Dawes Act The state purpose of the Dawes Act is to civilize the tribes and force them to start assimilate into white way of life. Actually, the use of tribe is too general, it should be to civilize the individual “Indian” and pull them away from the tribal mindset. It is a divide and conquer technique. If the individual has something that he, and immediate family, need to survive, they will fight for themselves and not for the group. Where the tribal community of the, if I eat, you eat mentality, has them looking out for the collective and not the individual. This individual mindset allows the lack of organized resistance to the government’s plans and wishes. While this plan could work, the way the government went about it doomed it in a way. …show more content…
Their need to keep control over the “Indians” by putting them under ward ship of the government made this goal of individual mindset unachievable. For individual mindset to work, the individual must be able to control his own actions and not be controlled by someone else. Instead of tribal leaders guiding the individual tribesmen for their collective good, the government wanted to control them for the government’s advantage. On a broader scale this allotment enabled the government to consolidate the Native Americans into smaller space. The farming traditions of the white people requires less land than the traditional ways of the tribes. The less land for the Native Peoples, the more land for the whites there is. This also allowed the land to no longer be divided up by specific tribe and it made it easier to jigsaw piece allotments together. There is a reason for this jigsaw type of