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Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
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7 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
You cannot believe that #BlackLivesMatter if you support the disenfranchisement and targeted discrimination of Black Natives who descend from enslaved people owned by citizens of the Five Slaveholding Tribes. #NoAntiBlackRacism #NoJimCrowInIndianTerritory
This can either be active support of disenfranchisement and discrimination policies or silence on the issue after being informed about it. I have seen far too many Choctaws and Chickasaws post Black Lives matter memes while also supporting their racist tribal policies.
You cannot believe that Black Lives Matter and then support your own Indigenous nation disenrolling, discriminating against, and disenfranchising the descendants of the slaves they owned and built their wealth off of. Why do you think the Five Slaveholding Tribes still rank
among the wealthiest and most influential nations today? A large part of that is the money that the tribes and the families enrolled in them made off of our ancestors’ forced labor while enslaved. #FreedmenLivesMatter

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More from @ChoctawFreedmen

Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
8 Dec
And see, this is the issue. No Native American person should be telling the descendants of displaced slaves—especially descendants of people owned by Native Americans—to go back to Africa.
As we explained here, we are not immigrants, settlers, or colonizers. We have nowhere in Africa to go back to. Many of the ethnic tribes our ancestors are from have dissolved or where forcibly disestablished during the colonization of the African continent.
Not to mention THIS IS WHERE WE ARE FROM AND HAVE LIVED FOR GENERATIONS. Our ancestors created a new culture and new ethnicity on this land after being forcibly removed from their homelands in Africa. Many of us were owned by Native Americans too. So don’t tell us to
Read 4 tweets
Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
8 Dec
Native Americans are not just an ethnicity, and they are not a race. They are a collection of several sovereign nations within the United States. They have treaties, constitutions, laws, and heads of state that meet with American politicians for diplomacy and to make demands.
These sovereign nations have made choices historically and continue to make choices on how to run their governments. Some have practiced slavery. Because Indigenous nations are sovereign, US declarations of emancipation and US constitutional amendments did not apply to slaves
owned by Native masters. This is the power of sovereignty. Many Indigenous nations carried out their own forms of slavery and anti-Blackness outside of the confines of US law. This is how they practiced anti-Blackness.
Read 8 tweets
Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
8 Dec
I wanted to underscore that although our ancestors’ Indigenous enslavers were not their allies in the 1800s, that doesn’t mean that Black and Native communities can’t find more opportunities for allyship today. But I think the first steps are acknowledgement of historical harms,
having honest and specific discussions about Black and Native interactions within the contexts of SPECIFIC tribes and regions, and reconciling the harms that have been done. This will be different for Black communities in comparison to Native nations. As sovereign nations,
Indigenous nations have specific human rights laws and norms that they must follow and uphold. As sovereign nations, Indigenous nations can have government-backed truth and reconciliation commissions and historical programs. They can ensure the descendants of the Black
Read 6 tweets
Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
8 Dec
A reminder that Blood Quantum requirements for citizenship—particularly within the context of slave-owning nations—is inherently anti-Black. You are placing certain descendants of slaves on a pedestal depending on if their ancestors were violently raped while in bondage.
Within the context of slave-owning Indigenous nations, such requirements are immoral, racist, and disgusting. Freedmen shouldn’t have to justify our place in our own nations based on whether or not our ancestors were raped by their Native American slave-owners.
We shouldn’t have to find DNA connections to “By Blood” cousins who descend from our ancestors’ slave-owners to justify our place in the nations that enslaved our ancestors and forced them to assimilate into their nations and perform free and coerced labor.
Read 5 tweets
Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
7 Dec
During slavery, not every Native tribe was friendly to Black slaves. It’s an inaccurate portrayal of the history of chattel slavery to promote the myth of the friendly Native American assisting runaway slaves. At least five Native American nations owned Black chattel slaves.
Many more individual Native people and Native tribes assisted with rounding up, hunting, and re-enslaving runaway slaves. In fact, for many tribes this was a core part of their treaty agreements with the United States government.
Perpetuating this myth of the “friendly Native” assisting runaway slaves when actual slaves may very well had been afraid of encountering a Native American while running away, knowing that that person would have had a high chance of kidnapping and selling them back into bondage,
Read 13 tweets
Choctaw & Chickasaw Freedmen Profile picture
5 Dec
I would like to remind grassroots Black and Native activists that if @RepDebHaaland does not shift her position on equality for Freedmen of the Five Tribes, her nomination will be devastating for Black Native Freedmen. This will not be a small setback for us.
This will be the continuation of differential treatment for Black descendants of slaves based solely on our ancestors’ racial classifications and their statuses as slaves. We will continue to be treated as second-class citizens or non-citizens by our own tribes.
Please stop overcooking this fact for Native representation or for your racist “climate justice” initiatives. If climate justice rests on Black people being treated as less than, then that’s not true justice. Sign our petition: change.org/p/debra-haalan…
Read 4 tweets

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