Read the excerpt from the US Department of the Interior’s homesteading timeline.
1865 – March 3: An 1865 appropriations act for expenses of the Indian Department extended the first possibility for some Indians to receive homesteads under the 1862 Homestead Act, but under conditions of essentially giving up their cultural affiliation. It was also one of the earliest laws outlining the course by which Indians (though just for the Stockbridge Munsee Tribes of Indiana) could become U.S. citizens. . . .
1884 – July 4, 1884: Another section within an appropriations act further defined how Indians could homestead, with their homesteads to be held in trust by the federal government for 25 years.
1887 – February 8, 1887: Passage of the Dawes Act provided for the division of tribally held lands under treaty into individually-owned tracts, with "surplus” lands being opened up to homesteading and other forms of disposal. Over the 47 years that the law was in effect until 1934, about 90 million acres of land left Indian ownership.
–"Explore the Homesteading Timeline,”
US Department of the Interior
The Dawes Act resulted in all of the following except
an increase in federally held territory in the form of enlarged reservations.
a significant loss of land individually allotted to native peoples.
the sale of land from native tribes to whites by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
the use of severalty to force American Indians onto individual homesteads.