The 1887 law that divided many Native American reservations into individual allotments was the Dawes Act.
Also called the General Allotment Act, the Dawes Act was signed by President Grover Cleveland on February 8, 1887. It authorized the federal government to survey reservation land and assign parcels to individual Native Americans, generally with different allotment sizes for heads of households, single people, and children.
Supporters claimed allotment would encourage farming and assimilation into American society. In practice, the policy weakened tribal governments and communal landholding. Land left after allotments were assigned could be declared “surplus” and sold to non-Native settlers, causing Native nations to lose millions of acres.
The act did not apply uniformly to every Native nation, and later laws modified or extended its effects. Congress ended the allotment policy through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, although much of the land and political damage had already been lost or imposed. The Dawes Act remains central to understanding federal Indian policy in the late nineteenth century.