The American Dawes Commission, named for its first chairman Henry L. Dawes, was authorized under a rider to an Indian Office appropriation bill, March 3, 1893. Its purpose was to convince the Five Civilized Tribes to agree to cede tribal title of Indian lands, and adopt the policy of dividing tribal lands into individual allotments that was enacted for other tribes as the Dawes Act of 1887. In November 1893, President Grover Cleveland appointed Dawes as chairman, and Meridith H. Kidd and Archibald S. McKennon as members. (pictured above)

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. 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.

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.

SEARCH THE DAWES ROLLS, 1898 – 1914*

or

http://www.okhistory.org/research/dawes*

*Please note these links are not associated with the Cherokee National Historical Society, Inc., the Cherokee Heritage Center, the Cherokee Family Research Center or its partners.  The link below may take you to other sites which require a fee to join such as Fold3.com or Ancestry.com.

To search the link below for free please scroll down to the mid-section of its page to where you see the search engine titled:  Search the Final Rolls by Last Name

We recommend that you do not enter information into any other search engine on this link.  Thank you for your visit to our website, www.cherokeeheritage.org.