The Dawes Act of 1887 authorized the federal government to break up tribal lands by partitioning them into individual plots. Only those Native Americans who accepted the individual allotments were allowed to become US citizens.

<h3>What is Dawes Act?</h3>

On tribal lands within the United States, the Dawes Act of 1887 governed land rights. Its authority, which bears Senator Henry L. Dawes's name from Massachusetts, allows the President of the United States to divide communal Native American tribal landholdings into allotments for Native American family and individual heads of household.

By making Native Americans "assume a capitalist and proprietary connection with property" that did not previously exist in their cultures, this would change the traditional systems of land tenure into a system of private property that is imposed by the government. The law gave tribes the choice to sell the federal government any unclaimed lands. Before allotments of private property could be made, the government had to determine "which Indians were eligible," which prompted a "official hunt.