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Show Omm OP INDUANF FAIRS, Washingtan, D. O., September 80,1908. SIR: I have the honor to submit herewith the seventy-seventh annual report of the Office of Indian Affairs. A SESSION'S LEGISLATION. The first session of the Sixtieth Congress was not so prolific of Indian legislation as the two sessions of the Fifty-ninth Congress. Two or three very important bills are in a state of suspension, and have varying cliances of passage during the coming winter. 1 The special accomplishment of the recent session was the enactment of a law releasing or relieving the restrictions on alienation of certain Indian lands in that part of Oklahoma occupied by the Five Civi-lized Tribes. Popularly summarized, it sets absolutely free all the lands of all intermarried whites, all freedmen, and all mixed bloods having less than half Indian blood; and all except homesteads of all mixed bloods having as much as half but less than three quarten Indian blood. The homesteads of full-bloods, and of mixed bloods having as much as half Indian blood, are to remain inalienable till April 26, 1931, except as the Secretary of the Interior may, under rules and regulations prescribed by himself, see fit to remove the restrictions. This subject will be treated more at length elsewhere in this report. In the annual Indian appropriation act, among the other provisions affecting the Five Civilized Tribes, the Secretary of the Interior was directed to take possession of and sell all buildings on lands belonging to these tribes, now or heretofore used for gov-ernmental, school or other tribal purposes, together with the appur-tenant laud and the furniture in them, giving preference as pur-chasers to the state, county and municipal authorities, and depositing the proceeds in the United States Treasury to the credit of the tribes interested. Another important act, because of its opening the way to further legislation in the same general line if it prove successful in operation, is that "to authorize the cutting of timber, the manufacture and sale of lumber, and the preservation of the forests on the Menominee Indian h r v a t i o n in the State of Wionsin.". Its provisions are |