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- fourteen 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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