Review by Choice Review
McDonnell, as did Fred Hoxie in his A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (CH, Sep'84), makes abundantly clear that the period 1887-1934 severely weakened Native American cultures. During these decades, Native American lands shrank from 138 million to 52 million acres. McDonnell's contribution is her sharp focus on the economic impact of government policies. According to McDonnell, the shifting of govenment policy from one of assimilation to exploitation of Native American resources set the stage. As a result, government officials aided white citizens in stripping range, farmland, water rights, and mineral resources from Native Americans at a rate unprecedented in US history. Limiting herself to government documents, McDonnell is at her best in describing the various shifts of government policy, the implementation of varying policies, and the uniformly disastrous effects these policies had upon Native Americans. Her weakness is her lenient criticisms of government officials. She accepts public pronouncements as motivation, thereby following Paul Prucha's assertions that government officials commonly sought altruistic, if not always practical, goals (see Prucha's The Great Father, 2v., CH, May'85). McDonnell's argument is undermined by a narrative that repeatedly shows that policymakers rarely considered the best interests of the Indian. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -R. L. Haan, Hartwick College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
For 47 years the Dawes Act was the lawok? aa , and during this time Native Americans saw their estate shrink from 138 million acres to 54 million acres. Most of the land, McDonnell reports, ended up in the hands of whites. Dawes was ok?unecessary.aa intended to ``civilize'' the various tribes and make them self-reliant by allotting individual ownership of reservation land for farming and livestock grazing; the law instead created a dependent society, argues the author. The tragic failure of Dawes is the subject of her terse, well-documented first book. McDonnell, a historian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, homes in on the administrators who were responsible, and describes their pathetic, sometimes corrupt practices in distributing, leasing and irrigating the land. Sadly, the message proves much stronger than this dry presentation, which probably will find less wordy. aa only a small audience. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The Indian land base shrank from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million in 1934 because of the Dawes Act, which allotted reservation lands to individual Indians in order to create independent farmers. Instead, more than 90 percent of the allotted land was immediately sold to land speculators. The disastrous effect of the act was to dispossess two-thirds of all Indians by 1934, when it was repealed. Historian McDonnell irrefutably demonstrates how the federal government, often under pressure from white politicians, persisted in allotting Indian land even after the negative effect of this policy on native populations was obvious. This book is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on 20th-century federal Indian policy.--Mary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib., Bronx, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
