The numbers probably related to the numbers assigned to Indians on the Dawes Rolls resulting from the Dawes Act of 1887 which allotted tribal lands in severalty to individual tribal members in exchange for Native Americans becoming US citizens and giving up some forms of tribal self-government. In...
They were very inter- ested in the background of the Choctaws being the first Indians to be removed on the Trail of Tears and the phases in history such as the Dawes Rolls and the 1907 Oklahoma Statehood that led to a diminished tribal gov- ernment until our regained sov- ereignty in...
The fifteenth amendment to the US Constitution is the third of the three so-called Civil War (or Reconstruction) amendments. It prohibits the federal government, as well as the individual governments of all of the states, from denying any US citizen the right to vote based on that person’s...
In the 1831 case Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court first articulated the concept of tribes as domestic dependent nations and characterizing Indians as “wards of the government.” As the U.S. continued to tighten the stranglehold on Native nations throughout the nineteenth century and...
In 1978, the United States enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) “to protect the best interest of Indian Children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families by the establishment of minimum Federal standards for the rem