The Dawes Act, or the General Allotment Act, is passed by the United States Congress. This act created individual land ownership, in allotments of 160-acres, on previously communal reservation lands. “The objective was to create independent Indian farmers and dissolve the tribes,” (Merchant 145). What was actually accomplished was further theft of reservation lands by whites–the Secretary of the Interior held the right to negotiate the sale of leftover land once the allotments had been portioned out to tribe members. The leftover land was sold by the Secretary of the Interior to whites, not First Nations. The act “meshed strategically with the conversion of Indian lands to national parks during the late nineteenth century,” (Merchant 145).

These images, are part of an 1887 study published by a white man in The Century Illustrated Magazine entitled ‘Among the Apaches.’ The subjects of the drawings are either barely clothed or clothed in unintelligible garb and are engaged in what whites would perceive as non-industrious and unproductive behavior. “The goal was to civilize Indians by turning them into farmers. First in time came the supposedly ‘wild’ Indian…” (Merchant 144). The rhetorical push for the passage and enactment of the Dawes Act was made in the name of ‘civilizing’ First Nations. These images would evoke in the public mind the need for the disbanding of communal land ownership as a leap towards assimilating First Nations.