Selfishness = Civilization? Or allotment of land for Indian Rez (circa 1900s)

This was a very curious find for me....I was reading thru "Book of the Hopi" - co-written by Frank Waters and Oswald White Bear Fredericks....published in the 1960s, it is a very in depth of account of history (recent and ancient) from the Hopi Indians' reality...goes into their ceremonial patterns and the religious order of the universes.....towards the end, they describe the interactions between the Hopis and the Navajo, and both with the fledgling USA.

In a series of conflicts over a very different perception of who 'owns' land and what entitles them to this, not only had the US government dictated exactly where indigenous peoples could live....then came the General Allotment Act in 1890. This law divided all reservation lands into pieces, to be distributed one piece per Indian - undermining any communal ownership of land (which was the basis of many, if not all?, tribes throughout North America).

Here is an excerpt from the book, Part 4 Chapter 6:

"The allotment system was conceived by Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts during a visit to the Cherokees' new home in Oklahoma. He reported:
'The head chief told us that there was not a family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own. There was a not a pauper in that nation, and the nation did not owe a dollar....Yet the defect in the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common.....There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much more progress.'"

I love this: "There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization."
It really seems to undo the past 134 years of the US. Is this the way we are supposed to exist together???