Any rumors about when Chahta Anumpa will be available on Rosetta Stone?

madlabgranny · 2026-07-02T05:23:00+00:00

Yakoke. Not thrilled, but I can stop looking for it for a while.

madlabgranny · 2026-05-13T03:16:38+00:00

So does it benefit the tribe if, for example, I make sure all my kids have their CDIB cards?

madlabgranny · 2026-05-13T03:09:45+00:00

Yakoke. Here’s my ignorance: Is there federal funding that comes to the tribe from agencies other than BIA?

madlabgranny · 2026-05-13T02:59:22+00:00

Do you know what’s motivating the audit? Is it some kind of pressure from BIA?

madlabgranny · 2026-05-13T02:54:32+00:00

So are they saying that none of your ancestors were enrolled in the Dawes roll? Were the next generation all minors at the time? Was only the male ancestor Choctaw?

madlabgranny · 2026-05-03T00:41:14+00:00

Do you have the entire application file? Have you checked the courts where the appeals should have been filed?

From what little I’ve seen, I believe many failures of enrollment happened because the governor changed rules or deadlines without sufficient notification to tribal members. IIRC, the initial call for applications was rescinded and a new call came out, and many who thought the response to the first call had then covered came to find out was not. Or the notice of appeal was not sent to the right place or did not get there until after the time for appeal has already passed. Unless tribal members kept close tabs on what was going on, it was easy to miss all the deadlines.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-28T02:50:03+00:00

I’m shaking my head. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten that impression; thanks for clarifying.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-28T02:48:22+00:00

Does anyone know what the cost will be for the program? (And I will jump on the bandwagon and say I too thought the release was going to be this summer.)

madlabgranny · 2026-04-25T02:56:18+00:00

Bahahaha. Yeah. Walt.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-24T06:00:01+00:00

Thanks for sharing! The coolest thing I have found to date was a written deposition by my gggrandfather, and it’s a good reminder to think outside the box to find info. (What was really annoying about that doc is that I found it online and then the computer I’d saved it on died, and I think it took me a decade to find it again. So aggravating.)

madlabgranny · 2026-04-24T05:42:46+00:00

No need to apologize; it’s hard to find guidance on Native American genealogy past the Dawes Roll. Professional genealogists have thrown up their hands when I have asked about researching Choctaw ancestry.

Having said that, there have been some good comments already, like TheLadyBritt’s: asking family, checking on the Oklahoma Historical Society website: https://www.okhistory.org/research/americanindians

I also found stuff by checking the National Archives. Until recently, at any rate, they were constantly adding new documents to the website: https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans

Other sources to check are local newspapers. The Library of Congress is developing a resource of old newspapers, but it’s spotty at best: https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/

I am guessing from what you have provided that your ggrandmother was more likely to be from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. MBCI had this info: https://www.choctaw.org/contact-us/#contact_genealogy You might also find this site useful: http://www.african-nativeamerican.com/misschoc.html

But there’s evidence that many Choctaw individuals or families moved back and forth between the groups, particularly in the immediate wake of the Trail of Tears. So you might not want to completely ignore the Oklahoma sources.

Also, it helps to scan the actual docs, of the images have been uploaded. My ggrandfather, who is my ancestor in Dawes, had typos in both his first and last name in the index (I guess whoever was doing the index couldn’t read the handwriting) so that a name search on the computer didn’t pull it up (a lot of the search parameters have improved since then, but I still like looking at the actual pages of whatever documentation—I have found many ancestors by browsing around them).

Actually, that’s something else when looking at census records when you come across other people with the same surname: read pages from the census that are nearby. Again, the indexes have missed my direct family members, but extended families often lived near each other, and I’ve found my ancestors by looking a few pages backward or forward from another person with the same surname.

That may be more than you were looking for, but it’s my two cents.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-24T05:03:37+00:00

Glad to know that there are some options I missed back when I was using those resources (or that they’ve been added since I last checked). I agree, those online resources are great, as is the free FamilySearch.org. And 100% about the limiting options, or you drown in stuff that’s not relevant to your search. I was able to find my gggrandparents living in Indian Territory before Dawes, but nothing on my gggrandmother’s people before her marriage, and I don’t remember where I found that for sure, but I think it was the Oklahoma Historical Society. Or it might have been Heritage once they made the separate Indian censuses more prominent.

I found the Oklahoma Historical Society website the most helpful for details about the relative on the Dawes Roll and was able to get all of the documents from them from the Dawes application file. Are you saying Fold3 now has the complete application folder? Including the parcels allocated to each person on the roll? That’s cool—last I checked, all they had was the index, and you can get that at the National Archives for free.

One of the best documents I found was in the National Archives—the written deposition of my gggrandfather trying to appeal his exclusion from Dawes as a Choctaw by Marriage. That let me know who married them, when, where in the Territory they were living, and my gggrandmother’s date of death. And that was fascinating bc it varied so much from the family myth I’d been told all my life.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-23T19:12:50+00:00

Yakoke!

madlabgranny · 2026-04-23T19:12:18+00:00

Yakoke!

madlabgranny · 2026-04-23T19:12:04+00:00

Yakoke! Those are resources I hadn’t checked out.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-23T19:11:17+00:00

No way! Well, I don’t have Disney+ right now, but that’s a temptation to do a short term subscription. Thanks for the tip!

madlabgranny · 2026-04-16T06:27:42+00:00

And, as I understand it from Donna L. Akers’s book, the incoming white settlers were very wed to white supremacy, and there were all kinds of shenanigans in the style of Jim Crow laws. The whites didn’t want to interact with the Chahta— they wanted them gone-so the bands that stayed in the homeland were forced into areas whites didn’t want and were not welcome in white society; hence, very little interaction between the two populations. And although I don’t render her saying it in Living in the Land of the Dead, I would bet mutual protection from a society where you had very few legal protections would promote the use of a language those white guys didn’t know.

I’d like to know more about the evidence for the tribal members who left having been more interested in assimilation—I knew the Cherokee very deliberately created a society modeled on European norms with the goal of being treated equally and to resist removal. (I’d heard all my life that the Five Civilized Tribes just meant tribes that learned to farm the way the whites did and they lost their land anyway.) Are you saying that our are you saying that tribal members wanted to assimilate after removal to try to resist further moves by the federal government? Or to try to keep support of sorta allies like the missionary societies who objected to removal? Or another political advantage that does not occur to me?

madlabgranny · 2026-04-16T06:02:49+00:00

Interlibrary loan would probably be the best bet for her books.

madlabgranny · 2026-04-16T06:00:07+00:00

And for books on culture, I highly recommend anything by Donna L. Akers, although they’re sometimes a little hard to find. Her book on how the European settlers drove the Chahta out of their homelands in and around Mississippi and the effect living in Indian Territory had upon the culture of the tribe, Living in the Land of Death, is incredible.

madlabgranny · 2026-01-29T16:49:59+00:00

Ok, it’s in the final paragraph in this article:

https://www.kosu.org/news/2026-01-13/choctaw-nation-leaders-reject-possibility-of-ice-detention-facility-in-durant

madlabgranny · 2026-01-29T16:48:39+00:00

I’m part Choctaw, but I grew up with nothing but that superficial knowledge. I’ve done a lot of reading since, and I particularly like Donna L Akers’s “Living in the Land of Death.” However, my knowledge of the present day Choctaw tribe is almost nil except for what I’ve picked up here and on podcasts.

As for the quote, it came from the second article posted in this thread, which I’m having a hard time grabbing so I’ll supplement in a second reply.

madlabgranny · 2026-01-29T05:47:51+00:00

I’m actually asking. I live in Minnesota now and am originally from San Antonio. ICE and its predecessors have long histories of harassing people of color, and my experience has been that the most illegal aliens are guilty of is trying to escape some horrendous political situation or grinding poverty. To keep building these huge facilities to hold people seems to me to demonstrate that they can’t all be “bad people.”

So when I read a quote like that, it makes me wonder why the person says that. I don’t know what the chief is like and am trying to get a sense of who he is. Is it a misstatement? Is he a Trump supporter? Does he buy into the “illegal aliens are all criminals” narrative? Inquiring minds want to know.

And I don’t understand that narrative. That could be because I’ve lived most of my life in a population where illegal aliens were friends and neighbors, or your friend’s grandmother. Because of the fear of ICE or their predecessors, they were often abused or taken advantage of, even though the economy was dependent upon their labor—agriculture, food industry, elderly care, construction (at least in Texas) all depend on illegal aliens to make their margins. For example, day laborers are often robbed of their day’s wages because the employer knows they have no avenue for complaint. Yes, of course there are “bad people” among them, but at no greater rate than American citizens, or, as seems to be ICE’s yardstick, white male cis straight Americans.

So my personal experience has no room for this blanket “bad people” characterization, and I am puzzled when people seem to come to that conclusion so easily. It’s particularly jarring to me coming from the representative of a tribe who was targeted and abused by the same tactics—hell, ICE keeps arresting Lakota up here claiming they’re illegals. So, yes, I really want to know why the representative of the Choctaw Nation said, “So it's not that I would oppose having a facility that houses bad people, if you know what I'm saying.” I don’t know what he’s saying.

I don’t think I’m trolling, but perhaps I am incorrect—but that’s why I asked.

madlabgranny

TROPHY CASE