NY Times, Sept. 8, 2020, 3:00 a.m. ET
Black, Native American and Fighting for Recognition in Indian Country
By Jack Healy
OKMULGEE, Okla. — Ron Graham never had to prove to anyone that he was
Black. But he has spent more than 30 years haunting tribal offices and
genealogical archives, fighting for recognition that he is also a
citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
“We’re African-American,” Mr. Graham, 55, said. “But we’re Native
American also.”
His family history is part of a little-known saga of bondage, blood and
belonging within tribal nations, one that stretches from the Trail of
Tears to this summer of uprisings in America’s streets over racial
injustice.
His ancestors are known as Creek Freedmen. They were among the thousands
of African-Americans who were once enslaved by tribal members in the
South and who migrated to Oklahoma when the tribes were forced off their
homelands and marched west in the 1830s.
In treaties signed after the Civil War, they won freedom and were
promised tribal citizenship and an equal stake in the tribes’ lands and
fortunes. But what followed were broken promises, exclusions and painful
fights over whether tens of thousands of their descendants should now be
recognized as tribal members.
Some of the descendants have won lawsuits seeking inclusion in the
Cherokee Nation. Some gained nominal citizenship as Seminoles, but said
they could not access tribal services. Others, like Mr. Graham, have
nothing.
But now, a landmark Supreme Court decision for tribal sovereignty has
breathed new life into their fight.
In July, the Supreme Court recognized a huge portion of eastern Oklahoma
as reservation land under the terms of an 1866 treaty. The same treaty
also guaranteed that freed slaves and their descendants would “have and
enjoy all the rights and privileges of native citizens.”
To groups of their descendants, the logic was simple: If the United
States still had to honor treaty promises it made to tribal nations,
then tribal nations had to keep their word to the descendants of those
formerly enslaved by the tribes.
“We’re making noise,” said Marilyn Vann, a Cherokee citizen and
president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes.
Ms. Vann estimated that there was a diaspora of some 160,000 descendants
of those formerly enslaved by the tribes, many of them living in
Oklahoma. There are groups representing descendants from each of the
five tribes who meet to share sepia photographs of ancestors, compare
genealogical records and plan protests.
Ms. Vann added: “There are chiefs who’d like to get rid of what they
think of as the Freedmen problem. We have our rights.”
Now, as they file lawsuits in federal and tribal courts, they say they
are fighting for tribal benefits including access to jobs, health care
at tribal clinics and hospitals, housing, scholarship funds for their
children and the right to vote in tribal elections. But also for
something more fundamental: “My identity,” Mr. Graham said.
In a statement, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation said that the issue of the
status of the descendants of enslaved people raised thorny questions
about tribal citizenship that “cut to the core of self-determination.”
They said the tribes had fundamental rights to run their own governments
and decide for themselves who qualifies as a citizen. Some said that a
reconciliation commission would be a better way to resolve the issue,
rather than an edict from Congress.
“Many of our citizens feel that identity is at the heart of this issue
and that blood lineage is essential to protecting it,” the Muscogee
Nation said. “But, on the other hand, the grave injustice done to the
slaves owned by some Creeks has to be acknowledged and discussed.”
The fight is unfolding as Oklahoma grapples with another bloody chapter
of its history: A white mob’s massacre and destruction of a thriving
Black neighborhood in Tulsa in 1921. Many of the Tulsa victims were
descendants of people formerly enslaved by the tribes, activists say.
This summer, crews excavated a suspected mass burial site searching for
remains, and survivors and descendants of the victims recently sued the
city.
The legacy of anti-Black racism in tribal nations can be a fraught,
uncomfortable topic, one that forces communities who have suffered
centuries of land theft, colonialism and genocide to confront the darker
corners of their own past. Several tribal officials declined interview
requests to discuss the issue.
“When we have that difficult history to deal with, we don’t talk about
it,” said Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. of the Cherokee Nation. About 7,000
descendants of Freedmen were incorporated into the Cherokee Nation after
a federal judge ruled in 2017 that they had tribal citizenship rights.
That history is “a stain on the Cherokee Nation we’ve got to remove,”
the chief said.
Spanish and English colonizers enslaved Native people across the
Americas. But tribes in Alabama, Georgia and Florida also adopted the
practice themselves, enslaving African-Americans to work on cotton
plantations and in homes. When the United States government forcibly
removed the Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Muscogee people
to Oklahoma, their slaves also made the deadly march or were transported
west in boats, according to historians.
The Civil War and the question of slavery divided tribes, with some
fighting for the Union and other tribal members declaring loyalty to the
Confederacy. Some enslavers retreated to Arkansas or Texas to escape
skirmishes and raids. Black Indians joined the Union or Confederate
armies, and later escaped to freedom in Kansas.
“It’s a history that still divides our citizens over what rights the
descendants of those Freedmen should have, as well as the larger
conversation concerning who is ‘legitimately’ Cherokee,” Rebecca Nagle,
a Cherokee writer and host of the podcast “This Land,” wrote this summer
after the Cherokee Nation removed two Confederate war memorials in
eastern Oklahoma. “We need to do more to confront that history within
our tribe.”
The Freedmen were granted tribal citizenship — and in some cases “an
equal interest in the soil and national funds” of the tribe — in the
treaties that Oklahoma’s tribes signed with the federal government after
the Civil War, in which the tribes were forced to cede huge portions of
their land to the government.
On the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, there were once three “colored” tribal
towns that formed their own small governments. Despite segregation and
racist legal structures, Freedmen served as council members, ministers,
judges. Jesse Franklin, who was born a slave in Alabama in 1817, was
named to the Creek Supreme Court in 1874 — some 93 years before Thurgood
Marshall ascended to the United States Supreme Court.
But their descendants say they were edited out of existence over the
past half-century by tribal constitutions and other laws denying them
citizenship because they were not citizens by blood, or because they or
their ancestors had been placed on a roster of ineligible people when
government agents began sorting Oklahoma’s tribes into “citizens” and
“Freedmen” in the 1890s.
Sharon Lenzy Scott said her mother was stripped of her Creek citizenship
when a new constitution was passed in 1979, and spent the next 20 years
until her death trying to ensure that her family never forgot.
“She called all her children into the living room and said, ‘I’m going
to tell you who you are, and don’t let anyone tell you you’re not,” Ms.
Scott said. “She knew who she was.”
The N.A.A.C.P. has weighed in to support the descendants of those
formerly enslaved by the tribes, and some members of Congress have
proposed legislation that would sever ties between the United States and
the Creek Nation, or withhold housing money from other tribes, until the
descendants are granted tribal citizenship.
But to some tribal leaders, those threats undermine tribal sovereignty.
Gary Batton, the chief of the Choctaw Nation, wrote in a June letter to
the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, that he objected to any
legislative maneuvering, and said the “Freedmen issue is a problem
caused by the United States, not the Choctaw Nation.”
“America should solve its own problems,” Chief Batton wrote.
Still, the descendants’ cause has supporters among tribal members. Eli
Grayson, a Muscogee (Creek) citizen whose family once owned slaves, said
the Freedmen’s descendants had been excluded for too long.
“These Freedmen lives don’t matter,” he said, echoing the Black Lives
Matter mantra.
Mr. Graham said he has been petitioning for his Muscogee (Creek) status
since he went to a tribal citizenship office in 1983 and told the office
workers that his father was Theodore “Blue” Graham, who spoke the Creek
language and went to traditional stomp dances. On that long-ago day, he
said, the clerk told him his father had been nothing but a slave: “It
tore my heart out.”
Mr. Graham can speak a few shards of Creek himself, enough to say “Come
to dinner” or teach his children “Mvto” for thank you. He has come to
dislike the term Freedmen, calling it a pejorative relic.
He would like, one day, to just be a citizen of his tribe.
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