It’s Complicated: Anti-Blackness, Freedmen Citizenship, and the Fight to Protect Tribal Sovereignty

Photo of enrollment of citizens outside Dawes Commission Tents, Choctaw Nation, 1899, Phillips Collection, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. 

By: Olivia Tencer

In 2021, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation made public statements to address their long standing policies of denying tribal citizenship to Freedmen and their descendants. Choctaw Chief Gary Batton published an open letter on July 1st, 2021, stating that this is a “critical juncture in both tribal and American history” (Batton, 2021). Since February 2021, the Cherokee Nation has taken out the “by-blood” stipulation in their constitution, initially approved by two-thirds of the voters after a ratification election on March 3, 2007. This amendment requiring “Indian blood” for tribal citizenship put the citizenship rights of 2,800 African American tribal members into question (Tayac, 2009, p 121). 

The decision to include Freedmen and their descendants as tribal members is complicated for the “Five Civilized Tribes” (Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles), who held nearly 10,000 Black slaves in bondage between the late 1700s and the end of the Civil War (Tayac, 2009, p. 149).  These decisions have led to questions pertaining to tribal membership, sovereignty, Native identity, and Black-Native solidarity that should continue to be explored by scholars and researchers alike. Jesse T. Schreier, Assistant Professor of History at the Community College of Baltimore County-Catonsville asks: “if Indians accept even a small number of Freedmen as citizens, will Indian groups begin to be viewed as Black rather than Indian by the U.S. government, thereby threatening their federal status as an Indian tribe?” (Schreier, 2011, p. 479). 

Settler colonialism, as defined generally by myself and other scholars, is the destruction and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and the subjugation and forced labor of chattel African slaves for the purposes of resettlement and financial capital through resource extraction. Settler colonialism uses Euro-American ideas of racialization and racial codes to define and categorize Indigeneity and Blackness in opposing ways. The one-drop-rule, codified by several U.S. states in the 20th century, ensured that any amount of African ancestry, despite phenotype, determines Blackness, therefore making Blackness expansive and inherited. Policies and practices of blood quantum, adopted by both state, federal, and tribal legislation, have been used strategically to make Native Americans disappear generationally, making Indigeneity or Native-ness subtractive and individuals “less Native” over time – but never truly white (Tuck & Yang, 2012). An increase in the Black slave population and the gradual “disappearance” of Native people were consistent with the goals of increasing white property (Nakano Glenn, 2015). In this short essay, I examine brief histories of the Choctaw and Cherokee tribes prior to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. to contextualize current day issues pertaining to Black-Native identity and solidarity. The narrative that Blackness and Indigeneity exist solely in opposition is complicated by shared histories and experiences that have been deeply interwoven since the beginning of settler contact. 

Tiya Miles, American historian and Professor of history at Harvard University, challenges the Black and white racial narrative of slavery. Native peoples owned, sold, and worked slaves in the Southeast and western parts of Indian Territory. While the practice of slaveholding varied between tribes, the Choctaws and Cherokees were known for developing harsh and controlled systems of slavery. Miles emphasizes that Native people were also slaves, despite misperceptions that often erase this history. Prominent Native author Vine Deloria Jr. writes in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto that “it is fortunate that we [Native people] were never slaves. We gave up land instead of life and labor” (Miles, 2019, p. 123). However, before 1715, 30,000 to 50,000 southern Indians were captured, sold, and enslaved by the English colonies alone. Miles argues that while is important to confront the realities of Black slavery in Native nations, it is equally as important to recognize the “much longer period” that African Americans, Afro-Indians, and Native peoples were enslaved together between the mid-sixteenth and early-nineteenth-centuries (Tayac, 2009, 140 & 149). While slaveholding was a way for Native nations to show civilization and protect them from forced removal and dispossession, the practice of slavery was not enough to ensure tribal sovereignty, as tribes were continuously forced west with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 (Miles, 2019).

In Schreier’s work, questions of identity and belonging are central to the experiences of Freedmen and Freedwomen. The decennial U.S. Bureau of Census’ accounting of the U.S. population was used to determine how political power would be apportioned to states and who would be taxed. Angela A. Gonzales, Associate Professor at Arizona State University writes, “the U.S. census, rather than serving as a passive instrument of data gathering, has long encoded and enforced an understanding of identity and difference through a pseudoscience of race” (Tayac, 2009, p. 58). In 1883, the U.S. federal government forced the Choctaw Nation to make a roll of its members (Schreier, 2019). The Choctaw Nation chose to use race to determine citizenship without explicit guidance from the federal government to do so. The nation placed former Choctaw slaves and their descendants on separate rolls from the Choctaw citizens. At the end of the 19th century, the 1893 Dawes Commission negotiated the end of tribal government for the “Five Civilized Tribes” and began to allot their tribal land. After the Civil War, some free African people and their descendants were given land as reparation to further expand the settlement of Native land and ensure dispossession indefinitely (Tuck & Yang, 2012). 

Despite racial codes, Black and Native people have had children together throughout history. By excluding people of African descent on the Choctaw rolls, the Choctaw government forced people of mixed descent, sometimes referred to as “Black Indians,” to be identified by their Blackness over their Native-ness. In a later census, previous Black and Native Choctaw members were crossed out, with the hand written notions “no good, negro”, “mother negro”, and “hatak lusa mohola” (stricken from the rolls, black person) (Schreier, 2011, p. 468). Gonzales writes that while the census gives legitimacy to racial categories, the census is ‘not merely a means of making society “legible,” but the census also provides the “authoritative tune to which most of the population must dance”’ (Tayac, 2009, p. 67). The census solidified the binary of Freedmen vs. by-blood and the “Black-Indian” became an impossible category to exist in. Native nations became legible to colonizers through the adoption of anti-Black racism and racial codes.

Similar to the Choctaws, the Cherokee Nation also enslaved African peoples and their descendants, and asked similar questions in regards to the tribal membership of Cherokee Freedmen. During the 1700s, the Cherokee began to strategically self-segregate from Black people. In 1730, the Treaty of Dover with Britain wrote into law that the Cherokees would be slave catchers in exchange for tribal sovereignty and protection from further settler encroachment. In the 1900s, with the further adoption of European racial hierarchies, the Cherokee made it illegal for Cherokee and Black people to marry (Miles, 2015). 

After the American Revolution, the 1791 Treaty of Holston between the Cherokees and the U.S. pushed the Cherokees to adopt Euro-American racial values. The U.S. encouraged Cherokee farmers to own Black slaves (Miles, 2015, p. 39). The Cherokee Republic of 1820 sought to preserve Cherokee independence by legislating the subordinate status of Black people. By regulating racial categories in the tribe, the Cherokees solidified their identity as a sovereign republic. With the Cherokee constitution of 1827, descendants of both Cherokee and Black people would not be considered Cherokee citizens. In 1838, the Cherokees’ new Treaty of Echota and the Indian Removal Act forced them to abandon their homelands for land west of the Mississippi. The removal of the Cherokee further damaged the bonds and ties of connection between the Cherokee and their Black slaves (Miles, 2015, p. 161). 

With the beginning of the American Civil War, confederate states pressured Native nations to make alliances with them as they ‘shared a culture as fellow slaveholders,’ and were promised sovereignty should they win the war. Confederate states framed the liberation of African slaves and the self-determination of Cherokee people in opposition to one another. While some Cherokee allied with the Confederacy, more Cherokee fought with the Union, and less than two percent of Cherokees were slave owners (Tayac, 2009, p. 124). In 1863, the Cherokees were forced to free all slaves, and with the new Treaty of 1866 the Cherokee accepted all former slaves as full citizens. Whether or not the Cherokee were forced or punished by accepting their former slaves as citizens is unclear. Author Clarissa Confer discovered that no states in the slaveholding South were required to “treat [their former slaves] as citizens” (Tayac, 2009, p. 124). The question then becomes whether treating someone as a citizen and granting them citizenship are one and the same.  In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) to dissolve tribes and foster assimilation. Landholdings were allocated to those on the Dawes Rolls determined to be tribal members, organized by racial designation (Schreier, 2011).

Cherokee and Choctaw tribal membership was reduced to official rolls. By 1907, the tribal rolls became the basis of tribal identity and therefore “recordable, predictable, and legible” to the U.S. federal government (Schreier, 2011, p. 478). These tribal rolls, in conjunction with blood quantum rules, determined tribal membership for many federally recognized tribes and are still being used today. Yet, those who marry out of the tribe and have children and those who descend from Freedmen are often ineligible for membership. The realities of how blood quantum rules affect tribal enrollment is of great concern for many tribes whose tribal membership populations are already declining. 

In 1983, the Choctaw Nation voted to disenfranchise and expel all Freedmen not related to Choctaw citizens by blood from the nation. Today, Choctaw Freedmen and their descendants without proof of direct lineage from a Native person on the final Choctaw Dawes Rolls are not given citizenship rights (Herrera, 2021). 

Theda Perdue, Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writes that racism learned by Native peoples in their struggle for sovereignty is a direct consequence of Native people and African Americans not joining together to battle Jim Crow America. For Perdue, this lack of solidarity was provoked by the joint classification of Native peoples and African Americans as colored and subsequent Native resistance of being categorized as such (Tayac, 2009, p. 33).

 After a 2017 federal court decision, the Cherokee Nation recognized Freedmen and their descendants as Cherokee citizens, extinguishing the term “by-blood” in their constitution (Oaster, 2021). According to author Dan Agent, the Cherokee Nation is now the first tribe to be forced to accept non-Indians as citizens (Tayac, 2009, p. 126). While Agent argues that Cherokee blood is what “powers the hearts and minds and sustains the culture of the Cherokee people”, Professor Daniel Littlefield from the University of South Carolina argues that the justification to “oust” the Cherokee Freedmen in 2007 due to their lack of blood quantum is explicitly rooted in the racism of the 19th century to determine “which Cherokee citizens would be the first to lose their land to white buyers” (Tayac, 2009, p. 126 & 130-131). Prior to the 2017 decision, Professor Littlefield warned that by attempting to nullify or amend the Treaty of 1866 or Article 9, in which Freedmen are granted citizenship, the Cherokee Nation could potentially jeopardize its sovereignty —  the sovereignty of a multiracial nation (including Shawnees, Delawares, Freedmen, and intermarried whites) whose citizenship was based on either blood or adoption since 1866 (Tayac, 2009, p. 131 & 129). 

The Choctaw and the Muscogee (Creek) do not recognize Freedmen as citizens of their tribes, and today, descendants of Choctaw and Creek Freedmen continue to fight for their place in the tribe, tribes that their descendants were enslaved by and have now been a part of for generations. Many of these individuals are also Black-Native peoples whose identities are often contested and miscategorized by the U.S. government and the tribal communities they are a part of. While white supremacy and settler colonialism are pervasive in the United States, there is much to heal in terms of Native-Black solidarity and kinship. During Black History Month and every month, we should continue to learn and question how anti-Blackness affects tribes, how ongoing settler colonialism divides Black and Native people by putting Blackness and Indigeneity in opposition to one another, and how the settler colonial regime, while chattel slavery is now abolished, continues to criminalize Black bodies and life and dispossess Native people of their land and lifeways to ensure a white settler future. 

Bibliography:

Batton, Chief Gary. “CNO Launches Initiative to Consider Tribal Membership for Freedmen.” Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, July 1, 2021. https://www.choctawnation.com/biskinik/cno-launches-initiative-to-consider-tribal-membership-for-freedmen/.

Cameron, Chris, and Mark Walker. “Tribes to Confront Bias Against Descendants of Enslaved People.” The New York Times, May 28, 2021, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/us/politics/freedmen-citizenship.html.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (January 2015): 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214560440.

Goldblatt, Laura. “Review of ‘The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies’ by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press).” Lateral 9, no. 2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.25158/L9.2.8.

Herrera, Allison. “Q&A: Choctaw Nation Chief Gary Batton On Freedmen Citizenship.” KOSU NPR, September 21, 2021. https://www.kosu.org/local-news/2021-09-21/interview-choctaw-nation-chief-gary-batton-talks-about-freedmen-citizenship.

Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. 2nd ed. University of California Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt19631rc.

———. “Uncle Tom Was an Indian: TRACING THE RED IN BLACK SLAVERY.” In Relational Formations of Race, edited by Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, 1st ed., 121–44. Theory, Method, and Practice. University of California Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvcwp0dz.13.

Oaster, B. ‘Toastie.’ “What Tribal Sovereignty Means for Freedmen Citizenship.” High Country News, March 3, 2021. https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribes-what-tribal-sovereignty-means-for-freedmen-citizenship.

Schreier, Jesse T. “Indian or Freedman?: Enrollment, Race, and Identity in the Choctaw Nation, 1896-1907.” Western Historical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (2011): 458–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.42.4.0459.

Tayac, Gabrielle, ed. IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. Smithsonian Books, 2009.

Tuck, Eve, and K Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.