Automated Mapping of Historical Native American Land Allotments at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation Using Geographic Information Systems
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Issue Date
2021-03-20Author
Meisel, Joshua Jerome
Egbert, Stephen L.
Brewer, Joseph P. II
Li, Xingong
Publisher
MDPI
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
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The General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, established the legal basis for the United States government to break up remaining tribally-owned reservation lands in the U.S. by allotting individual parcels to tribal members and selling the remaining “surplus.” This research explores the processes involved in mapping these historical allotments and describes a method to automatically generate spatial data of allotments. A custom geographic information systems (GIS) tool was created that takes tabular based allotment land descriptions and digital Public Land Survey (PLSS) databases to automatically generate spatial and attribute data of those land parcels. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota was used as the initial study area to test the mapping technique, which resulted in successfully auto-mapping over 99.1% of allotted lands on the reservation, including the smallest aliquot parcels. This GIS technique can be used to map any tribal lands or reservation with allotment data available, and currently it can be used to map over 120 individual reservations using publicly available data from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
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Citation
Meisel, J.J.; Egbert, S.L.; Brewer, J.P., II; Li, X. Automated Mapping of Historical Native American Land Allotments at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation Using Geographic Information Systems. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2021, 10, 183. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi10030183
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