This Land Was Our Land

In my last post I discussed some of the underutilized resources available for tracing Native American ancestry, and mentioned the long, sad history of the Federal Government’s mismanagement of the small amounts of our lands that we have been allowed to keep—sort of. Today I’m going to go into that history in more detail, focusing on the records that exist which can help us learn more about our Indian ancestors. It’s a search that is likely to make you angry once you get into it, but I feel we owe it to those ancestors to learn and pass on the information that still exists and attempt to get a degree of justice for them and for us.

Once the Feds hornswoggled our ancestors into ceding our best lands, they had to face up to the fact that the Indians simply refused to evaporate. Just as bad, the Indians kept moving around as they always had done, to cope with the abundance or scarcity of game, fish, and wild plant foods, and/or to visit relatives. The government therefore set aside large tracts of lands which were not known to contain anything of value, such as valuable minerals or good, rich, deep topsoil. Those tracts became the reservations.

Indians—being illiterate but not stupid—resisted the idea of being confined to small tracts of land devoid of reasonable natural resources to sustain their people. Many had been hornswoggled into signing treaties whose written terms were not the terms that had been negotiated orally. Sometimes Indian resistance was dealt with by massacre, as at Wounded Knee. Others were “removed” if their presence became inconvenient—in other words, when someone else wanted their lands. (That’s how the sacred Black Hills got carved away from the Lakota when gold was discovered there.) Sometimes the Indians were removed by force, as with the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838 or the Navajo Long Walk of 1864. And sometimes they were removed by outright chicanery.

In order to "persuade" the Lake Superior Chippewa to move west of the Mississippi River, an executive order was issued by President Zachary Taylor in 1850: the site of the annuity payment was changed from La Pointe (on Madeline Island), Wisconsin, to Sandy Lake in Minnesota. This was in itself a violation of numerous treaties, as was the moving of the payment date from summer to late October. By that time, with more and more of their resources becoming more and more restricted, the Ojibwe were now dependent on that annuity for survival, so they felt they had no choice but to go to Sandy Lake.

The journey was an arduous one, and when the Ojibwe got there, it was several weeks before a government agent arrived, and he immediately informed them that the annuity (consisting of money and vital supplies, including food) had not yet been sent. A small portion of the annuity finally arrived in early December, by which time the Ojibwe were starving, freezing, and dying from dysentery or measles at a rate which admirably suited the government interests. The survivors, weakened by starvation and the freezing cold, were forced to return home with only a fraction of what they had been promised by treaty. Many died on the way, or shortly afterwards.

I grew up in Minnesota, and I can testify that Minnesota winters are very, very cold, and that walking through deep snow on foot is arduous. At least 400 Ojibwe men died at Sandy Lake or on the return home, and of course there were many additional casualties at home over the fall and winter among the women, children, and old men who had not made the journey. In other words, so far as the President was concerned, the affair was a rousing success, and the stubborn Ojibwe would now surely be forced to resettle west of the Mississippi.

In 1852, however, there was another President in office, and the 93-year-old Chief Buffalo of La Pointe led a delegation to Washington, DC, to persuade him to rescind Taylor’s order to remove the Chippewa from the lands which had been guaranteed to them by numerous treaties. And to their everlasting credit, large numbers of whites who lived along the travel route became highly indignant about the shabby treatment the Ojibwe had received from the federal government and signed petitions demanding that the removal order be cancelled.

Once in Washington, however, the commissioner of Indian Affairs was outraged that the group had dared to come without official permission and ordered them to go home. Fortunately, the Ojibwe encountered some members of the Whig party, who arranged for an audience with President Millard Fillmore (a Whig). Fillmore received Chief Buffalo and the others with respect and listened carefully to what the Indians had to say. Two days later, he rescinded the removal order, and the 1854 Treaty set up reservations in the home territories of the Ojibwe bands.

Eventually most of the recalcitrant tribes west of the Mississippi were forced onto reservations, although most fought heroically as long as they could against “removal.” Small tribes and bands who remained adamant simply ceased to be “Federally recognized” and left to their own devices to survive in the white man’s world.

Since the official idea of establishing reservations was to turn the Indians into self-supporting farmers, in 1887 the Feds got the bright idea of moving all Indians—hostile or not—onto reservations (preferably where natural resources were few), then, under the terms of the federal Dawes Act, dividing the reservations into 80-acre allotments which were doled out to the “official” tribal members, male and female, including small children. (In Minnesota, the 1889 Nelson Act required all Indians to move to White Earth, but so many Ojibwe took one horrified look at the place and went back to where they came from that the original reservations persist to this day and the Dawes Act allotment process continued.

Still, the Dawes Act would give a married couple 160 acres and 80 acres to each of the kids they had at the time. Sounds reasonable, yes?

No.

For a start, if an allotment had any valuable natural resource (including good timber or valuable minerals) or was in fact decent farmland, the Indian who got title would be hounded by whites looking to get that land away from the “worthless” Indian by purchase or by outright swindle. Second, any land that had not been allotted was likely to be declared “surplus” and sold off. (To this day, about 95% of the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota is owned by non-Indians.)

Equally bad, there was no allowance for the fact that Indians, like everyone else, have children. Even with a second round of allotments some 20 years or so after the first round, there were too few allotments to accommodate future generations. This was deliberate: the goal was to get the Indians into the cheap end of the labor pool and eventually to close the reservations once everyone had become completely “civilized”.

Here’s how it worked: suppose a newlywed couple were given adjacent 80-acre allotments, totaling 160 acres between them, and then proceeded to have 10 children, of whom 6 (or their offspring) survived long enough to inherit equal shares of their parents’ property. As adults, how were those 6 surviving children supposed to support themselves and their families by farming on only 26.7 acres each? They might grow enough food on their lots to feed themselves if the hunting, fishing, and wild plant foods were plentiful, or possibly grow enough fruit and/or vegetables to sell and thereby pay their other expenses. But the size of the parcels owned would diminish substantially with each subsequent generation, so that in a few generations a direct descendant of the original allottees might own only a few square feet of the original 160 acres.

Now, the government foresaw this problem (in fact, it counted on it), so the problem was solved by taking charge of the probates of the original allottees, then distributing to the heirs not a specific piece of land each but an undivided interest in the original allotted land. (Very few Indians made wills, but if they did, the wills were generally honored.) This meant that no heir could have exclusive title to a useful-size parcel unless he or she persuaded or paid the other heirs to cede their shares to that one heir.

Civil inheritance laws also played a major role in making sure that Indian heirs didn’t actually get control of their inheritance. Example: in Minnesota (where my grandparents lived), unless there was a valid will specifying otherwise, civil law gave 1/3 of the deceased’s property, including all land interests or shares of interest, to the surviving spouse, and divided the other 2/3 among the deceased’s surviving children or their heirs. If a child died young, her share would revert to the surviving parents if any, or to the parents’ heirs, including the dead child’s siblings or their heirs. With white families, the heirs would then determine the most fair way to divide up the property. Indians were presumed to be incompetent to do this, so each heir continued to hold an undivided interest, and the process is still ongoing to this day.

This still did not give any Indian heir an actual parcel of land to live on, much less farm. When you consider that there were many marriages between whites and Indians, and that widows and widowers often re-marry and, if young enough, have additional children, within a couple of generations a large percentage of the original allottee’s heir's might be persons with no Indian ancestry at all.

The technical term for all of this is fractionalization, and it meant that the government administered the allotment and its use without input from the actual owners. It might, for example, lease it out to a white cattle rancher as grazing land at the bargain rate of $1 an acre per year. It might have all the allotment’s timber cut down for use as railroad ties or building material for the white towns and cities. The income “should” have been divided among the land’s owners, but all too often it simply disappeared, either lost in the bureaucracy or downright stolen. Or the allotment might be simply ignored, producing no income at all while insuring that the dozens or hundreds of owners couldn’t even live on it. (At least my great-uncle Joseph’s allotment, which I discussed in an earlier post, did generate a distribution of timber income a few years ago.)

Believe it or not, there is an upside to all this for those of us who are researching Native American ancestors who lived on a reservation and/or had an allotment.

In my great-uncle’s case, the records as to the legal owners have at least been carefully kept and heirs occasionally receive updates. (The 1955 list of Great-Uncle Joseph's heirs provided me with an invaluable mass of information about the extended family when I first decided to research my family history.)

I’m talking about probates here, which can be the most fruitful documentation for any ancestor. The Indian Census records were made not only to keep a count of how many Indians had still not been civilized enough to move into cities to provide cheap labor, but also to keep track of who owned what land on a given reservation.

By the way, older probates were generally labelled “Inheritance Files” or “Heirship Files”. I may be prejudiced, but I suspect the term “probate” was not used because that would imply that the deceased was fully human. In fairness, I must add that the term in use these days is the same as for everyone else: probate.

Many of the probates of Indians who had allotment land interests have been at least partly preserved, along with references to the land records and often a great deal of genealogical material as to the parentage, siblings, and all lawful heirs of the deceased. Sometimes the files are quite large because there was a question as to whether a particular heir is in actual fact a rightful heir. From a genealogical point of view, these are the juiciest probates of all.

The National Archives in Washington, DC, has numerous probates of Indians of many tribes at least up into the early 1920s, held in the Central Classified Files under decimal system 350. Other, later ( mid-1920s onward) probates are held in the appropriate Regional Branches of the National Archives once they have been settled. Each probate has a unique file number.

If you have a file number from before about 1925 or so, you can contact the National Archives by e-mail or snail mail, and they can, for a reasonable fee, supply you with a copy of the probate. I can tell you from experience that the archivists in Washington DC and at the Regional Branches are generally very nice people and will help you as much as they can, but if you don’t have a file number, they won’t be able to find a specific probate for you.

They can, however, identify the boxes which hold probates for the specific band or tribe involved. Probates which have been settled are, by definition, public documents. If you go personally to the correct archive and provide identification like everyone else, you can request the boxes holding the probates for your band or tribe, look through the file boxes yourself, and make photocopies of the probate(s) you want. (Handle them carefully; old paper is fragile.)

Here’s the tricky part: while a probate could be settled within a year if there were no questions of fact involved, a settlement could take as much as 20+ years if there were complications or challenges as to the right of a particular person to inherit. (Great-Uncle Joseph's probate is still not finalized after 73 years, and the list of his heirs grows longer every year.) In other words, the year of death is irrelevant; the year that counts for locating a probate is the year the last document was added to the file—which may be years, even decades after the main issues were settled. Therefore, you can’t request a probate for your grandmother if all you have is information as to death date and tribe.

If a probate has not been settled yet, it “should” still be at the regional office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that had jurisdiction for the deceased’s band or tribe, but you may not be able to get a look at it unless you are one of the heirs. Since the BIA gets re-organized every so often, a file that started out with one office may have been moved several times since the person’s death. However, a probate which has been finalized is by definition a public record and you should be able to access it through the agency that has it now—if you can find out which agency that is. I suggest contacting the one nearest to the tribe or band where your family member was enrolled.

Sounds daunting? There’s still hope. The BIA office in Minneapolis recently pointed me to another source for probate records. The Federal government keeps track not only of public land ownership but also allotted land on Indian reservations. The BIA referred me to the Land Titles and Records department of the Regional office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, which, they said, “should” have the probates of my great-grandmother (died 1938) and of my grandmother (died 1940).

Fortunately I already had those file numbers, because they were mentioned in Great-Uncle Joseph’s probate. I wrote to the Aberdeen office just before Thanksgiving (not expecting to hear from then until January because of the holidays). Two weeks ago I received from that office’s Land Titles and Records Section copies of the probates (which were printouts from microfilm)—and full of good information they were, too. The letter accompanying the copies told me that names and tribe or band affiliation, even with exact date of death, are not enough to find a probate, but if I can provide more information such as enrollment numbers, probate file numbers, or allotment numbers, they may be able to find the probates for my GG grandparents and for their other children.

Well, I know the death dates for some of those relatives but not the probate file numbers. However, I do have the White Earth allotment numbers for them, and I will be sending that information to the same Land Titles and Records section in January. With those probates I expect I will finally be able to sort out some mysterious relationships and possibly connect with living relatives in that line. I will post the results of that query when I receive them.

Uncle Sam may not have done right by our Indian ancestors, but at least he has left many of us a paper trail that may be a great help to us in discovering something about the lives they led, help us take the lines back another generation, and possibly connect with living cousins.

Counting Indian Heads

Many people with Native American ancestry—proven or “family lore”— have no idea how to go about proving or tracing that ancestry. For some, I regret to say, the desire is to prove eligibility to participate in casino profits or in the recently-settled case of Cobell v. Salazar, a case brought against the then Secretary of the Interior because of a century and a half of mismanagement of the lands and funds belonging to tribes and individuals. That mismanagement resulted in vast sums of money simply disappearing and left generations of Indians dying poor without ever having control over lands and funds belonging to them.

To its credit, the present federal administration agreed to the settlement and is in general making a serious effort to get its records in order and compensate for the losses. However, it is still a major hassle to access the Federal records which can help you trace your Native ancestry for genealogical purposes—unless you know already what resources are available. If you don’t, read on.

As soon as the United States began make treaties with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent, the Feds were very eager to ensure that as few people as possible could claim benefits under the many treaties between Uncle Sam and the numerous tribes whose ancestral lands and rights were being hijacked. During the oral negotiations, the Indians would agree to certain terms, but since they could not read the treaty documents, they signed with an X mark and didn’t learn until too late that the document as written had terms different from what had been orally agreed upon. 

The technical term for this is cheating. If you’re angry enough about it, you call it swindling or just plain bare-faced theft. (I’m very angry about it, myself.)

If money, land, or goods were to be handed over in exchange for the ceded territory, the government, not unreasonably, insisted that these things should go only to the people who were entitled to them. And of course, the Indians themselves wanted to receive what they had been promised and not have it diverted to people who had no right to it. They also wanted to provide for their mixed-blood relatives who lived among them in the ceded territory and maintained and honored their relationships with their full-blood kin. Therefore, in relation to treaty benefits, the government often made every effort to record the names and relationships and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion decisions. My cousin Theresa M. Schenck’s All Our Relations: Chippewa Mixed Bloods and the Treaty of 1837 (Amik Press: Madison, Wisconsin 2009) is a compilation of the applications and the vetting process for persons of mixed white and Chippewa ancestry applying for benefits under that treaty.

Many treaties included annual payments spread over several years to the bands and tribes whose lands and usage rights were being ceded. Governments being governments, this means that for many tribes there are Federal annuity rolls, made (usually) every year to record who was entitled to payment, the name of the family head who collected the payment on behalf of the others in the family, and the number of adults and children for whom payment was made. And bureaucracies being bureaucracies, many of those annuity rolls have survived. 

Usually annuity rolls list only male heads of families by name; eligible women and children whose payments he collected on their behalf were only listed by total number. If the male head had died, only then would the woman’s name be recorded. Annuity rolls generally give, at most, a rough classification of the children by gender, and/or by whether they are over or under age 10. This is not always very helpful if your proven ancestor’s name is not recorded and you don’t know the names of that ancestor’s parents. You can’t even depend on the number of persons in the household being genealogically correct for a family group: a widowed grandmother, aunt, sister or cousin might be included among the adults, and the number of children may include nieces or nephews, grandchildren, or even unrelated orphans or foster children.

On the other hand, the annuity rolls can help pinpoint the year of a marriage and the approximate year of the parents’ births, as well as the birth years of children. This helps a lot when marriages were according to “Indian custom” rather than ceremonies presided over by a white clergyman or a judge and reported to the government. (One of the good things about the bureaucratic records was that “Indian custom” marriages were recognized as legal marriages.)

Many annuity rolls have been preserved and microfilmed by the National Archives; the Family History Library (LDS church) has many of these in its collection and you can order them online to view them at the nearest LDS Family History Center.

Like white families, Indian families change over time. Children are born. Children grow up and become independent. Family members of all ages die. Other relatives are taken into the household. Not only that, but many Native American people—like everyone else—felt free to move (temporarily or permanently) to another jurisdiction to join other relatives, to cope with a shortage of vital resources in “their” territory, to join in a bountiful harvest in an area where they had kinfolk, or indeed for any purpose they wished. Eventually the government agents had to switch tactics and track individuals as well as family groups.

The result: Indian Census records. Probably the best-known are the Dawes Rolls, which are lists of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership as of 1897-98, and the Guion Miller Rolls of Eastern Cherokee (1909-1910), These are available on microfilm or in book or CD-ROM form. The same goes for the Durant Rolls of Ottowa and Chippewa in eastern Michigan who were listed on the 1870 annuity rolls and/or their known descendants living as of March 1907. 

Even more helpful for family historians, there are also annual census records of members of many other tribes, most dating from the the 1880s onward up to the 1920s or, in a few cases, the 1930s. (Later records are not available because of privacy laws. Censuses are still being made annually, but now they are made by the individual bands or tribes to keep track of their own members and are not available to the general public.) 

A goodly percentage of the Indian census records available are for the Chippewa (Ojibwe or Anishinaabe), mainly because the Chippewa were not among the Eastern tribes whose territory was simply seized by the early white settlers. The Chippewa and their allies did, however, control access to the Great Lakes and its resources by about 1660 and had enough military power for the whites to prefer negotiation over war. The Chippewa therefore made more treaties with the US than any other tribe.

(Note: I usually use the preferred term of Anishinaabe, but in Federal records we are always—then, now, and probably forever—called Chippewa, and if you need to research that people, that’s the name you need to search for.)

Ancestry.com has many of the Indian census records filmed by the National Archives online, covering a period from the mid-1880s up to, in some cases, the mid 1930s. You can also purchase the microfilms from the National Archives or rent them from the Family History Library for viewing at your local Family History Center. 

You will find that the records list only persons actually enrolled in the particular band or tribe (although a spouse not enrolled may be described or mentioned by name in parentheses). By the 1890s, when the allotment system was foisted on “pacified” tribes, allotment numbers were often included. Children are usually listed with their parents until age 21, when they are listed separately. The earliest censuses for my own Bois Forte ancestors appear to have been made by agents who trooped from encampment to encampment in no particular order in relation to the order of the previous census; the chief (who may be chief of only 10 or 15 people) is usually indicated. Later censuses were more organized and the agents followed the same route each time. 

Going through the Indian census records requires a certain flexibility of the mind as well as patience, because the census formats are not uniform from year to year. Many are organized by band, with the chief’s name as band identification. . Sometimes the censuses are organized alphabetically by the name of the head of the family (separate lists for those still using only their Indian names and for those who have more or less settled on a family surname). Often there are individual annotations added later stating that a person has died or that another child has been born (with the dates given); in fact, many agents used last year’s roll as the basis for this year’s, noting changes such as births and deaths during the interim, and sometimes—hooray!—the agent’s working copy is the one which was filmed. Children who have married or reached the age of 21 are shown as separate entries, often cross-referenced to where they were listed last year.

You will quickly discover that the spelling of Indian names on the censuses varies wildly from year to year. This is because many sounds of any Indian language generally do not equate to the sounds of American English. Thus “Gi wi gi jig” in one census is “Ke way ge shig” in another and you have to be alert to the alternate spellings. Moreover, there was a high turnover among Indian Agents, so each new agent would often devise a new spelling for a given name. And just to make things interesting, many Indians have more than one Indian name and therefore some persons are listed under alternate names some years. 

In the Chippewa rolls, you will find a lot of young children listed as Kwe-sens or Kwe-we-sens: those are not names, but simple gender designations. Kwe-sens means “little girl” and Kwe-we-sens means “little boy”. As the years went by most Indians eventually adopted surnames (often derived from the preferred Indian name of the head of the family) and English first names.

In short, navigating the Indian censuses can be a little tricky, particularly since the individual pages of a given census may not have a header telling you what band and what year you are looking at, and there may not even be original page numbers. I finally made for my own use a list telling me what exactly is on each of the rolls as displayed by Ancestry.com along with the starting image number for each year and/or band. This applies only to the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan Chippewa and at this point it’s not complete; one of these days I’ll finish it and try to put it online for other people researching those groups, but until then you’re on your own.

There are other useful government records for tracing Native American ancestors. Here’s an example: claiming it was all for our own good, the American government set about “civilizing” us, starting with the most vulnerable. Children would be rounded up like cattle or forcibly dragged from their parents’ arms (this is not an exaggeration but a precise description) and sent to boarding schools, where they would be viciously punished if caught speaking any language other than English, exposed to fatal diseases from the unsanitary condition of the boarding schools, forcibly baptized and given good Christian names, and taught enough reading and writing to help them get menial jobs. Boys might be trained as gardeners or other sorts of manual labor; girls were taught how to cook and sew and make good maids or nannies for white children. My own mother was a victim of the boarding school system; so were most of my cousins.

Do I sound angry? Well, I am. But I digress.

The boarding school system, like any other government system, kept records too. Some records are just accounting records. (These can be interesting and very revealing of the prejudices of the time: for example, the cost of food for the children was often considerably less than the cost of food for the staff.) 

Other Indian school records are specialized census lists of the students, usually with appraisals of each student’s progress in becoming “civilized"  Many of these school records still exist in the National Archives and/or in the Regional Branches of the National Archives; some are available on microfilm either from the National Archives or the Family History Library or even in university or state or local historical society libraries. (I found my mother's report cards on one microfilm.) 

More information about Indian schools can turn up online in websites for historical societies (such as the Visual Arts Collection of the Minnesota Historical Society, or just by searching the web for the name of the school, such as "Carlyle Indian School" or Flandreau Indian School". Who knows? You might find your great-grandfather's photo online!