Potawatomi Allotment in Kansas

Abstract

Land figures prominently in scholarship on Native Americans, and it is a critical component in virtually every aspect of the historical narrative of North America’s Indigenous peoples. The information an average American student will learn about the modern period follows a common trajectory. Before the arrival of Europeans, the use of land and natural resources, migration and settlement patterns, and territorial conflicts shaped the lives and relationships of American Indians. Beginning in the seventeenth century, explorers, missionaries and settlers left their homes in Europe in search of a promised land of opportunity and plenty. When they reached the ‘New World’ conflict inevitably arose over the territory settlers, and by extension colonial powers, hoped to control. Indian wars and Indigenous participation in colonial struggles dominated American history during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the 1830s, systematic dispossession of Native Americans’ homelands by the means of treaties and forced removals was well-established and expropriation continued under the policy of allotment.