Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977

2. From the Second Removal to Recognition, 1898–1918

chapter two From the Second Removal to Recognition, 1898–1918 Having only recently rebuilt their communities, the Mississippi Choctaws again faced removal in 1898 when the federal government moved to allot the Choctaw Nation in Indian Territory. Because of Article 14, Choctaws remaining in Mississippi were also entitled to land, but deciding who should appear on the Choctaw tribal rolls proved difficult because Mississippi Choctaws lacked appropriate documentation of their eligibility. Policy makers’ ubiquitous concern with race at the turn of the twentieth century meant that enrollment turned on the issue of Indian blood. As they pursued allotments, the Mississippi Choctaws again encountered incompetent officials and broken promises, and again they protested with memorials and petitions. In this new context, they employed the language of Indian blood, identifying themselves as the full-blood Mississippi Choctaws—a definition that included language and culture in addition to ancestry. The Choctaws’ declaration of a full-blood identity echoed the federal government’s requirements for renewed Article 14 claims under allotment policy—requirements that represented changing perceptions of how Indian blood had affected the historical outcome of Article 14. As they sought to sort out competing claims, Mississippi Choctaws, ersatz claimants, lawyers, and federal officials sparred over the meanings of Choctaw ancestry, history, and culture. The Mississippi congressional delegation sought enrollment with the Choctaw Nation for Choctaws in Mississippi. They did so for a variety 37 From the Second Removal to Recognition, 1898–1918 of motives, many of which echoed their beliefs about tragic, vanishing , noble savages expressed following the Civil War. So powerful were these preconceived notions of Indianness that elected officials initially battled not on behalf of the actual Choctaw communities, but for pretend claimants along the Gulf Coast. Mississippi politicians’ engagement in the campaign for enrollment reflected the distance between actual Indians and ideas about Indians that complicated the Choctaws’ struggle for recognition.1 Although the efforts of both Indians and politicians failed to win enrollment with the Choctaw Nation, the campaign drew attention to the predicament of Choctaws in Mississippi and finally prompted a congressional appropriation for them. The Choctaws’ hard-won recognition as Indians deserving federal aid was the first victory in their campaign for tribal resurgence. The Second Removal: Rights, Race, and Identity In 1893 Congress created the Dawes Commission to persuade Native governments in Indian Territory to accept the allotment of their lands and the dissolution of their tribal status. The Office of Indian Affairs (oia) had already begun allotting other Indian lands under the General Allotment Act of 1887 (also known as the Dawes Act, after its chief sponsor Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes). The Dawes Act had divided Indian reservations into individual allotments, throwing open the remaining communal lands to white settlers and dissolving the Indians’ institutions of government. This policy had excluded the nations of Indian Territory until 1898 when the government passed the Curtis Act, which allotted the nations of Indian Territory. After a bitter political battle, the Choctaw Nation had accepted allotment under the Atoka Agreement in 1897. This agreement was added to the Curtis Act and passed the following year. Mississippi representative John Sharp Williams, who represented the fifth district containing most of the Choctaw communities, joined with the Choctaw Nation seeking allotments in Indian Territory for Choctaws in Mississippi.2 The Curtis Act authorized the Dawes Com- 38 From the Second Removal to Recognition, 1898–1918 mission to enroll Mississippi Choctaws who could prove descent from persons entitled to land under Article 14. Qualified Choctaws then had six months to move to Indian Territory to retain their land.3 This opportunity prompted a flood of applicants, which raised questions of how to identify legitimate enrollees. In the hyper-racial atmosphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, race became a crucial component of enrollment. The text of the General Allotment Act made no specific mention of race as a criterion for allotment, but references to Indian blood abounded in administrative documents and practices. The pervasive preoccupation with racial purity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries strongly influenced both Indian policy and tribal constructions of identity. For example, the Dawes Commission held segregated hearings in Indian Territory and drafted three separate rolls—one for intermarried whites, one for freedmen (former slaves), and one for Indians by blood, where enrollees were listed by blood quantum. The operative measurement for inclusion on the latter roll was “one-half Indian...