Georgia is rapidly becoming a sanctuary for Afro Hispanics, Latinas, and BIPOC from various parts of the globe. Indigenous groups such as The Choctaw are also coming back to reclaim their ancestral territories that were taken from them during the Trail of Tears. The Choctaw Native Capital and Muscogee Creek, settled in Okmulgee OK, is named after the Ocmulgee River, which is the traditional homeland of the Choctaw and Muscogee people! The federal government enforced Native American racism to conceal the true identity of the natives as people with high levels of melanin, in order to further the government's agenda of diluting the native bloodline until they resembled European culture and physical characteristics. The discovery of gold in Georgia brought an end to this scheme, leading to the dispossession of natives as white settlers demanded their land, ultimately forcing the natives to barren territories in Oklahoma where they faced extinction!
Excerpt By: Olivia Tencer
In 2021, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation made public statements to address their long-standing policies of denying tribal citizenship to Freedmen and their descendants. Choctaw Chief Gary Batton published an open letter on July 1st, 2021, stating that this is a “critical juncture in both tribal and American history” (Batton, 2021). Since February 2021, the Cherokee Nation has taken out the “by-blood” stipulation in their constitution, initially approved by two-thirds of the voters after a ratification election on March 3, 2007. This amendment requiring “Indian blood” for tribal citizenship put the citizenship rights of 2,800 African American tribal members into question (Tayac, 2009, p 121).
The inclusion of Freedmen and their descendants as members within the "Five Civilized Tribes" (Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles), who enslaved nearly 10,000 Black individuals from the late 1700s until the Civil War's conclusion, presents complexities (Tayac, 2009, p. 149). These issues raise significant questions about tribal membership, sovereignty, Native identity, and Black-Native unity, meriting further investigation by scholars and researchers. Jesse T. Schreier, Assistant Professor of History at the Community College of Baltimore County-Catonsville, poses a critical question: "If Indians recognize even a small number of Freedmen as citizens, might Indian groups start to be perceived as Black rather than Indian by the U.S. government, thus endangering their federal status as an Indian tribe?" (Schreier, 2011, p. 479).
Settler colonialism entails the erasure and displacement of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement and exploitation of African slaves for resettlement and economic gain through resource extraction. It employs Euro-American racial ideologies to differentiate and define Indigeneity and Blackness. The one-drop rule, established by various U.S. states in the 20th century, dictated that any African ancestry classified an individual as Black, making Blackness a broad and inherited identity based on visual traits rather than DNA evidence. Consequently, many individuals recognized as Native Americans by the U.S. government lack genetic ties, reflecting a portrayal influenced by cinematic myths rather than the documented physical characteristics and genetic lineage of these populations.
Indeed, DNA evidence has often been contested as it could disqualify many phenotypically white-appearing natives from their indigenous claims. Blood quantum policies and practices, enacted by state, federal, and tribal laws, have been strategically employed to generationally diminish Native American presence, rendering Indigeneity or Native-ness as diminishing over time, yet never allowing individuals to become fully white (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Concurrently, the rise in the Black slave population and the progressive "disappearance" of Native peoples aligned with the objectives of augmenting white property (Nakano Glenn, 2015).
By examining brief histories of the Choctaw and Cherokee tribes prior to the abolition of slavery in the U.S. to contextualize current day issues pertaining to Black-Native identity and solidarity. The narrative that Blackness and Indigeneity exist solely in opposition is complicated by shared histories and experiences that have been deeply interwoven since the beginning of settler contact.
In their eagerness to be accepted by the dominant white society, some Native peoples owned, sold, and enslaved others in the Southeast and western Indian Territory. The practice of slaveholding varied among tribes, but the Choctaws and Cherokees were notably stringent in their systems of slavery. Concurrently, Native individuals were also enslaved, a fact often overlooked in history. Vine Deloria Jr., a distinguished Native author, states in "Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto" that "it is fortunate that we [Native people] were never slaves. We gave up land instead of life and labor" (Miles, 2019, p. 123). Yet, records show that from before 1715, English colonies alone captured, sold, and enslaved between 30,000 to 50,000 southern Indians. Moreover, forcible rape and Native Boarding schools were deliberate, genocidal strategies intended to 'civilize' Native people and destroy their nations, communities, cultures, languages, religions, and familial bonds. There is documentation that all manner of child abuses including deaths occurred at these schools.
Miles argues that while is important to confront the realities of Black slavery in Native nations, it is equally as important to recognize the “much longer period” that African Americans, Afro-Indians, and Native peoples were enslaved together between the mid-sixteenth and early-nineteenth-centuries (Tayac, 2009, 140 & 149). While slaveholding was a way for Native nations to show civilization and protect them from forced removal and dispossession, the practice of slavery was not enough to ensure tribal sovereignty, as tribes were continuously forced west with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 an act specifically passed by Congress in order to steal lands believed to have significant deposits of gold and transfer that wealth to white citizens. (Miles, 2019).
Questions surrounding identity and belonging play a crucial role in the lives of Freedmen and Freedwomen. The decennial U.S. Census was utilized to decide the distribution of political power among states and determine tax obligations. Angela A. Gonzales, an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, argues that the U.S. census has not merely been a passive data collection tool but has historically shaped perceptions of identity and difference based on a flawed racial pseudoscience. Through data manipulation, the census has even gone so far as to rename entire populations to align with white supremacy goals. In 1883, the U.S. government compelled the Choctaw Nation to compile a membership roll, with the Nation opting to use race as a criterion for citizenship at the explicit direction of federal authorities.
The New Yorker Magazine reported in 1979, an Oklahoma woman named Johnnie Mae Austin stopped getting mail from the Muscogee Nation. There were no more announcements of meetings, notices of elections, or news of monetary settlements. The problem wasn’t postal. Austin’s Muscogee citizenship had been erased by a new Muscogee constitution in which citizenship was defined “by blood,” words that named a fraught crossroads in Native and African American histories. The Muscogee people, also referred to as Creeks, were among the tribes that once enslaved people of African descent and that were required, in the wake of the Civil War, to accept them as tribal citizens.
A tribal-enrollment census around the start of the twentieth century split the Muscogee citizenry into groups that were separate but by no means equal. One roll—the “by blood” roster—listed people of Creek heritage, while a second, “freedmen,” roll named Black Creek citizens, the formerly enslaved and their descendants. Austin’s ancestors appeared on the second roll. With the new constitution, Muscogee citizenship was reserved for those on the first roll, or their lineal descendants. And so Austin, after forty-seven years of being Creek, found her tribal identity legally and politically erased. With this native tribes are complicit in their own erasure and destruction and the Settlers bloodlines will finally win by purchasing their souls!
The nation placed former Choctaw slaves and their descendants on separate rolls from the Choctaw citizens. At the end of the 19th century, the 1893 Dawes Commission negotiated the end of tribal government for the “Five Civilized Tribes” and began to allot their tribal land. After the Civil War, some free African people and their descendants were given land as reparation to further expand the settlement of Native land and ensure dispossession indefinitely (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
THE RED STICK CREEK
Red Sticks (also Redsticks, Batons Rouges, or Red Clubs)—the name deriving from the red-painted war clubs of the true warriors of the Native American Creek—refers to an early 19th century traditionalist faction of Muscogee Creek people in the Southeastern United States. Made up mostly of Creek of the Upper Towns that supported traditional leadership and culture, as well as the preservation of communal land for cultivation and hunting, the Red Sticks arose at a time of increasing pressure on Creek territory by European American settlers.
The Lower Towns' Creek community, being in closer proximity to the settlers, had a higher number of mixed-race families. They had already been compelled to give up land to the Americans. In hopes of achieving peace and prosperity, they adopted the ways of the colonizers, including embracing slavery, even enslaving some of their own people, which led to many becoming affluent plantation owners. The federal authorities introduced a "civilization program," which was advocated and put into effect by the Indian agent for the United States, Benjamin Hawkins.
Hawkin's program of teaching agriculture and “domestic arts” or housekeeping to the Creeks succeeded primarily with the Lower Creeks. Their conversion from a hunting/bartering economy to a market economy produced great wealth among many of them, particularly those of mixed-blood ancestry who claimed a white father (usually a trader or merchant) and a Creek mother. Hawkins created a governing body for all Creeks, the National Council, which intentionally circumvented the previous polity of town headmen. This caused resentment between those economically successful mixed race Lower Creeks and many Upper Creeks who opposed assimilation.
A serious rift soon developed in the Creek Nation. One faction consisted of those leaders who received monetary emoluments from the United States, who supported the National Council, and who rejected any opposition to the colonizer's agenda. In this context, the Red Sticks joined by formerly enslaved Africans called the Maroons led a resistance movement against European American encroachment and assimilation, tensions that culminated in the outbreak of the Creek War in 1813. Initially a civil war among the Creek, the conflict drew in United States state forces while the nation was already engaged in the War of 1812 against the British.
TRUE NATIVES RETURINING TO ANCESTRAL LANDS (Excerpt from Atlanta Journal Constitution)
In September 1838, Nancy Still lodged a claim seeking to recover $820 that she alleged was taken from her following the expulsion by federal troops of her and other Cherokee from their residences in present-day North Georgia. As part of the forced journey to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, numerous Cherokee perished. A Cherokee claims agent recounted Still's narrative, stating, "The troops forced her to depart, leaving her home vulnerable. Although she was allowed to return the following day, she discovered her door sealed shut. Upon breaking it open, she found her trunk forced open and her money missing." As for Nancy Still, she filed multiple claims and was eventually forced west to Oklahoma, where she survived into her 70s but was never compensated. $820 in 1820 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $21,544.51 today, an increase of $20,744.51 over 204 years.
Research conducted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the volume of immigration court cases set to be heard in Georgia in the near future indicates that Lawrenceville is becoming a preferred destination for Central American immigrants. As of June, Lawrenceville ZIP codes were associated with nearly 12,000 pending immigration court cases, which is more than for any other municipality in Georgia. This data comes from an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. Gwinnett County has been leading the state in the number of new immigration cases filed annually, surpassing 10,000 in both 2023 and 2024. Other cities such as Lilburn, Chamblee, Doraville, and Norcross also have high numbers of pending cases at the municipal level. The current backlog in the national immigration court system often allows individuals to remain in the U.S. for years before appearing before a judge to determine if they can avoid deportation.
Since the 1970s, Atlanta has been recognized as a black mecca.
In 1971, Ebony magazine described Atlanta as the "black mecca of the South," stating that "black people have more, live better, achieve more, and confront white systemic racism more effectively than anywhere else in the South—or North." As the nation grapples with economic challenges, these unsustainable systems give way to rising economic opportunities across racial lines. This dynamic forces conservative anti-black strategists to contend with the economic advancements of diverse groups, such as Asians and North Africans, stretching the resources of the diminishing white majority thin. Maintaining racist systems is costly, and the U.S. contributes to the global framework of white supremacy. In essence, as American xenophobes grow alarmed, their fear-mongering narratives backfire. Rather than uniting whites against a singular target, they convey that the majority of the world is the target, which amounts to cultural suicide.
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