UC Davis

“Stories in Severalty: Allotment and Indigenous Modernisms” examines Indigenous engagements with the uneven textual, legal, and environmental terrains of the United States federal Indian policy known as allotment, which aimed to “assimilate” and “civilize” Indigenous Peoples in the United States by disrupting Indigenous forms of collective land tenure and by extending new regimes of racial capitalist property. Intensifying with the Dawes Act of 1887, allotment extinguished recognized tribal sovereignty and privatized Native lands held in common into parcels, which were then “allotted” to individual tribal members, along with US citizenship. Allotment introduced new racialized and gendered geographies that facilitated one of the most significant transfers of land and extractions of wealth in US history. As a scheme of Indigenous expropriation through privatization, allotment has been deployed elsewhere across the globe, and I argue that its terrains, then and now, play a significant role in the history of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Through an interdisciplinary, community-engaged study of both literary and community texts, my dissertation shows how Indigenous authors engage with, resist, and challenge allotment’s enduring forms of domination. Continuous with longstanding Indigenous knowledges and practices, these engagements with “allotment modernity” work in and through allotment’s privatization schemes to extend Indigenous sovereignty and land relations into the future. My project argues that reading allotment through Indigenous texts, past and present, both critiques settler colonial and racial capitalist features of the policy that continue to impact present-day Indigenous communities, and shows how Indigenous Peoples have imaginatively appropriated and converted allotment features toward Indigenous ends.