ite road" (Milner 173). Because the government believed the Indians and their way of life was inherently inferior to European-based culture, the government hoped through education and missionization to transform the Indians into Christians.
The commitment to a reservation policy for the Indians began during the presidency of James K. Polk (Milner 174). William Medill, Polk's commissioner of Indian affairs, advocated establishing "colonies" for the Indians beyond the Mississippi. The reservation policy became a form of internal removal within the American West that generally either reduced the size of the Indians' homeland or moved them to an entirely new location. The defense of reservations fused an articulated humanitarian concern for the Indians' welfare with the true self-serving practiced European ethnocentrism. By the 1880s, government, military, congressional, and Christian officials decided that tribal landholdings and cultures were antithetical to the vision of America. Consequently, political, cultural and religious leaders argued that reservations should disappear along with Indian identity (Milner 174).
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, reservations were viewed as an obsolete means of assimilating Indians into America. This led to the eventual breakup of many reservations in 1887 after the passage of the General Allotment Act (often called the Dawes Act after the Massachusetts senator who sponsored the bill). The Dawes Act, which applied to most of the Indian tribes in the country, took the remaining tribal lands and divided them into 160-acre parcels. The parcels were then applied for by individual Indian families, who would thenceforth own the land in their individual names, and could sell it as well. Surplus land, i.e., tribal land left over from the 160-acre allotments distributed to individual members, was controlled, leased, and sold by the federal government, invariably to whites (Mander 27...