American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Public domain trust allotments (PD allotments) are parcels of land held in trust by the federal government for specific Indian individuals. It is a class of Indian lands created by the General Allotment Act of 1887 as an ancillary result of the effort to assimilate Indians into the general population by terminating reservations and making Indians homesteaders of private parcels. They were intended for Indians not residing on a reservation or for whose tribe no reservation was created. These "landless" Indians were permitted to make allotment selections from the public domain, including the national forests. PD allotments are not the same as the trust allotments created from Indian reservations that remain within the boundaries of a reservation. Both PD allotments and reservation allotments are supposedly entitled to the same services (and obligations or restrictions) conferred by trust status. As a practical matter, allotments within reservation boundaries have received considerably more attention than PD allotments. Reservation allotments are covered by natural resource management plans prepared for reservations and in general have provided greater benefits to their owners than PD allotments.