Correct. It was a policy to encourage Native Americans to move to the agricultural model used by European Americans, as well as incorporate socially. It was rel

Correct. It was a policy to encourage Native Americans to move to the agricultural model used by European Americans, as well as incorporate socially. It was relatively easy for a white American farmer to set up a farm in the state administered squares, but it was relatively difficult for Native Americans to roam nomadically- it essentially reduced the density of available foodstuffs in the checkerboard by half. The presumption was that Native Americans would/should start farming and adopt American social and economic norms. Another somewhat common practice was splitting up reservations into homestead sized blocks and assigning each block to an individual Native American adult male in traditional common law property ownership ways, which didn't map to any Native American social/economic norm. There was a lot of effort put forth by the US government after the Reconstruction to coerce Native Americans to act like white Americans. Which was bizarre considering citizenship wasn't fixed until 1924. You would have thought they would have led with that.