The Dawes Act, also known as the General Allotment Act, authorized the President of the United States to survey Native American tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Native Americans. Those who accepted the allotments and lived separately from the tribe would be granted United States citizenship.
The objectives of this Act were to abolish tribal and communal land ownership of the tribes into individual land ownership rigths in order to transfer lands under Native American control to white settlers and stimulate assimilation of them into mainstream American society., and thereby lift individual Native Americans out of poverty.
Worcester v. Georgia was a case in which the United States Supreme Court vacated the conviction of Samuel Worcester and held that the Georgia criminal statute that prohibited non-Native Americans from being present on Native American lands without a license from the state was unconstitutional.
Both nationalism and imperialism, along with militarism, were very intertwined during this time, since nationalism created an "us vs. them" type of mentality that led countries to want to take over and occupy more territory.
