Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
PHOENIX – For Alaina E. Roberts, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, the dark history of slavery in the United States hits home.
Roberts’ ancestors were slaves. They were slaves to members of the Chickasaw Nation.
“My dad’s family, his grandfather, great-grandfather, their grandfather are from Ardmore, Oklahoma. They came to Ardmore from Mississippi with members of the Love and Colbert families who were their slave holders,” Roberts told ICT.
Members of five tribal nations, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek and Seminole, owned slaves. They were known as the “Five Civilized Tribes” in the mid-19th Century for their adoption of European customs and practices. The tribes officially freed their enslaved people in 1866 with new treaties with the US government.
In an 1866 treaty, the Choctaw and Chickasaw were required to abolish slavery and grant tribal citizenship to their former slaves, known as Freedmen.
Today, Choctaw Freedmen and their descendants who don’t have proof of direct lineage from a Native person on the final Choctaw Dawes Rolls aren’t considered Choctaw tribal citizens as the tribe never granted them citizenship.
The Dawes Rolls are official records listing individuals approved for tribal land allotment in Indian Territory (now Eastern Oklahoma) between 1898 and 1914. Individuals were categorized as citizens by blood, intermarried whites, or Freedmen.
The Cherokee Nation granted citizenship to its Freedmen in 2017 along with the Muscogee Creek after a 2025 US Supreme Court decision reaffirmed Freedmen’s right to citizenship.
“Freedmen are not strangers. You know, there are lots of Freedmen who live in Ardmore who live next door to citizens who go to school with citizens. We’re not scary people who are trying to take anything away. We just want recognition of this shared history,” Roberts told ICT.
Tribal citizenship allows access to various government resources, like Indian Health Service-provided healthcare, and scholarships and college funding reserved for Native people.
“I definitely acknowledge that it was Europeans and white Americans who introduced the idea of racialized slavery and it certainly wasn’t all Chickasaws and Choctaws who owned slaves. It was a small minority. But that small minority was composed of people like legislators, governors and chiefs, people who ended up making sure that Chickasaw and Choctaw life still revolved around slaveholders and gave them a lot of power,” Roberts told ICT.
Opponents to Freedmen citizenship cite Indigenous ancestry.
“A key disagreement is that we’re not Indian, which is not true. For a lot of us, we have Chickasaw or Choctaw ancestry. I have Chickasaw ancestry. But even if we are not Chickasaw by blood, Indian is a legal identity that is tied to a political nation,” Roberts told ICT.
“Some people are defensive because they think that I am blaming them for something their ancestors did, which I am not. But a lot of Chickasaws and Choctaws I’ve met in the last few years have been interested in learning more because this is their history. This is our family history. It tells us about what the Chickasaw and Chocolate nations were like before removal.
How they survived by getting into capitalism and agricultural cotton production and this is kind of the other half of the story.”
Roberts continues to raise awareness about the history of Chickasaw and Choctaw Freedmen who continue to fight for recognition today.
“I’m trying to figure out what do Choctaw and Chickasaw citizens want? How can I get to know them? How can Freedmen get to know them and have conversations about what it would look like to have Freedmen citizenship and to help other citizens learn about us and our history,” Roberts told ICT.