Just to be clear—we shouldn’t even have to be called Freedmen anymore. Our ancestors were freed from slavery over 150 years ago, but our tribes still label us that way 🤔 Even the Cherokee Nation, which accepts Freedmen as citizens, requires them to apply through a separate
“Freedmen” process. Why are we still being identified by the enslavement of our ancestors or by our African ancestry? We are Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and Cherokees and should be treated as such. People with 1/1024 blood quanta in the tribes are not separated into
different categories or called “white Cherokees” or “white Choctaws”. Even people who have evidence of their ancestors getting onto the By Blood Rolls by fraud are not separated from other tribal members but we are, based solely on our ancestors’ racial designations
and enslavement statuses. We are obviously using these terms for legal reasons, as that’s how we are legally set aside by both our tribes and the federal government but we shouldn’t have to continue having to have a clause with our tribal identification. It’s 2020.
We aren’t freed slaves, so why are we still being treated like we are? And even if we were freed slaves, the Freedmen label was one that was truly enforced on the tribes by the federal government. Before the Dawes Commission began enrolling tribal members, we had a variety of
labels and in some tribes, freed slaves mixed with “Native Blood” were considered to be “Half Bloods” or other “Mixed Bloods,” similar to people mixed with white.
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