right. The federal government still hasn't
adopted the modern legal tools that states or
local governments use to return abandoned or
highly fractionated property to productive community
use. So the trust continues, the owners multiply,
the fractions get smaller, and the land remains
dead and paralyzed. So what does this all mean?
When we zoom out and look at this entire century
and a half long story. It means that a self -righteous
attempt to force cultural assimilation via the
concept of private property ownership resulted
in stolen wealth, lost culture, and quite literally
an unsolvable math problem. They took a functioning,
resilient communal society, aggressively imposed
a rigid European grid of individualism over it,
and in the process they broke both the society
and the grid itself. It stands as a monumental
testament to the unintended, or perhaps if you
read Senator Teller's quotes, the entirely intended
consequences of top -down colonial social engineering.
You cannot force a culture to change its relationship
to the earth by handing them a ledger. We've
covered incredible heavy ground today. We started
by looking at a vibrant 155 million acre reservation
system sustained by ancient communal traditions.
We watched the Dawes Act violently force privatization
onto that land. We saw the destructive unscientific
use of blood quantum by federal clerks to legally
erase indigenous identities. We witnessed the
devastating calculated loss of 90 million acres
of tribal land to tax traps and corporate greed
in just a few decades. And finally, we explored
the bizarre, paralyzing modern reality of fractionation,
where an inheritance becomes a $40 ,000 a year
administrative burden for a piece of land worth
half that. It is an incredibly complex, painful
legacy that demands our attention, primarily
because the ledger is still open. The government
is still processing the paperwork, and the fractions
are still dividing today. I want to leave you,
the listener, with something tangible to think
about. The next time you sit down at a desk to
sign a piece of property paperwork, whether it's
closing on a mortgage, signing a rental lease,
or drafting a will, I want you to think about
how those laws of inheritance and ownership,
which seem so incredibly mundane and normal to
us, can actually be weaponized. Think about how
a simple deed, a piece of paper with a signature,
can be used to dismantle an entire culture. And
think about how a bureaucracy can blindly outlive
its creators to haunt descendants centuries later,
meticulously doing the math to send them a penny
every 177 years. I'll leave you with a final
thought to mull over, building directly on that
math. If the current trajectory holds and we
actually reach 11 million fractional interest
by the year 2030, does there come a legal and
philosophical point where the very concept of
ownership itself completely breaks down? Think
about it. When a piece of land has more legal
owners than it has grains of soil, who really
owns it? That is the perfect unsettling question
to end on. Thank you for joining us on this deep
dive into the sources. And as always, keep questioning
the systems built around you.