The General Allotment Act, also called the Dawes Severalty Act, was enacted by U.S. Congress in 1887. It authorized the granting of citizenship to American Indians (exempting those of the Five Civilized Tribes) who accepted allotments and lived separately from their tribes. The aim was to ease poverty among Native Americans.

The author of the act, Henry L. Dawes, was born in Cummington, Mass., in 1816. Graduated from Yale College in 1839, he taught, edited the Greenfield Gazette and the North Adams Transcript, studied law and opened a practice in North Adams. Later a resident of Pittsfield, Dawes served in U.S. Congress as both a representative (1857 to 1875) and a senator (1875 to 1893). He was chairman of the commission created to administer the tribal affairs of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians in the Indian Territory (1893‐1903). He lived at 1 Elm St. in Pittsfield, died in that city in 1903 and is buried there. Dawes Avenue and the former Dawes School were named for him.

Berkshire historian Gerard Chapman suggested Dawes sincerely believed himself an advocate for Indians in establishing the 160‐acre grants. “Doubtless cognizant of the abuses suffered by the Stockbridge Indians, who saw their landholding eroded by the unprincipled behavior of Ephraim Williams and his cronies, wrote his act of 1887 to make the Indians’ individually held acres ‘free from taxes and free from mortgages and free from any possible lien that the ingenuity of the white man can possibly invent.”

Dawes spoke at the Mohonk Conference: “The Indian of the past has no place to live in this country … The greed of these people for the land has made it utterly impossible to preserve it for the Indian.”

The act, on the other hand, shattered tribal identity, driving Indians from their reservations.

Historian Martin Langveld ventured, “The goal was assimilation. And collective ownership of reservation lands by the tribes was seen as an obstacle to that goal. Individual land ownership would motivate the Indians to better their situation, it was thought.”

Historian Lion G. Miles asserts Dawes was not ill‐intentioned: “Dawes was in fact one of the reformers in Congress who had the interests of the Indians very much at heart… Seeing the potential for improving the situation of Indians, these reformers challenged those who wished to transfer control of Indian affairs to the Army and forcibly consolidate all the tribes on three reservations. Instead, they lobbied in Congress for a program of ‘Americanizing’ (i.e. civilizing) the Indian by giving him agricultural self‐sufficiency; education (i.e. Christianity); equal protection under white man’s law, and, most importantly, individual title to land ‘in severalty.’”

•   Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the various Reservations, https://academic.udayton.edu/race/02rights/native09.htm (viewed 11 November 2016) and other sources.

•   Chapman, Gerard, “Henry Laurens Dawes,” Berkshire Eagle, 12 September 1989.

•   “Ex‐Senator Dawes Dead,” Chicago Tribune, 6 February 1903.

•   Henry Laurens Dawes, Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=d000148 (viewed 11 November 2016).

•   Langeveld, Martin C., “Allotment: How the 1887 Dawes Act disrupted Native American cultures,” talk before Monday Evening Club, Pittsfield, Mass., 26 May 2015.

•   Miles, Lion G., “In defense of Pittsfield’s Sen. Dawes,” letter, Berkshire Eagle, 26 March 1993.