Unsettled Grounds: Rethinking American Art in the Dawes Act Era, 1887-1934

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Cooke, Jr., Edward

Abstract

This dissertation asks what the history of art in the United States looks like from the vantage point of the Dawes Act. Between 1887 and 1934, this federal policy employed private property as a comprehensive strategy to try to assimilate the country’s diverse Indigenous peoples, strip them of millions of acres of territory, and undermine their sovereignty. This dissertation argues that visual and material culture were instrumental in conveying, legitimizing, and challenging the Dawes Act’s policies and ideological motives. Across three case studies, I examine objects intentionally created in support of the Dawes Act, as well as those that reflect how the policy’s mutually constitutive logics of white possession and Indigenous dispossession circulated more widely as a kind of settler common sense. To that end, I position the Dawes Act, and the objects discussed in this dissertation, as legal and cultural manifestations of a settler colonial project that has never been fully realized. As a policy that codified a racialized logic of private land ownership, and which belies conventional art historical periodization, the Dawes Act reframes settler colonialism’s territoriality as a foundational condition for art made in the United States. By reading the Dawes Act’s policies and objectives alongside art made during its legislation, this dissertation advances new approaches for bridging the divide between theoretical frameworks of settler colonialism and art history’s attentive focus on object study.

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