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Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants

Dawes Roll (1898–1914)

The Dawes Commission was created by Congress in 1893 to negotiate agreements to dissolve the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—and allot their lands. This roll was considered the final roll. The decree of February 3, 1896, resulted in a decision to make new rolls and begin accepting applications for Cherokee citizenship, including from Freedmen, on June 10, 1896. The citizens were classified into three categories: Indians by blood, Freedmen, and intermarried whites. 

On December 18, 1900, the Cherokee Freedmen’s convention drafted a list of resolutions to make sure that their voices would be heard regarding this new roll. They implored that the Wallace Roll would be authenticated as the basis of citizenship of the Cherokee Freedmen. They also requested that the secretary of the interior allow them to choose one of the members of the Dawes Commission so that the enrollment of Cherokee Freedmen would be fair.1  

The Dawes Commission started to enroll citizens on April 1, 1901. Public hearings were held in fourteen towns and required all heads of households to physically appear to enroll their families. The dates and locations were advertised through flyers and local newspapers. If individuals seeking to enroll failed to appear in person, they were not eligible for citizenship, and subsequently could not receive allotments of land. Moreover, according to section twenty-one of the Curtis Act, refusal to apply for enrollment could also be punished. 

For example, Redbird Smith (1850–1918), a Keetoowah and a Cherokee National Council member, who led a resistance movement against the Dawes Allotment Act, was arrested in Muskogee and compelled to register for allotment in March 1902. Following Redbird Smith’s lead, there were fullblood Cherokees who did not enroll themselves on the Dawes Roll as a form of resistance to the government’s actions. The Dawes Commission subsequently enrolled Smith’s followers without their consent.2 The Dawes Rolls were closed on March 4, 1907. At the time, there were 41,798 enrolled citizens, 4,924 being Freedmen. By the end of June 1907, 4,208 Cherokee Freedmen received land allotments.3 

Procedure and Issues

The Dawes Act (“An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations”) required that the rolls be “descriptive of the persons thereon, so that they may be thereby identified.” Accordingly, the applicants had to answer a set of questions. The applicants also had witnesses testify to the facts of their enslavement by the Cherokees and residence in the Nation within six months after the promulgation of the Treaty of 1866, as required by the treaty. Because this residency was difficult to prove with documents, the importance of testimony increased, along with its issues. 
Cherokee Freedmen from Saline District, Cherokee Nation, explained the difficulty of meeting this time requirement in their 1872 petition to President Ulysses S. Grant: 

Some of us had fled North to get away from slavery, or to take our families away from the horror and sufferings of the War, while we ourselves enlisted in the Union army. Some of us, had been dragged by our owners, to the South to keep us from being freed by the Union army so that we were a long way off from the Cherokee Country when the Treaty was made. We were so far, that we had no way of getting back to our old homes so that we could not possibly have reached there in time, even if we had known what provision was made for us in the Treaty.4



In addition to these physical difficulties with meeting the demand of the treaty, there were also Black people who had moved outside the Cherokee Nation at an early age or were born outside the tribal land. These people would have had a different sentiment towards the Cherokee Nation, spending most of their time outside of the Nation, raising a question of how tribal identity is defined by the self and others. 

Gauging the truth of the testimony and which testimonies to favor was another issue. Commissioner A.C.Tonner's letter to the secretary of the interior concerning Phyllis Whitmire’s application records this issue, noting, “It becomes a very difficult proposition to say how much weight such testimony should be given.” Thus, in many cases, the evidentiary weight of the testimony also depended upon the witnesses’ purity of blood. Tonner further elucidated the difficulty of determining the authenticity of the testimonies and responsibility of an inductive decision in the same letter, sustaining that “the determination of a case like this would seem to depend, from a legal standpoint, upon the question upon whom is the burden of proof, the applicant or the Cherokee Nation.”5

As the number of witnesses applicants brought in to prove their rights to citizenship began to increase, the Cherokees accused some of being professional witnesses who sold fraudulent testimony to citizenship applicants for a fee. Those suspected of being professional witnesses included Harry Still, Crap Lynch, Moses Hardrick, Moses Riley, and Sheep Jim Alberty; the records demonstrate that they testified in two hundred to four hundred cases in total.6 To this end, some of the Cherokees’ suspicions about the Freedmen applicants’ veracity are, to a degree, warranted. The Bureau of Indian Affairs 1883 report records 3,599 cases involving Cherokee freedmen, which is more than the entire population of “African blood” before the Civil War.7 1,198 people were authenticated, but a larger number additionally claimed citizenship.

Although bringing in witnesses to the court of the Dawes Commission was not an easy job for the applicants, the commissioners preferred written documents. These decisions in part were based on a refusal of the oral knowledge system sustained in Cherokee culture.8 

Stenographers recorded the entirety of the interviews in English.9 With this gathered information, the commissioners cross-checked the testimonies of the applicants and witnesses with the 1880 and 1896 tribal rolls and decided on their status as “regular,” “doubtful,” or “rejected.” The information was entered on fourteen-by-seventeen-inch cards.

Erasure

Various factors contributed to the denial of applications, including ideological differences and practical obstacles. Disputes over Cherokee identity, logistical challenges accessing registration offices, the dearth of proof to meet the Treaty of 1866’s criteria, difficulties in English language proficiency, and instances of corruption among officers played significant roles in causing these omissions. 

What made the Dawes Roll distinctive was the enrollment of Cherokee people by determining their blood quantum. Although comprised of three rolls that distinguished “Cherokees,” “Freedmen,” and “doubtful citizens,” the Dawes Roll recorded the blood quantum only for those categorized as “Cherokees” and not anyone else. Even when the registered Cherokee Freedmen descended from pure Cherokee blood, being categorized as Freedmen obstructed their blood quantum being recorded. Around three hundred out of the 4,208 adult Cherokee Freedmen enrolled in the Dawes Roll who actually had some degree of Cherokee heritage were thus unable to identify official documentation of that heritage.10 This missing information would repeatedly cause problems for the Cherokee Freedmen to authenticate their blood over time.

The Dawes Roll leaving out many freedmen enrolled in the Kern-Clifton Roll was deemed unlawful according to Cherokee Nation v. Whitmire, 223 U.S. 108 (1912). Because the Kern-Clifton Roll complied with the decree of February 3, 1896, the Dawes Commission’s dismissal of it was consequentially ruled as unconstitutional.
 

Footnotes

  1. Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 180.↵
  2. Michael Lee Weber, "Redbird Smith Movement," The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=RE015↵
  3. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 181.↵
  4. Quoted in Murray R. Wickett, Contested Territory: Whites, Native Americans, and African Americans in Oklahoma, 1865-1907 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 10.↵
  5. Cherokee Freedman Collection, Africana Studies, Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University.↵
  6. Daniel F. Littlefield, The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship (Greenwood, 1978), 229.↵
  7. Gregory D. Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (Yale University Press, 2015), 208.↵
  8. Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 114↵
  9. Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family, 112.↵
  10. Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (University of California Press, 2002), 186.↵

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