Waters threatens Choctaw over enrollment of Black Freedman descendants

RAPID CITY—In a June 25, 2020 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gary Batton, Chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, implored the Speaker to “exercise your leadership to oppose recent efforts by the Chairwoman of the Committee on Financial Services, the Honorable Maxine Waters, to insert – in house related bills being shaped by the House in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd – a provision requiring the Choctaw Nation to pay the price for resolving the government’s Freedman issue.”

What Waters wants to do is withhold treaty obligated funding if the Choctaw and other tribes do not alter their enrollment criteria to permit the enrollment of the descendants of Freedmen, whether these descendants even have a genetic or cultural connection to the tribe.

“The heavy-handed penalty in Chairwoman Waters’ bill language – withholding federal housing assistance funds for under-privileged Choctaw families – is without precedent,” Batton wrote.

The current Congress has yet to address this bill, but a revamped version, minus the Freedman stipulation, sponsored by newly appointed Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, then acting as a Congresswoman from New Mexico minus the Freedman stipulation, failed to pass in 2020.

Looking back on the history of the Choctaw/Freedman controversy, shows that in 1830 President Andrew Jackson used his considerable political clout to push the Indian Removal Act through Congress, targeted at the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole) of the Southeastern United States. These tribes earned their collective sobriquet by building strong communities based upon the economic models of their white neighbors. Jackson’s idea was to relocate tribes to the Oklahoma Indian Territory about 800 miles to the west.

John Ross was the political savvy leader of the Cherokee. The son of a Scottish merchant, he knew how the white world operated, and tried to take legal action against the state of Georgia, the case going all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that a state could not assert jurisdiction over an Indian Tribe. President Jackson is purported to have remarked, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

Against the tide of history, this ruling failed miserably. Local white vigilantes began attacking the tribes, and Ross himself was almost killed in one such raid.

The Choctaw saw the writing on the wall a decade before, and they had been relocating piecemeal to Indian Territory. The celebrated French author and observer of Early America, Alexis de Tocqueville, is reported to have “witnessed a party of Choctaws struggling to cross the Mississippi with great hardship in the dead of winter.”

The problem for these Choctaw became, in emulating the economic system of their white neighbors, they also purchased Black slaves, since the Five Civilized Tribes resided in slave-owning states. The Choctaw took their chattel “property” west, and during the Civil War, having no love for any Union, many Choctaw sided with the Confederacy. After the Civil War, with slavery at an end, these former slaves became Freedmen. Some of these Freedmen were connected to the tribe by blood, but most were not, and it is the descendants of these Freedmen to which Maxine Waters wants to now hold the Choctaw Tribe accountable. The tribe is being coerced into enrolling the descendants of their former slaves into the tribe, even though these descendants have no tribal connection by blood or culture.

“The Freedman issue is a problem caused by the United States, not the Choctaw Nation,” Batton wrote in his letter to Pelosi. “Congress should not be permitted to abuse its power by forcing the Choctaw Nation to fix America’s longstanding problems of systemic racism rooted in America’s enslavement of African Americans. Just as African Americans today struggle to survive and thrive after generations of slavery dispossessed them of the fruits of the labor stolen from their ancestors, so too the Choctaw Nation today struggles to survive and thrive after repeated and massive American thefts of Choctaw land dispossessed the Choctaw Nation of the fruits of the natural resources stolen from the Choctaw Nation. Choctaw Nation representatives have tried without success to dissuade Chairwoman Waters to abandon her proposed bill language. We oppose it because it purports to over-ride the federally approved Constitution of the Choctaw Nation, subjugate the sovereignty, self-governance and self-determination of the Choctaw Nation to the control of the federal government, and by-pass tribal and federal judicial procedures. There is no more fundamental element of tribal self-governance than the authority of a Tribe like the Choctaw Nation to determine our own citizenship.”

Batton then lists four examples of case law where the rights of tribes to determine their own membership as part of “their residual sovereignty” is reiterated time and again.

The rationale Waters is employing for why Freedmen with no tribal connection for over a century are the responsibility of the tribe is never adequately explained. Batton continues to address this issue from several different perspectives: “Our Choctaw Constitution…requires every applicant for tribal citizenship to show direct lineal descendancy to a Choctaw citizen of Choctaw blood on the 1906 Choctaw citizen roll. The Choctaw Nation could not comply with Chairwoman Waters’ bill language without violating the Choctaw Constitution.”

Beyond these Freedmen meeting no enrollment criteria, the complicated history between then and now is completely overlooked in assessing tribal culpability for the welfare of Freedmen descendants.

“It is untenable for Chairwoman Waters,” Batton continued in the letter, “to ask the 116th Congress to reach back into indefensible and conflictive periods of history and impose just one portion of a treaty imposed upon the Choctaw Nation in 1866 without regard to the meandering mass of countervailing treaties, law and policy that followed the 1866 treaty. Likewise, it would be both unseemly and unfair for Congress to take the extreme step of holding hostage housing assistance otherwise due the Choctaw Nation in 2020 until the Choctaw Nation complies with a provision of the 1866 Treaty, especially since the United States itself has wholly breached its obligations under many other provisions of the same 1866 Treaty.”

Marilyn Vann is the president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association. She wrote a letter in response to the letter Batton sent to Pelosi. Vann wrote: “The Choctaw freedmen issue was caused by the Choctaw nation’s system of permanent enslavement of people of African descent, its waging war on the United States during the Civil War by joining the confederate states in 1861 (ratified through a treaty) primarily to protect the chattel slavery system, and subsequent failure to uphold the promises and commitments it made to the Choctaw freedmen tribal members adopted by the tribe and their descendants—issues on which Mr. Batton is totally silent.”

Vann’s assertions are supported by 1860 Federal Census statistics. These statistics indicate “…there were 13,666 Choctaw Nation tribal members at that time who collectively owned 2,298 slaves. The Census found one Choctaw, Robert Jones, owned 230 slaves.”

The Choctaw Nation signed a treaty with the federal government in 1866. The government promised the Choctaws and the Chickasaw Nation $300,000, an amount equal to roughly $4.8 million today, in return for the tribes making “such laws, rules, and regulations as may be necessary to give all persons of African descent, resident in the said nation at the date of the treaty of Fort Smith, and their descendants, heretofore held in slavery among said nations, all the rights, privileges, and immunities, including the right of suffrage, of citizens of said nations …”

Inherent in the point Batton is making, is that isolating this specific aspect of the treaty, the tribe taking the $300,000 and then never subsequently delivering, is cherry picking on a massive scale, ignoring the collective consequence of the subsequent unjust history against the tribe. Given the treaty violations to come, and further land theft from the tribes, up to and including the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889 which opened up two million acres of Indian Territory to non-tribal settlement, holding a stressed and violated people to an 1866 treaty stipulation, when all about them the treaty was being violated with gross impunity, smacks of deeply misguided political myopia.

Waters has yet to explain to the Choctaw Nation how punishing their underprivileged families is a just and necessary response to an unjust and unnecessary 164-year-old stipulation in an oft-violated treaty.

The United States as a whole, has yet to award reparations to the descendants of Black slaves, and yet, Congress now attempts to single out the Choctaw Nation and force them to add tribal members that do not meet tribal enrollment criteria as a reparation for a treaty the tribe signed under coercion during the most trying period in their history. And if they do not do this, Waters appears intent on making the poor and vulnerable of the Choctaw Tribe suffer.

 

 

(Contact James Giago Davies at skindiesel@msn.com)

 

The post Waters threatens Choctaw over enrollment of Black Freedman descendants first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

Visit Original Source