“To Domesticate and Civilize Wild Indians”: Allotment and the Campaign to Reform Indian Families,1875-1887

Abstract

During the late nineteenth century, critics of Indian affairs proposed a solution to the “Indian problem,” the refusal or inability of Native people to assimilate into American society. Reformers concluded that kinship systems prevented acculturation by undermining individualism and social order, and they turned to federal policy to fracture these extended indigenous families into male-dominant, nuclear families, modeled after middle-class, Anglo-American households. Reformers advocated for allotment, the subdivision of reservations into individual homesteads and the dissolution of tribal governments, because they believed that this process would foster individualism, promote economic self-interest, defeat communalism, and instill the core values of Anglo-American culture in Native people. Reformers expected private property to provide a foundation from which Indians would raise themselves up, and by giving Indians a means for self-support, they saw themselves as tipping the first domino in a chain reaction that would allow Indian men and women to distance themselves from the familial and tribal ties that hindered their personal growth and to cultivate their attachment to American society, which encouraged individualism and materialism.