After entanglement came enumeration. Once African and Indigenous lives had become interwoven through kinship, labor, and survival, the United States increasingly worked to redefine identity through records. Belonging was no longer shaped by community recognition or lineage alone. It was filtered through federal documentation.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government introduced enrollment systems meant to dismantle communal landholding and reshape tribal citizenship. Among the most consequential were the Dawes Rolls, which classified members of the Five Civilized Tribes for allotment. These rolls did not simply record identity. They decided it.
Families were divided into categories such as “by blood,” “freedmen,” and “intermarried,” often based on appearance, rumor, local testimony, or the judgment of federal enumerators. African ancestry was frequently used to justify separation, even when Indigenous lineage was known and affirmed within the community. Once written into the rolls, these classifications carried lasting legal and political consequences.
This process marked a shift from lived entanglement to bureaucratic exclusion. Kinship recognized by community could be overridden by paperwork. Identity could be diminished without physical removal. The record became the authority.
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