There's a huge amount of misunderstanding about the Dawes Rolls, but one important thing to recall is this: although allotment was forced on the Five Tribes, our base rolls were assembled in large part through prior rolls and records already assembled *by* the Tribes.

This was a huge point of contention in the early allotment roll negotiations, as some of the Five Tribes withheld their records or made access difficult. But eventually, when it was clear it was going to happen one way or another, they insisted that their own records be central.

The Dawes process was horrible in myriad ways. But trashing the Final Rolls as a wholly colonial imposition ignores that our Nations FOUGHT LIKE HELL to ensure that our own archive serve as the foundation for citizenship and land distribution under excruciating circumstances.

And yes, we know the Rolls are problematic, and complicated, and exclusionary, but they're also an incredibly dense and inclusive archive that requires a lot of nuance and care to understand, both in their exclusions and their inclusions. And each of the Five Tribes is different.

But blanket dismissals of the Rolls are historically and culturally ill-informed, and simplistically treating them as nothing other than evidence of assimilation does a huge disservice to the decades-long efforts of the Five Tribes to salvage something of kin and land ties.

Projecting other nations' experiences onto that of the Five Tribes is dangerous, and vice versa. And for all their connections, each of the Five Tribes's experiences and archives is different, too--you have to deal with specificities in these contexts.

But the history, contexts, and function of the Dawes Rolls are incredibly complicated, and those complications are vitally important for understanding contemporary Five Tribes kinship, identity, and nationhood. If you don't know the archive, proceed with caution.

This thread isn't to support or challenge anyone's citizenship or claims to such. It's simply to say that the Dawes Rolls are much more than just a colonial record, and that there are important albeit complex reasons why the Five Tribes use them for a base citizenship record.

These rolls, like all such documents, can be tools as well as weapons, and for both benevolent and malevolent purpose. But they're not just uniformly colonial documents. To make that claim is to ignore the efforts of the Five Tribes to grapple with their content and implications.

We need to dispense with the ahistorical narrative that the Five Tribes somehow "sold out" by utilizing the Rolls. Our ancestors worked under unbelievable threat to ensure their accuracy to the best of their ability and resources. For all the problems, that deserves respect.

And whether or not the Dawes Rolls are important is an argument for Five Tribes-connected folks to make, not for citizens of other Native Nations or non-Natives. We know they're not perfect, but they're certainly better than a lot of outside commentary would indicate.

If you don't like the way we do things or have concerns, that's fine. But at least do us the courtesy of understanding the *why* of these things and what thinking went into them, now and in the past, before shitting on the hard and scary work our Nations undertook to survive.

There are terrible aspects of that story, especially the attacks on Freedmen's citizenship rights and anti-Black bigotry that continues. But Freedmen voices speak powerfully in the Dawes records too, articulating kinship as well as vital critique, and that bears remembering.

The Rolls reveal a lot of bigotry and exclusion, along with resistance, refusal, and relationality. It's not an easy archive or history, nor are their continuing legacies; they're messy and challenging and complicated...just like our Nations were then, and just like they are now.