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Show 110 aEPORT OF THC COMMISSIONEB OF INDIAN AZFAIEEI part of Choctaw or Chickasaw Indian blood were entitled to enroll-ment and to share in tho estate of the nations as Indians by blood. A person enrolled as a Choctaw or Chickasaw freedman receives land of only the value of 40 acres of the average allottable land and does not share in the funds of the tribes; while one enrolled as a citizen by blood is given an allotment of the value of 320 acres of the average dlottable land of the two nations and will have his sharo 9f the tribal funds. In the case of Joe and Dillard Perry, who are of Chickasaw Indian and freedman blood, it had been held by the assistant attorney-general for the Interior Department that if they made application for enrollment as Chickasaw citizens by blood within the time prescribed by law they were entitled to enrollment as such. Their names had been placed on the Chickasaw freedman roll; but when it was shown that their applications had been properly made their names were transferred to the blood roll of the nation. Afterward, in accordance with the opinion of the Attorney-General of February 19,1907, their names were retransferred to the freedman roll. Apparently taking this case as a precedent, the attorneys rep-resenting the Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen procured the intro-duction into the Congress of a bill directing the Secretary to transfer from the freedman rolls to the blood rolls the name of any person of Indian blood on either the mother's or the father's side, as shown by the tribal rolls, the records of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, or those in the Department. It was provided, however, that no original application for enrollment could be made, but that only those enrolled or who had applications pending for enrollment as Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen should be entitled to the benefits of the proposed legislation. Office report of January 3 on the bill said, in substance, that whatever rights the freedmen had were based on the treaty of 1866 and subsequent action by the Congress and the tribal authorities; that it had always been the mderstanding of the Office that persons whose mothers were freedwomen were recognized by the tzibes as belonging to the freedmen, regardless of the quantum of Indian blood; that during slavery a child followed the status of the mother, a child born of a free mother being free and one born of a slave mother being a slave; that it was the universal custom among the white people of this country to regard as a negro any person known to be in part of negro blood irrespective of the degree of such blood; that the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations had been fairly generous to their former slaves and their, descendants by allowing them to participate to a limited extent in the allotment of land-something which former white slave owners had not done; and that for nearly half a century the freedmen bad been allowed to occypy and cultivate lands belonging to the tribes without rental. The legislation was not enacted. |