Editing Dawes Act (section)

=== Culture and gender roles ===
The Dawes Act compelled Native Americans to adopt European American culture by prohibiting Indigenous cultural practices and encouraging settler cultural practices and ideologies into Native American families and children. By transferring communally-owned Native land into private property, the [[Office of Indian Affairs]] (OIA) "hoped to transform Native Americans into [[Yeoman|yeoman farmers]] and farm wives through the assignment of individual land holdings known as allotments." In an attempt to fulfill this objective, the Dawes Act "outlawed Native American culture and established a code of Indian offenses regulating individual behavior according to Euro-American norms of conduct." Any violations of this code were to be "tried in a Court of Indian Offenses on each reservation." Included with the Dawes Act were "funds to instruct Native Americans in Euro-American patterns of thought and behavior through Indian Service schools."<ref name=":3" />

With the seizure of many Native American land holdings, indigenous structures of domestic life, gender roles, and tribal identity were critically altered in order to meld with society. For instance, "an important objective of the Dawes Act was to restructure Native American gender roles."<ref name=":3" /> White settlers who encountered Native American societies in the latter half of the nineteenth century "judged women's work [in Native societies] as lower in status than that of men" and assumed it was a sign of indigenous women's "disempowerment and drudgery". As a result, "in evolutionary terms, Whites saw women's performance of what seemed to be male tasks&nbsp;– farming, home building, and supply gathering&nbsp;– as a corruption of gender roles and an impediment to progress." In theory, the gendered tasks "accorded many indigenous women esteem and even rewards and status within their tribes."<ref name=":4">{{Cite book|title=Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919|last=Simonsen|first=Jane E.|publisher=University of North Carolina Press|year=2006|isbn=9780807830321|pages=10–11}}</ref>

By dividing reservation lands into [[Private property|privately owned]] parcels, legislators hoped to complete the assimilation process by forcing Native Americans to adopt individual households and strengthen the [[nuclear family]] and values of economic dependency strictly within this small household unit.<ref>Gibson, [[Arrell Gibson|Arrell M. Gibson]]. "Indian Land Transfers." ''Handbook of North American Indians: History of Indian–White Relations, Volume 4''. Wilcomb E. Washburn and William C. Sturtevant, eds. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988. pp. 226–29</ref> The Dawes Act was thus implemented to destroy "native cultural patterns" by drawing "on theories, common to both ethnologists and material feminists, that saw environmental change as a way to effect social change." Although private property ownership was the cornerstone of the act, reformers "believed that civilization could only be effected by concomitant changes to social life" in indigenous communities. As a result, "they promoted Christian marriages among indigenous people, forced families to regroup under male heads (a tactic often enforced by renaming), and trained men in wage-earning occupations while encouraging women to support them at home through domestic activities."<ref name=":4" />