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When Congress passed legislation in 1887 that allotted individual American Indians pieces of land while also granting them citizenship, proponents of the Dawes Act argued it would give them greater independence to farm their own land and help them assimilate into white American culture.

But the Act had devastating consequences. By the time it was repealed in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all their native land and two-thirds of them had become landless or unable to meet subsistent needs.

And mortality rates—particularly among young Native Americans—spiked by roughly 20%, according to new Stanford research. While the average white American lived to the age of 65 by the mid-1930s, the life expectancy of American Indians at the time was 52. Much of this was due to child mortality disparities, which were exacerbated by allotment.

Although in 1900, an American Indian mother (regardless of allotment status) was more likely to have lost a child than a white mother (by 12.2 percentage points, or 64%), allotment may have increased this already wide gap by as much as 50%.

Grant Miller, the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor and a professor of health policy at the Department of Health Policy in the Stanford School of Medicine, notes in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that while there has been plenty of research about the harmful economic impact of the U.S. allotment policy for American Indians, its health impact has not been closely studied.

"There has been little understanding of how these policies contributed to substantial health inequality between American Indians and other Americans," said Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. "This paper helps fill that gap."

Matt Snipp, the Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor and professor of sociology in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a co-author of the study, notes that while the study does not examine the relationship between the high mortality rate among American Indians in the aftermath of the Dawes Act and the high mortality rate among Native Americans today, "It's difficult to understate the importance and role of allotment in ending American Indians' traditional way of life and serving the interests of others."

Indeed, the health disparity between Native Americans and other Americans persists. American Indians and Alaska Natives have a life expectancy of 65.6, compared to 76.4 for all other U.S. races. And they continue to die at higher rates than other Americans in many categories, including chronic liver disease, diabetes, homicide, suicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases.

Greed or humanity

The General Allotment Act passed on Feb. 8, 1887—also named the Dawes Act after its author, Sen. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts—authorized the privatization of native tribal reservation land under the guise of protection for the American Indian population. Heads of households received an allotted 160 acres; others received 40–60 acres, depending on their age and household status.

Some government officials criticized the legislation as a ploy to take land away from American Indians and weaken their traditional way of life.

"The real aim of the bill is to get land out of Indian hands and into the hands of white settlers," of the House Committee on Indian Affairs when the Dawes Act was implemented. "If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough, but to do it in the name of Humanity, and under the cloak of ardent desire to promote the Indian's welfare by making him like ourselves, whether he will or not, is infinitely worse."

It wasn't until 1934 that the tribal governments were allowed to regain sovereignty under the —legislation meant to reverse some of the disparities created by the Dawes Act.

Methodology

The researchers used a variation in age at allotment, conditional on age, among American Indian women in the 1910 population census—at which time roughly 80% of all allotment had been completed—to identify its impact on the mortality ratio of their women.

"Women allotted at younger ages had greater lifetime exposure to allotment and its consequences, while women allotted at older ages had less lifetime exposure," explains Jack Shane, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics and also a co-author of the study. "This approach suggests that allotment increased the American Indian child mortality ratio by a little more than 15% and may be an underestimate due to selective mortality among adult women."

The researchers also used variation in allotment timing across tribes to estimate its impact on changes in birth cohort size between the 1900 and 1910 population census, the decade during which more than half of all allotment occurred.

One of the key takeaways from the study is that U.S. allotment policy may have increased by nearly half the already large disparity between the survival of American Indian children and other children in the United States.

"Contemporary critics of the Dawes Act voiced urgent concern about its harms to American Indians, including to their health and survival," the authors conclude. "Although our analysis does not consider all dimensions of American Indian welfare, we provide new evidence that these concerns about health and survival were well-founded."