A deal for the City of Tulsa to send traffic and other municipal cases involving Muscogee Nation citizens to tribal court doesn’t cover the descendants of formerly enslaved people who are also tribal citizens.
Tulsa will still prosecute tribal citizens who can trace their lineage back to a Freedmen ancestor — people who were enslaved by the Five Tribes but freed and at one time granted citizenship within their respective tribal nations following the Civil War.
A deal the Muscogee Nation and Tulsa reached in June covers all Native American citizens who commit crimes within the Muscogee Nation reservation. Under the terms of the deal, the city agreed to drop pending municipal charges against Native people and send their cases to tribal court. Moving forward, the city will send most cases involving most tribal citizens to the Muscogee Nation court system.
Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter, The Talegate
But the agreement includes a provision that, in addition to being a tribal citizen, people must have a certified degree of Indian blood for their cases to be sent to tribal court.
Michelle Brooks, a spokesperson for Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said that the settlements “does not expressly include or exclude Freedmen” but follows a standard set by federal courts.
A 19th-century U.S. Supreme Court case, United States v. Rogers, set out the requirement of a blood quantum — a person’s documented degree of American Indian ancestry to be considered a tribal citizen in state and federal court.
Jason Salsman, a spokesperson for the Muscogee Nation, said that the new agreement with Tulsa doesn’t apply to Freedmen because the federal government “requires Indian blood to be considered an Indian.” Tribal citizenship cards issued to Cherokee Freedmen list a zero blood quantum; therefore, they are still under Oklahoma state jurisdiction.
The Five Tribes — the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole nations — all sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. After the Confederacy lost, these tribal nations signed treaties to re-establish their relationships with the United States government and end the practice of chattel slavery. In some cases, tribes agreed to grant citizenship to enslaved people. Then in 1887, the United States enacted the Dawes Act, which created citizenship rolls for tribal citizens who were citizens “by blood” and those who were not. The Dawes rolls for Freedmen had no blood quantum.