Indianz.Com > News > Gaylord News: Freedmen continue to press for citizenship rights in tribal nations
Oklahoma tribes split over tribal status of former slaves’ descendants
Tuesday, August 2, 2022
Gaylord News
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Oklahoma’s five largest tribes split last Wednesday on the terms of treaties signed more than 150 years ago regarding their treatment of descendants of their former slaves, and on what those treaties require.
The hearing before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee was the first to bring together federal officials, tribal representatives and descendants of the Freedmen, the former slaves of the five tribes who were offered varying levels of tribal rights after the Civil War, said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.
“We will have a respectful dialogue, these issues are hard, we’re talking about two groups of people who have experienced terrible injustices as a result of the federal government’s actions,” Schatz, the committee chairman, said in opening remarks. “We want to … hear from the Freedmen’s representatives as well as the tribes and the Department of Interior to figure out what the path forward is, but it starts with respectful dialogue.”
The five tribes – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole – all signed treaties with the federal government after the Civil War that generally offered the rights and privileges of tribal citizens to the slaves that some tribal members had owned.



Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Notice
Oversight Hearing on “Select Provisions of the 1866 Reconstruction Treaties between the United States and Oklahoma Tribes” (July 27, 2022)
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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