dawes act??

Question

how did the dawes act impact the lives of Indian children?
Please put the source you got it from!

Answer 1

Start at 1887 and scroll down to 1998

http://www.turtletrack.org/Issues00/Co03112000/CO_03112000_Timeline.htm
1887 Dawes Act passes, requiring allotment of tribal lands to individual Indians, an effort to dissolve tribal social structures, force assimilation and free millions of acres of reservation lands for white settlement. Boarding schools become an important part of the allotment plan, intended to prepare Indian children for nontribal living. Proceeds from sale of "excess" reservation lands fund major expansion of the boarding schools system.

1920 Meriam Report, a critique of federal Indian policy by the Brookings Institute, calls boarding schools a total failure and national disgrace. The report cites inadequate facilities and poor quality of education and condemns the practice of taking Indian children from families. The report also says the Indian family and social structure should be strengthened, not destroyed.

1933 John Collier becomes Indian commissioner in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and begins dismantling the boarding-school system and constructing day schools. By 1943, two-thirds of children are in day schools run by the federal government or by states.

Answer 2

The new plan to rescue the vanishing Indians called for an aggressive assault on tribalism by the simple expedient of parceling out communally owned reservation land on an individual, or severalty, basis.

The plan, called the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, went into effect in 1887, with the enthusiastic support of many well-meaning but misguided friends of the Indians: philanthropists, humanitarians, reformers, and social scientists. Hundreds of thousands of acres remaining after the individual 160-acre allotments had been made were then sold at bargain prices to land-hungry or land-speculating whites.

Allotment, designed to absorb the Indians into mainstream America, turned out to be a monumental disaster. In addition to losing their “surplus” tribal land, many Indian families lost their allotted land as well, despite the government’s 25-year period of trusteeship. The poorest of the nation’s poor—many of them now landless and the majority still resisting assimilation—American Indians reached rock bottom in their population shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Mired thus, the Congress granted these original Americans citizenship in June 1924.

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Act