Despite the original safeguards in place to help native people retain their land, the General Allotment Act caused their holdings to plunge from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 millions acres by 1934. This happened for several reasons. First, on many reservations, the most productive land was often sold-off as “surplus” to non-Indians. In addition, many Indians did not become the farmers the U.S. Government wanted them to be. The General Allotment Act did not provide for agricultural education or farming equipment and for some native groups, intensive agriculture was culturally unacceptable. Often cut off from their older ways of survival, some Indians were convinced to sell their land after the 25-year trust period because in their poverty they had nothing else to sell.

Amendments to the General Allotment Act also made it easier for Indian land to pass into non-Indian hands. For example, in 1902 legislation known as the “Dead Indian Act” was passed that allowed Indians to sell lands they inherited even if it was still in trust. In 1906, the Burke Act was passed, which authorized the Secretary of the US Department of the Interior to decide whether an Indian was “competent” to manage their lands or not. If the Indian was “competent”, then the Secretary could take the land out of trust and the land would then become taxable. The Secretary of the Interior was authorized to do this without the knowledge or against the wishes of the allottee. Thus, many Indians ended up having to sell their lands because they owed taxes on land they thought was in trust. Twenty-seven million acres of Indian land were lost this way. With the Act of May 29, 1908, the Secretary of the Interior was also given power to sell the allotments of deceased Indians if he deemed the heirs incompetent.

So much Indian land was passing out of Indian hands that even the U.S. Government became alarmed. In 1928, a government report entitled “The Problem of Indian Administration” (also known as the “Merriam Report”) sharply criticized the policy of allotment and the U.S. Indian Service in general. The report provided undeniable evidence of the destructiveness of federal Indian policy and spurred significant changes in the federal administration of Indian affairs.

In 1934, the Wheeler-Howard Act (also known as the Indian Reorganization Act) was passed and ended the process of allotment on Indian lands in the contiguous United States. The act also said that all remaining allotments in trust would stay in trust indefinitely. It did not, however, prevent land from passing out of trust when it is inherited by a non-Indian heir or when an allotment owner petitioned the Secretary to terminate the trust status of the allotment or remove restrictions upon alienation. Furthermore, the act did not change some parts of the General Allotment Act that had made the use of allotments increasingly difficult among Indians. The act did not change the fact that on reservations, both Indians and non-Indians owned land, and thus there were different claims as to how land within the reservations was to be used, governed and policed. These problems are discussed in the next section.

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