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The Muscogee Nation, or Muscogee (Creek) Nation, [3] is a federally recognized Native American tribe based in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The nation descends from the historic Muscogee Confederacy , a large group of indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands .
Creek Freedmen is a term for emancipated Creeks of African descent who were slaves of Muscogee Creek tribal members before 1866. They were emancipated under the tribe's 1866 treaty with the United States following the American Civil War, during which the Creek Nation had allied with the Confederate States of America.
The criteria for Citizenship is that you must be Creek by Blood and trace back to a direct ancestor listed on the 1906 Dawes Roll by issuance of birth and/or death certificates.
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation Citizenship Card is issued by the Citizenship Board Office. This card includes a roll number as well as a photo of the Citizen, the Creek Blood quantum only, name, date of birth, and other additional information.
- Overview
- The deep impact of the Dawes Act
- Creeks and the fight for self-determination
When Rhonda Grayson was growing up in Oklahoma, summer visits to her grandparents' house in Wewoka meant time spent in the kitchen with her grandmother. Together they cooked peach cobbler and traditional Native foods like wild onions, poke salad and hominy, the corn used to make grits.
Cooking was just one way Grayson learned about the rich history and culture of the generations of Black Native Americans who came before her.
"I was always keenly aware of my African ancestry," said Grayson, 51. Part of her lineage was Native, too. "I always knew that we were Creek."'
One of those Black Creek ancestors was Grayson's great-grandmother America Cohee.
Cohee was an original enrollee in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. For generations, Black Creeks like Cohee had been a part of the tribe, until one day they weren't.
For more than 40 years, Black Creek descendants like Rhonda Grayson have been fighting to regain citizenship in the Creek tribe. Because their lineage also harks back to the dark days of chattel slavery, these would-be members of the Creek Nation have been shut out. In a year marked by historic uprisings in support of Black lives, these Black Native Americans say now is the time to acknowledge their rights, too.
Based in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, the Creek Nation today has more than 86,000 enrolled citizens. It is one of the largest federally recognized tribes in the United States. The nation's land includes more than 7,000 square miles across Oklahoma, stretching from Tulsa in the north to the Canadian River at its southern edge.
The Creek people descend from Indigenous tribes who lived in the Southeastern U.S. long before European colonization, but eventually those two histories converged.
As chattel slavery became a core economic engine in the colonies, some tribes, including the Creek, also capitalized on slave labor.
The late 1700s was "when the tribe really began to pick up on Black enslavement," said Alaina E. Roberts, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. The Creek Nation adopted chattel slavery as a strategic effort, Roberts said, to ally with white settlers by assimilating to their culture.
But assimilation wouldn't stop the forces of colonization. In the 1830s, the federal government forced the Creek people from their land in Alabama and Georgia to the newly created Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.
Among those relocated were free Blacks living as members of the tribe or those with mixed African and Indigenous heritage. Others were enslaved.
Sharon Lenzy-Scott's mother, Adlene Perryman-Lenzy, was one of the members who was disenrolled around the time the federal payments were approved.
"They just said that you were no longer a citizen of the nation," Lenzy-Scott said. One day she was a Creek citizen and the next she wasn't, and she was ineligible for future federal payments.
Perryman-Lenzy fought to be re-enrolled for more than 20 years. But that didn't happen by the time she died in 2000.
Since the 1970s, descendants of Creek Freedmen like Perryman-Lenzy have tried to re-enroll and been denied.
For the Creek Freedmen descendants today, disenrollment has meant the loss of cultural identity, including recognition of the Creek Nation's practice of slavery.
It has also fractured the descendants' sense of belonging, a source of pain that Rhonda Grayson said is still felt today.
- Claire Tighe
The mixed blood Creek Nation Perryman family was one of the first families to settle in this area and operated the first post office in 1882 at the home of George Perryman near what is now 41st & Trenton.
A full-blood Creek, born in the “Old Nation.” In the War of 1812, when a boy, he was taken prisoner, and was reared by a white man. He emigrated from Alabama in 1829, and was educated at the Union Mission after reaching Indian Territory.
People also ask
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