Muscogee Nation Supreme Court Rules Descendants of People Enslaved by the Tribe are Citizens
In a decision that would allow for tribal citizenship for thousands of new members of the Muscogee, who are not connected by blood, Muscogee Nation Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, July 23 that descendants of people once enslaved by the tribe are entitled to tribal citizenship.
According to AP News, the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court found that the tribal nation’s citizenship board violated an 1866 treaty when it denied the citizenship applications of Rhonda Grayson and Jeffrey Kennedy, in 2019, because they could not identify a lineal descendant of the tribe.
“When I heard the ruling, I felt generations of my family exhale at once,” Kennedy shared after the court’s decision.
According to historian Tiya Miles, indigenous tribes enslaved African Americans in an effort to participate in American capitalism. “They were working hard to comply with government dictates that told native people that in order to be protected and secure in their land base, they had to prove their level of ‘civilization,’” Miles explained.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, when asked, “How would slave ownership prove civilization?” The answer, Miles contends, is that in capitalism-crazed America, slaves became tokens of economic success.
The Muscogee Nation, one of five tribes in Oklahoma that once enslaved Black people, abolished slavery and granted citizenship within the tribal nation to the formerly enslaved, in accordance with a 1866 treaty with the U.S. government.
In direct conflict with that treaty, in 1979 the tribal nation adopted a constitution that limited citizenship to the descendants of people listed as “Muscogee (Creek) Indians by blood.”
In the recent opinion handed down by the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court the court wrote, “Are we, as a Nation, bound to treaty promises made so many years ago? Today, we answer in the affirmative, because this is what Mvskoke law demands.”
“Our ancestors signed that treaty in good faith, and today the Court finally honored their word,” Jeffrey Kennedy reflected in a statement.
