Choctaw freedmen
Similarly to some other "American Indian" tribes, the Choctaw had customarily held other Indigenous people hostage and at times, negotiated them to be sold through contracts of indentured servitude.
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.
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.
The Confederacy had promised the Choctaw and other tribes of Indian Territory an exclusively Native American state if it won the war.
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.
[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] Prior to European colonization, the Choctaw, in line with the customs of other indigenous tribes of the American Southeast, were accustomed to taking captives in warfare.
Tribes in the region intensified their raids on enemy villages in order to acquire captives with the specific intent of selling them to the colonists in major slave-trading centers such as New Orleans and Charles Town.
Many tribes undertook such raids in order to satisfy outstanding debts they had acquired with colonial merchants in South Carolina, an issue which contributed to the eruption of the Yamasee War (1715–1717).
During the following decades, the Choctaw Freedmen continued to face considerable discrimination in terms of social identity and political legislation.
[12] In the 17th century the incorporation of race-based slavery became an efficient alternative for wealthy members of the Choctaw Nation to maintain an increasingly tenuous hold on political and cultural autonomy against Western expansion, while it allowed them to pursue economic and diplomatic goals that benefited them.
In 1894, the Dawes Commission was established to register Choctaw and other families of the Indian Territory so that each tribe's communal lands could be allotted among its heads of households.
Following completion of the land allotments, the US proposed to end the tribal governments of the Five Civilized Tribes and to admit the two territories jointly as a state.
[14] The direct "articles of the allotment" rules were published in The Daily Ardmorite; details spanned the entire front page of the newspaper.
For instance, in February 1896, Susan Brashears came before the Commissioner to the Five Civilized Tribes in Muskogee, in order to request that her four children be placed on the Dawes Rolls as Choctaw Indian "by blood".
