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The 1862 Homestead Act did not include indigenous peoples, so Congress passed the Indian Homestead Act to give Native family heads the opportunity to purchase homesteads from unclaimed public lands. This was under the condition that the individual relinquished their tribal identity and relations, along with the land improvement requirements.
The US federal government enacted these policies in areas that it wanted to populate with American citizens or prospective citizens (often to the detriment of the interests of the Native Americans who had previously occupied these lands [1]). In total, some 30,000 black homesteaders obtained land claims in the course of this movement.
Included with the Dawes Act were "funds to instruct Native Americans in Euro-American patterns of thought and behavior through Indian Service schools." [5] With the seizure of many Native American land holdings, indigenous structures of domestic life, gender roles, and tribal identity were critically altered in order to meld with society.
When black Americans finally gained citizenship in 1866, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act. This Act was meant to avail land in states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi to acquisition by the people, which included the black population. At the core of Act was the endeavor to give black Americans the ...
A map of the Six Nations land cessions. The Six Nations land cessions were a series of land cessions by the Haudenosaunee and Lenape which ceded large amounts of land, including both recently conquered territories acquired from other indigenous peoples in the Beaver Wars, and ancestral lands to the Thirteen Colonies and the United States.
Another component of assimilation was homesteading. The Homestead Act of 1862 was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. The Act gave an applicant freehold title to an area called a "homestead" – typically 160 acres (65 hectares or one-fourth section) of undeveloped federal land. Within Indian Territory, as lands were removed from ...
These counts also included the freedmen – formerly enslaved African-Americans who had been emancipated after the American Civil War, and their descendants. The rolls were used to assign allotments to heads of household and to provide an equitable division of all monies obtained from sales of surplus lands.
It followed the Distribution-Preemption Act 1841. The law, a forerunner of the later Homestead Act, brought thousands of settlers into the new territory, swelling their ranks along the Oregon Trail. 7,437 land patents were issued under the law, which expired in late 1855. The Donation Land Claim Act allowed white men or partial Native Americans ...