Full Blood Rule of Evidence – talk 19 March

The “Full Blood Rule of Evidence”: Rights, Race, and Identity among the Mississippi Choctaws, 1898-1918
Katherine Osburn
Department of History, Tennessee Tech University
Wednesday, March 19th 7:30 pm
Sprinkle Room
In 1898 Congress imposed the Dawes Act on Indian Territory, home to the so-called Five “Civilized” Tribes who had been removed from the Southeast in 1830. This act endeavored to assimilate Indians into American culture by abolishing their reservations and granting allotments of land to individual Indians in the hopes that they would all become yeomen farmers. Congress then created the Dawes Commission to carry out the allotment process and determine which Indians living outside of Indian Territory were eligible for an allotment with their tribes. For the Choctaws, this meant an opportunity to re-unite with some of their brethren who had remained behind in Mississippi during Removal.
The enrollment process, however, raised the question of how to identify legitimate enrollees and, in the hyper-racial atmosphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the question of race became central to this task. To verify lawful claimants, the Office of Indian Affairs established the so-called “full blood rule of evidence,” which defined the Choctaws by reference to racial characteristics. Analyzing the assumptions of the Office of Indian Affairs, the activities of the Dawes Commission, and the efforts of Choctaw communities in Mississippi to claim their rights in Indian Territory, this paper examines how Mississippi Choctaws appropriated the racial language of “full-blood” and how their assertion of Choctaw identity played out against competing claims to Indian identity across the South.