Prior to the early 18th Century, most of Georgia was home to American Indians belonging to a southeastern alliance known as the Creek Confederacy. Today’s Creek Nation, also known as the Muskogee, were the major tribe in that alliance.
Pleasant Porter was elected principal chief on September 5, 1899, on a platform of compromise with the federal government. In addition to dealing with tribal dissension over the agreement, Porter also had to try to resolve the controversial question of the rights of the freedmen.
On August 4, 1898, Aylesworth gave Isparhecher a signed receipt for twenty-five 1896 town census rolls. It had taken more than two years of requests and then threats of court action to get just one of the “official rolls.” The ninety days that the Dawes Commission had to decide applications under the 1896 act had, of course, long since elapsed.
The Creeks were overwhelmingly opposed to allotment or any change in the treaty of 1832, which had forced them to move to Indian Territory. One full-blood expressed a common sentiment when he told a Senate investigating committee that “I love my treaty, and I want my old treaty back.”(21) He went on to say that “I will never stop asking for this treaty, the old treaty that our fathers made with the Government which gave us this land forever … as long as the grass grows, water runs, and the sun rises.”(22)
At a meeting held in Okmulgee on April 3, 1894, the commissioners explained at great length to a crowd of nearly three thousand (mostly full-bloods) all of the benefits allotment would bring, but the entire group “voted” against the plan.(23)
What can you do when you “discover” a continent, but there are already people living there? Europeans arriving in North America tried a number of approaches to solve what was often referred to as “the Indian Problem,” depending on the relative military power of the natives and non-natives.
The criteria for citizenship is that you must trace back to a direct ancestor listed on the 1906 Dawes Roll by issuance of birth and/or death certificates.
The criteria for citizenship is that you must trace back to a direct ancestor listed on the 1906 Dawes Roll by issuance of birth and/or death certificates.
Overview of the Creek Indian Tribe
22 ViewsThe Creek Indians were a confederation of tribes that belonged primarily to the Muskhogean linguistic group, which also included the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Muskogees were the dominant tribe of the confederacy, but all members eventually came to be known collectively as Creek Indians.
At present, the Poarch Creek Indian Tribal Roll is open for membership only if the following conditions are met.
The records relating to the Creek Indians are actually records of a number of different Indian tribes who belonged to confederacy of which the Muskoke or Creek (as they were called by the Europeans) were the principal power. The confederacy included various Muscogee people such as the Okfuskee, Otciapofa, Abikha, Okchai, Hilibi, Fus-hatchee, Tulsa, Coosa, as well as the Alabama, Natchez, Koasati and possibly some Shawnee who settled among them.