The American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Dawes Commission, named for its first chairman Henry L. Dawes

Henry L. Dawes

Henry Laurens Dawes was a Republican United States Senator and United States Representative, notable for the Dawes Act.-Biography:...

, was authorized under a rider to an Indian Office appropriation bill, March 3, 1893. Its purpose was to convince the Five Civilized Tribes

Five Civilized Tribes

The Five Civilized Tribes were the five Native American nations—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—that were considered civilized by Anglo-European settlers during the colonial and early federal period because they adopted many of the colonists' customs and had generally good...

 to agree to cede tribal title of Indian

Native Americans in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...

 lands, and adopt the policy of dividing tribal lands into individual allotments that was enacted for other tribes as the Dawes Act

Dawes Act

The Dawes Act, adopted by Congress in 1887, authorized the President of the United States to survey Indian tribal land and divide the land into allotments for individual Indians. The Act was named for its sponsor, Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. The Dawes Act was amended in 1891 and again...

 of 1887. In November 1893, President Grover Cleveland

Grover Cleveland

Stephen Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th president of the United States. Cleveland is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms and therefore is the only individual to be counted twice in the numbering of the presidents...

 appointed Dawes as chairman, and Meridith H. Kidd and Archibald S. McKennon as members.

During this process, the Indian nations were stripped of their communally held national lands, which was divided into single lots and allotted to individual members of the nation. The Dawes Commission required that individuals claim membership in only one tribe, although many people had more than one line of ancestry. Registration in the national registry known as the Dawes Rolls has come to be critical in issues of Indian citizenship and land claims. Many people did not sign up on these rolls because they feared government persecution if their ethnicity was formally entered into the system

System

System is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole....

. People often had mixed ancestry from several tribes. According to the Dawes Commission rules, a person who was 1/4 Cherokee and 1/4 Creek had to choose one nation and register simply as '1/4 Cherokee', for instance. That forced individuals to lose part of his or her inheritance and heritage.

Although many Indian tribes did not consider strict 'blood' descent the only way to determine if a person was a member of a tribe, the Dawes Commission did. Many Freedmen (slaves of Indians who were freed after the Civil War), were kept off the rolls as members of tribes, although they were emancipated after the war and, according to peace treaties with the United States, to be given full membership in the appropriate tribes in which they were held. Even if freedmen were of mixed-race ancestry, as many were, the Dawes Commission enrolled them in separate Freedmen Rolls, rather than letting them self-identify as to membership.

Many Creek Freedmen

Creek Freedmen

Creek Freedmen are African American people who were former slaves of Muscogee Creek tribal members before 1866; they were freed by the 1866 treaty with the United States and granted citizenship in the Creek Nation. The Creek Freedmen had lived and worked the land in Indian Territory prior to the...

 are still fighting the membership battle today against the Creek Nation, as they attempt to share in contemporary benefits of citizenship. The tribe has defined as members only those who are descended from a Creek Indian listed on the Dawes Rolls. A similar controversy has embroiled Cherokee Freedmen

Cherokee freedmen controversy

The Cherokee Freedmen Controversy is an ongoing political and tribal dispute between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen regarding tribal citizenship. In 1863, by an act of the Cherokee National Council during the American Civil War, the Cherokee who supported...

 and the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation voted in a referendum (from which the Freedmen were excluded) to exclude all Freedmen except those who could prove descent from a Cherokee on the Dawes Roll.

The result of the Dawes Commission was that the five Indian nations lost most of their national land bases, as the government declared as "surplus" any remaining after the allotment to individual households. The US sold the surplus land, formerly Indian territory, to European-American settlers. In addition, over the next decades, settlers bought land from individual Indian households, thus reducing overall land held by tribal members. The Indians received money from the overall sale of lands, but lost most of their former territory. As tribes began to re-establish self-government after 1934, and especially since the 1970s, they have tried to end the sales of tribal lands.

Angie Debo

Angie Debo

Angie Elbertha Debo was an American historian who wrote 13 books and hundreds of articles about Native American and Oklahoma history...

's landmark work, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940), detailed how the allotment policy of the Dawes Commission and the Curtis Act of 1898

Curtis Act of 1898

The Curtis Act of 1898 was an amendment to the United States Dawes Act that brought about the allotment process of lands of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory: the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, Cherokee, and Seminole...

was systematically manipulated to deprive the Native Americans of their lands and resources. In the words of historian Ellen Fitzpatrick, Debo's book "advanced a crushing analysis of the corruption, moral depravity, and criminal activity that underlay white administration and execution of the allotment policy."

External links

• Dawes Packets, the original applications for tribal enrollments
• Kent Carter, The Dawes Commission and the Allotment of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1893-1914 (Ancestry Publishing, 1999) (excerpt available here)
• Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture - Dawes Commission