In the second half of the nineteenth century the federal government initiated an aggressive set of policies designed to free up western land for white settlers and to acculturate American Indians to American values and practices. Decades of work toward this end culminated in the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. Named after the Massachusetts senator Henry L. Dawes, who headed the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs, the act broke the land of most remaining reservations into parcels to be farmed by individual American Indians or nuclear American Indian families. Partitioning Indian land in this manner, Congress hoped, would force native peoples to give up communal living and to adopt American farming practices. Eventually, policy makers reasoned, American Indians would embrace all American cultural norms and become integrated into U.S. society.