Choctaw freedmen

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The Choctaw Freedmen are former enslaved Africans, Afro-Indigenous, and African Americans who were emancipated and granted citizenship in the Choctaw Nation after the Civil War, according to the tribe's new peace treaty of 1866 with the United States. The term also applies to their contemporary descendants.

Like other American Indian tribes, the Choctaw had customarily held Indian slaves as captives from warfare. As they adopted elements of European culture, such as larger farms and plantations, the elite began to adapt their system to purchasing and holding chattel slave workers of African-American and Afro-Indigenous descent.^[2] Moshulatubbee held slaves, as did many of the European men, generally fur traders, who married into the Choctaw nation. The Folsom and Greenwood LeFlore families were wealthy Choctaw planters who held the most slaves at the time of Indian Removal and afterward.^[2] After signing the treaty for Removal, LeFlore withdrew from the Choctaw Nation to stay in Mississippi and take US and state citizenship. He owned 15,000 acres of plantation and 400 enslaved African Americans.

Slavery lasted in the Choctaw Nation until after their signing of the 1866 Reconstruction Treaty. The emancipation and citizenship of the enslaved were requirements of the 1866 treaty that the US made with the Choctaw. The U.S. required a new treaty because the Choctaw had sided with the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. The Confederacy had promised the Choctaw and other tribes of Indian Territory an exclusively Native American state if it won the war.^[3] Formerly enslaved peoples of the Choctaw Nation were called the Choctaw freedmen, comparable to the African-American freedmen in the United States. They differed in that numerous people also had mixed Choctaw and/or European ancestry (the latter was also true of African Americans in the US). At the time of Indian Removal, the Beams family was a part of the Choctaw Nation. They were thought to have been of African descent and also free.^[2]

The Choctaw Freedmen were officially adopted as full members into the Choctaw Nation in 1885.^[4] In 1983, a requirement for blood relationship was added to the Nation's constitution, excluding many Choctaw Freedmen from membership although many were of African and Choctaw/Chickasaw ancestry. Although there was intermarriage between Blacks and Indians, the Dawes Commission enrolled people of mixed heritage as Freedmen, and indicated no blood relation to the tribe.^[5] As of 2021, the Choctaw Freedmen are still fighting for equal legal status in the tribe, as they believe they have been limited to second-class status.^[5] The Freedmen argue that the tribe has not honored the 1866 treaty.^[6] By 2021, only the Cherokee Nation had updated their constitution to accept as citizens, descendants of Freedmen, those who have ancestors registered with the Dawes Commission.^[7]