Pressing to Carve Up the Yakima Reservation
A colonel fresh from Washington, D.C. reports that the Indian commissioner is ready to send an agent within a month to allot Yakima lands — framed as kindness, it was the machinery of dispossession.
Colonel W. F. Prosser, while in Washington, D.C., had an interview with the commissioner of Indian affairs relative to the opening up of the Yakima Indian reservation. The colonel stated that in his opinion the Indians would be much better off today had an allotment been made seven years ago. The commissioner heartily concurred and stated that he had been working on the same proposition of late. He had even gone so far as to arrange for a visit by a special agent within a month to the reservation, when the lands will be allotted, or action taken by the Indians. It is estimated that sufficient surveys have been made so that the allotment may easily obtain.
“The colonel stated that in his opinion the Indians would be much better off today had an allotment been made seven years ago.”
In 1892 the push to allot the Yakima reservation into individual parcels — opening 'surplus' acreage to sale — was sold as a kindness to Native people. In practice, allotment under the Dawes Act stripped tribes across the West of two-thirds of their land base. The Yakama Nation still holds and defends its treaty lands today, and the paternalistic language here is a reminder of how dispossession was dressed up as benevolence.
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