#colonial settler

“On the heels of a fiver-year recession, from 1878 to 1887, the desire for cheap or ‘free’ Indigenous land in Dakota Territory infected white settlers like a fever. The decade, during which the white population in the region nearly doubled, was known as the “Great Dakota Boom.” In 1887, under increasing pressure to open more of the remaining 1868 Treaty lands, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, signaling a new assault on Lakota and Dakota lands. Dawes sought to disintegrate collective Native identities and communal land practices by allotting private plots to Native families and opening millions of acres of ‘excess’ land for white settlement.”