Ninety Million Acres: The Dawes Act and the Theft of Indian Land
By Daniel R. Whitfield
Length4h 47m
About this audiobook
The treaty the Lakota signed at Fort Laramie in 1868 set aside a reservation "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of their people. Its twelfth article went further: no part of that land could be given up without the consent of three-fourths of the adult men, not a bare majority and not the signature of one agreeable chief. Red Cloud would not sign at all until the Army's forts on the Bozeman Trail had been abandoned and burned.
Nineteen years later Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, a man who believed himself the Indians' friend, saw his General Allotment Act become law. It carved reservations into individual plots, up to 160 acres for the head of a family, and opened the "surplus" to white settlement.
On the ground the law meant land rushes, guardians who drained the estates of Native minors, blood-quantum rolls that decided who counted as Indian on paper, and oil that made some allotments a target for fraud. Reformers and the Meriam Report of 1928 exposed the damage, and in 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act finally stopped the carving. By then the land held by Native nations had fallen from about 138 million acres to about 48 million.
The three-fourths clause outlived nearly everyone who signed it. In 1980 it stood behind a Supreme Court judgment over the Black Hills, and the Lakota, offered the money, would not take it.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 47 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Reservation as a Holding Pen
2Chapter 2: The Senator Who Believed Himself a Friend
3Chapter 3: 160 Acres and a Promise
4Chapter 4: The Great Land Rush
5Chapter 5: The Guardians and the Guardianship Fraud
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: Blood Quantum and the Paper Indian
7Chapter 7: Oil Under the Allotment
8Chapter 8: The Reformers Awake
9Chapter 9: The Meriam Report
10Chapter 10: The Depression and the End of Allotment
11Chapter 11: 1934: The Indian Reorganization Act
12Chapter 12: What the Land Remembers
13About the Author
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