What this is — and what it isn't

The records, returned to usefulness

The Dawes enrollment records of the Five Civilized Tribes sit in the public domain, digitized and hand-transcribed by the U.S. National Archives and its partners — but locked behind exact-match searches and paywalled mirrors. We took NARA's own transcriptions of the original census cards and made them genuinely searchable: 181,629 people — enrollees, applicants who never received a roll number, and the parents named on every card — in a search that forgives spelling and shows families together, with every record linked to its original documents.

Method, in the open

• Sources: NARA Record Group 75 — Enrollment Cards M1186 and Applications for Enrollment M1301 — all U.S. public domain, accessed through NARA's published bulk catalog data.
• The Archives' words, verbatim: every name, age, sex, blood degree, roll number, and post office comes from NARA's own transcription of the card. We never guess: where a value has not been transcribed, the field stays blank and the record links to the card image instead. Machine-read text appears only in clearly labeled, collapsed "card text" sections — never as data.
• Provenance everywhere: every record view shows its NARA identifiers (NAIDs) and links to the original scans on catalog.archives.gov. We host no scans.
• Known limits, stated: NARA's transcription of the cards is ongoing — roughly half the cards have full person lists so far, and untranscribed cards appear here by card number and link only. Ages are as written on the census card (recorded at application), which can sit a few years below the age printed on the final roll. The original document always outranks our index — that's why every entry links to it.

Our commitments

• Living nations, present tense. Every nation we cover — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole; the Navajo, Hopi and Apache; the Lakota, Dakota, Comanche, Kiowa and Osage; the Ojibwe and the Haudenosaunee — is here now. Our content treats them that way.
• Nothing sacred, nothing restricted. We publish only public, educational material — historical federal records and publicly shared knowledge.
• No authority claimed. Native Past is not affiliated with or endorsed by any tribal government. Citizenship and enrollment are determined solely by the nations themselves. A record here is a starting point for research, never proof of eligibility, and we decline to frame it otherwise.
• Respect for painful records. These documents record a coercive process, racialized categories, and family separations. We keep the original wording — labeled as historical — and present it with context rather than nostalgia.
• Corrections welcome. When nations, descendants, or researchers point out errors, we fix them and say so.

The apps

Native Past for iOS and Android teaches the history, stories, and living languages of 15 Native nations — short illustrated chapters and gentle language lessons, fully offline, with sources cited on every item. This records search ships in the apps too, alongside a private on-device space for your own family documents and family tree. More about the app →

Required notice

This product uses the National Archives Catalog API but is not endorsed or certified by the National Archives and Records Administration.