Five Civilized Tribes

[4] The descriptor "civilized", historically used to obscure the cultural imperialism of White settlers, is seldom used nowadays because of the derogatory implication that other Native tribes were uncivilized.

[11][12] Texts written by non-indigenous scholars and writers have used words like "savage" and "wild" to identify Indian groups that retained their traditional cultural practices after European contact.

As a consequence of evolving attitudes toward ethnocentric word usage and more rigorous ethnographical standards, the term "Five Civilized Tribes" is rarely used in contemporary academic publications.

[14] Sociologists, anthropologists, and interdisciplinary scholars alike are interested in how and why these native peoples assimilated certain features of the alien culture of the White settlers who were encroaching on their lands.

Historian Steve Brandon asserts that this "adaptation and incorporation of aspects of white culture" was a tactic employed by the Five Nations peoples to resist removal from their lands.

While the term "Five Civilized Tribes" has been institutionalized in federal government policy to the point that the US Congress passed laws using the name, the Five Nations themselves have been less accepting of it in formal matters, and some members have declared that grouping the different peoples under this label is effectively another form of colonization and control by White society.

Some commentators, including the Indian activist Vine Deloria Jr., have declared that it is demeaning and implies that the indigenous peoples of the North American continent were "uncivilized" before their contact with the habits, customs, and beliefs of Anglo-American settlers.

Prior to the arrival of white settlers, these tribes generally had matrilineal kinship systems, with property and hereditary positions passed through the mother's family.

[19] President George Washington and Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War, implemented a policy of cultural transformation in relation to Native Americans.

[20] The tribes of the Southeast adopted Washington's policy as they established schools, took up yeoman farming practices, converted to Christianity, and built homes similar to those of their colonial neighbors.

[8] How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race by our modes of population that we had persevered through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivating and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended.

Armed conflicts occurred between some of the tribes and the settlers, who kept pushing west and acquired additional territories through negotiated treaties with European colonial powers and sometimes by force.

President Martin Van Buren had enforced the Treaty of New Echota, although the Senate had not ratified it, and a majority of the tribe said they had not agreed to its cessions of communal land.

[25] During removal to Indian Territory, "the Five Tribes considered enslaved Black people an ideal way of transporting capital to the West" because they were "movable property.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed over the veto of President Andrew Johnson, gave ex-slaves full citizenship, except for voting, in the United States.

US Army occupation soldiers were stationed throughout the South via military districts enacted by the Reconstruction Acts; they tried to protect freedmen in voting polls and public facilities from violence and intimidation by White Southerners, which were common throughout the region.

It included the provision that they emancipate the enslaved African Americans and provide full citizenship to those who wanted to stay in the Chickasaw Nation.

The Chickasaw and Choctaw negotiated new treaties "without a clause accepting their guilt, allowing them to declare that they had been forced into a Confederate alliance by American desertion."

The slaves were freed and they could continue to live within the boundaries of the nation as second-class citizens, or they could move to Union states and no longer be associated with the tribe, which meant they did not participate in the Dawes Rolls of the 1890s, which registered tribal members.

[31][32] They enacted legislation similar to the US Black Codes, which set certain wages for ex-slaves and attempted to force freed people to find employment under Indian tribal members.

Because the Chickasaw Nation did not provide citizenship to their freedmen after the American Civil War, which they felt would be akin to formal adoption of individuals into the tribe, they were penalized by the US government.

[citation needed] In the late 19th century, under the Dawes Act and related legislation, the US government decided to break up communal tribal lands, allocating 160-acre plots to heads of households of enrolled members of the tribes.

At the time, registrars tended to classify any person with visible African American features as a Freedman, not inquiring or allowing them to document Indian descent.

The tribes have wanted to limit those who can benefit from tribal citizenship, in an era in which gaming casinos are yielding considerable revenues for members.

In the 19th century, historians and ethnographers recorded their oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, the base of most other Iroquoian-speaking peoples.

Some historians credit the Chickasaw intervention in the French and Indian War on the side of the British as decisive in ensuring that the United States became an English-speaking nation.

[46] The Choctaw are Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States, including present-day Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

Historians such as Walter Lee Williams have documented some early Spanish explorers encountering chiefs of the Mississippian culture, ancestors of some of the Five Tribes.

The federally recognized tribes have about 231,000 members in total, making the Choctaw the third-largest Native American population in the United States.

The Seminole nation came into existence in the late 18th century and was composed of renegade and outcast Native Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama, most significantly from among the loose Creek confederacy.