Thread by @ChoctawFreedmen

Blood quantum was a racist practice of diminishing “Indian-ness” that settlers used to shrink the Indigenous population in the United States. This was a system of Indigenous identification that allowed for settlers to justify taking Indigenous peoples’ lands and obliterating

Tribal communities. On the other hand, settlers identified Black people under a maternal one-drop-of-Blood policy that stated that all people with any African ancestry were Black and all people born of Black enslaved mothers were automatically slaves.

These systems of racial grouping and identification allowed for white settlers to both expand their land holdings—taken from Indigenous people as they were “absorbed into whiteness”—and expand their ownership in enslaved people. They were able to both take land

And increase their labor force for working on said land. With Freedmen, racial identification was conplicated. In many tribal bands and communities, people of both Indigneous and Black ancestry were considered just as Indigenous as people mixed with white blood.

However, in most documented instances in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, all people of any prtial African ancestry were identified as Black and tainted. In the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations, being of prtial white ancestry did not “taint” a person’s Indigeneity or preclude

Them from tribal membership or land. On the other hand, if a person was seen as being of any partial African ancestry, their “Indigenous-ness” was completely tainted. They were seen and treated as Black, tainted, human beings meant to be enslaved for profit.

We must wrestle with the legacies of selective Blood Quantum policies today. Many Freedmen have ancestors who were of “Choctaw/Chickasaw Blood,” but have no listed Blood Qunatum on the Dawes Rolls. On the other hand, there are Chickasaws and Choctaws who are 1/1024 Blood Quantum

But who are identified as white and are granted full tribal, citizenship, and economic rights. This all stems from settler notions of “Blood Quantum” and one-drop-of-Black-blood policies.

Today, the tribe requires all citizens to prove they have at least one ancestor on the Dawes Rolls of any Blood Quantum, no matter how small. Freedmen were systematically put on the Dawes Rolls without a Blood Quantum, no matter their ancestry.