Equity Case 7071
“The suit filed in the United States court at Ardmore
Saturday evening involving property worth probably $15,000,000, attracts
attention as one of the most gigantic pieces of litigation in the history of
the Indian Territory.”
That quote comes from a newspaper article in the Indian
Citizen on April 18, 1907. It is now one hundred- twelve years later and it
remains one of the most profound cases dealing with race and citizenship in the Chickasaw
and Choctaw Nations.
The Dawes Commission, the United States Department of the
Interior, the Chickasaw Nation and the Choctaw Nation all denied at least 1,500
people who claimed to have Chickasaw or Choctaw ancestry from becoming citizens
“by blood” in the nation of their birth and the nation of their ancestors
birth.
Commissioner Tams BIXBY drew upon the idea that these
individuals who were the sons and daughters of men some alive and many deceased
should not be enrolled on the Chickasaw or Choctaw blood rolls because their
mothers had been women of African descent and may have at one time been
enslaved by a Chickasaw or Choctaw “citizen.”
The Dawes Commission and the two slave holding tribes had
many cases where they enrolled some children of Chickasaw or Choctaw men and
they even enrolled some children of freedmen men as citizens by blood because
their mother may have been recognized as a by blood citizen; however the bulk
of the people who were claimants in Equity Case 7071 were lineal descendants of
a Chickasaw or Choctaw Indian and should have been enrolled as a “Citizens by
Blood.”
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| Indian Citizen April 18, 1907 p1c1 |
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