An 1894 Hopi Petition: "Let Us Keep Our Communal Land"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/07/12/hopi_petition_asks_government_to_allow_communal_land_owning_to_continue.html
These are four pages of an 1894 petition, sent from a group of Hopi Indians to the American government. Ten additional pages of pictogrammed signatures follow, as well as detailed explanations of the meanings of these totems, which represented the chiefs and leaders of the Moqui pueblos in the Arizona Territory.
The Dawes Act of 1887 decreed that the government should assign portions of land to Native Americans on an individual basis (in severalty). The avowed aim of the law was to secure land for male tribal members as the West was rapidly settled. But, as with other policies of the periodincluding the creation of boarding schools that separated Native American children from their tribesthe governments goal was also to kill former ways of life (in this case, communal farming) by substituting new ones.
The petition is in the hand of Thomas Keam, a recent English immigrant who ran a trading post in the Arizona Territory. In an accompanying letter, Keam attested that the head of every family in the tribe had signed.
During the last two years, strangers have looked over our land with spyglasses, the petition begins. Voicing uneasiness with these developments, the petition goes on: None of us ever asked that it should be measured into separate lots, and given to individuals for this would cause confusion.
The author explains the matriarchal system of inheritance that the tribe had evolved ....