Geospatial Impacts of Land Allotment at the Standing Rock Reservation, USA: Patterns of Gain and Loss

Allotment—the division of Native American reservations into individually-owned plots of land—has been extensively studied; yet there exists a paucity of reservation-level studies at granular geospatial scales, i.e., at the level of examining the impacts of allotment on individuals, families, and clan or tribal groups. In previous research, we described a new semi-automated method for creating detailed GIS allotment databases and discussed the policies and processes that that lay behind allotment at the Standing Rock Reservation. In this study, we employed our Standing Rock database to map and explore allotment patterns in detail. We primarily focused on patterns of clustering versus dispersion of allotment parcels for individuals, families, and tribal groups by calculating median distance (and other descriptive statistics) and standard distance in GIS. Throughout, we used mapped representations of allotment patterns as visualization tools, both for confirming hypotheses and raising new questions. As anticipated, we discovered patterns of both gain and loss. On the one hand, as we had found earlier, the people at Standing Rock gained land through their insistence on allotments for married women and for children born after the beginning date of allotment (“later-born children”), land they otherwise would not have received. We also confirmed that married women only received half the land that their husbands received and that the early sale of “surplus” reservation lands deprived a future generation of children of the opportunity to receive their own land. Perhaps most importantly, however, we discovered that the belated timing of allotments to married women and later-born children caused their allotments to be located at some distance from those of their husbands or fathers, creating disjunct and dispersed patterns of family land holdings that would have significantly hampered the creation of viable farming and ranching operations.