Our ancestors were forced into Oklahoma by the federal government’s anti-Indigenous removal policies that forced the Five Tribes to walk the Trail of Tears. Our ancestors also would have never had to walk the Trail of Tears had their Indigenous masters not enslaved them.
As Afro-Indigenous descendants of enslaved people owned by Native masters, our relationships to the federal government and to our tribes are complex. Had it not been for the federal government’s intervention, our ancestors would’ve continued to be enslaved past 1866.
They were only freed from bondage in the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations because the federal government strongly urged for the abolishment of slavery in Indian Territory following the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations’ loss with the rest of the Confederacy in 1866.
As Freedmen, we have a complicated relationship with the federal government. On the one hand, they dispossessed our tribes of land in their original homelands and forced us to walk the Trail of Tears, forced us all to abandon our traditional practices of communal land ownership,
etc. On the other hand, without federal intervention who knows when our ancestors would have been freed from slavery? The 13th Amendment did not apply in Indian Territory, so without treaty agreements, slavery could have continued indefinitely.
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