Half-Breed Tract

A Half-Breed Tract was a segment of land designated in the western states by the United States government in the 19th century specifically for Métis of American Indian and European or European-American ancestry, at the time commonly known as half-breeds. The government set aside such tracts in several parts of the Midwestern prairie region, including in Iowa Territory, Nebraska Territory, Kansas Territory, Minnesota Territory, and Wisconsin Territory.

Historically, the mixed-blood population in the Pays d'en Haut were typically the descendants of Native American women and Whites men, often men of French-Canadian or Scots (including Orcadian) origin, who dominated early fur trapping and trade. These men lived far from other Europeans. Others had fathers who were American trappers and traders. The children typically grew up in their mother's tribes, where the fathers and families were offered protection if not full membership.

As relations between the United States government and the tribes became more complex, the mixed-race children often were excluded from benefiting both from the federal laws governing Indians and the political rights of their fathers because of discrimination on both sides. The tribes had their own kinship systems and rules of descent and inheritance. For instance, the Omaha had a patrilineal system, and considered mixed-race children of European or "white" fathers to be white unless formally adopted into the tribe by a man. Other tribes had matrilineal systems, and children were considered born into the mother's clan and took their status from her. Due to hypodescent (assignment of children of a mixed union to the subordinate group) and the fact that many of the mixed-race children grew up in tribes on the frontier, Europeans tended to classify them as being more Indian than white. Their fathers' living "outside" civilized society as mountain men was part of this idea. The Omaha and other tribal leaders advocated setting land aside for the mixed-blood descendants; usually the intent was to award land to male heads of families.

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