Tribal Government Records

By Anonymous on Sat, 10/24/2015 - 19:53

Forums

Hello,

To give a little background, the Chickasaw Nation kept its own records for each county and on a national level between 1854 until the early 1890s. At that time, the Dawes Commission decided they needed these records from the tribes to help determine citizenship for the rolls. So they took them and put them in a closet in Muskogee, Oklahoma when they finished with them. Someone found them and had them moved. At some point someone re-arranged the original volumes by subject and county. Then the Federal Government decided that the Oklahoma Historical Society should house the original records. In the 1970s, the Indian Archives Division of the OHS put them on microfilm. The Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur has a copy of this publication. They made digital images. One CD has 3 rolls on it. They made me a copy of the CD with CKN 9, 10 & 11. Now I want to cite it.

I'm lost. I don't think I can cite the original volumes because they are not in the original order so the page numbers would be off. I used digital images on a CD so I think I should cite that because that's what I used, but it's not a published CD. I started to use the QC Model for Local & State Records Courts & Governance CD-ROM, but then I got stumped on the publication title. Most of my research is in Chickasaw Nation during this time period so I use several different volumes.

I'm not even going to attempt a ciation. I've attached the two title pages (The first one is for the microfilm publication "Roll CKN 10" and the second one is for Volume 53) and the image of the information I need to cite (the CD-ROM is broken down into 3 file folders, CKN 9, CKN 10 & CKN 11, I'm using CKN 10, Image 347, handwritten "P19," title at the top of the page says, "Permits"). I'm citing a permit for a U.S. Citizen to work in the Chickasaw Nation for a Chickasaw citizen.

Please point me in the right direction. 

Submitted bykatidid19on Sat, 10/24/2015 - 19:56

Just to clarify, these are not U.S. Government records in any way, but ownship. These records were created by the Chickasaw Nation Govenment for their own purposes and the only microfilm publication was made by the Indian Archives Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society. 

Submitted byEEon Sun, 10/25/2015 - 15:37

Katidid, you've turned up a doozie. Let's see if we can't strip the problem down to basics, starting with this question: How is this set of records cataloged at OHS?

Submitted bykatidid19on Sun, 10/25/2015 - 17:31

I can't seem to find how the microfilm is cataloged, but the originals and copies of the originals are under the Indian Archives. 1860 - 1930. Then to find Volume 53 it says, Series 2. Chickasaw Nation, Series 3. Bound Volumes, Oversize Box 38. Pickens County Permits and Probate Record. 1801-1872.

Some information at the top says, "Materials from this collection are recalled by the Record Group title and box number, for example: Cherokee Nation Records, Box 6. Courts, January, 1875-August, 1878, Doc. No. 523-533."

Submitted byEEon Mon, 10/26/2015 - 11:48

Katidid, my own efforts to find clear cataloging data were also fruitless. I could find catalog entries that fit parts of the data appearing on the title page to your microfilm, but the rest of the data would be contradictory.

In cases such as this, the safest thing to do is simply use what's on that title page.  That title page states that it is published film. There are numerous examples of citing published film through EE, starting with 3.18. They all follow one basic premise: published microfilm is cited like a published book or a published CD, etc. The basic elements are these:

Creator, Title of Publication (Place of publication: Publisher, Date), specific item.

If the publication we are citing is a multivolume work, then each volume might have a distinct subtitle. That seems to be the situation here. EE 12.71 “Multivolume Works: Different Subtitles” provides an example for that.  Following it, we would have this:

Indian Archives Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Chickasaw National Records, roll CKN 10, County Court Records, Panola County 1878–1894, Chickasaw Volumes 66 and 65; Pickens and Wichita Counties, 1849–1881, Chickasaw Volumes 53, 60, and 54 (Oklahoma City: OHS,  1977), item No. 9, Y. Green employed by Mrs. Frances Chockrain, Pickens Co., 13 January 1870.

Two caveats apply:

  • Citations to multivolume (or multiroll) works conventionally state the number of volumes or rolls. In this case, we don't have cataloging data to tell us that.
  • What you've imaged seems to be a snippet from a fuller page. I can't tell whether that page carries its own page number. If so, that would need to be cited. From what you've provided, the only locational element that's visible is that "No. 9." Not knowing whether other "No. 9" entries appear (as when, for example, entries are arranged in chronological order and numbers are repeated each year), I've added a brief description of the item and the date. Because the volume covers several counties and the specific item is from a specific county, that county is also included in the descriptor.

Yes, it is a snippet from one image. Image 347. You would definitely need to include the image number. On the CD, there are three folders, "9," "10" and "11." Each folder contains anywhere from 500 to 900 images. The images are usually of two pages and sometimes there are page numbers that are original, sometimes there are page numbers that you can tell are not original and sometimes there aren't any. Also, some of the Volume title pages say, "pages x to x not filmed, appear later in series with related subject matter." I wouldn't use the page numbers. Here's a link to a Catalog type thing that might help:

http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/microfilmarchives.pdf