The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, incentivized colonial western expansion and conversion of prairie into agriculture, and the 1887 Dawes Act allowed the US government to unjustly claim over ninety million acres of Indigenous lands for agricultural purposes. This is when the concept of “private property” took hold on the continent, imposing rigid and violent cartographies on what was otherwise a fluid, shifting community. In the same period, five thousand bison were being slaughtered daily, with the direct and incomprehensibly evil intention of starving and punishing Indigenous
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