United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indian enrollment requirements

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The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians was organized under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936.

Blood quantum

The Keetoowah Band requires 1/4 degree of “Old Settler”/Keetoowah Cherokee blood.

“Old Settlers”: there is a legal definition of who was an “old settler.”

This group was composed of those Cherokee who removed to what is now Arkansas under the treaties of 1817 and 1819. They settled between the Arkansas and White Rivers, west of a line from current Batesville to a spot about midway between today’s Conway and Morrilton. There was no western boundary established. 

Since “Old Settlers” implies a certain identifiable group, one is able to look at two census rolls to determine whether an ancestor was a member: the Emigration Roll of 1817, and the Old Settler Roll of 1851. The first lists those Cherokee chose to emigrate to Arkansas Territory under the two treaties above. 

The second includes those among this group who were still living in 1851, and who were residing in what is now Oklahoma when the main body of Cherokee arrived there in 1839. Those on the 1851 census who enrolled under the Dawes Commission retained their citizenship. Others did not. Only those on the 1817 Emigration roll and the 1851 Old Settler roll are actually “old settlers,” all of whom resided in what is now Arkansas between 1817 and about 1840.