Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
The Okla Falaya Band of Choctaw Freedmen is seeking federal recognition, having submitted the request on April 26 to the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, arguing that constitutional law and the 1866 Treaty between the U.S. and the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes make them tribal citizens.
“The Okla Falaya Band of Choctaw Freedmen is not asking for special treatment. We are asking for what the United States government promised us in 1866 and has never delivered: recognition, citizenship rights, and the enforcement of federal trust obligations,” El Haq Malak Bey, principal representative of the Okla Falaya Band of Choctaw Freedmen, told ICT.
The petition submitted by the Okla Falaya Band of Choctaw Freedmen includes a request for four parcels of land held in trust by the Montgomery Family Irrevocable Trust to be considered Native lands.
Unlike traditional recognition models that require tribes to surrender land into Bureau of Indian Affairs trust, the band petitioned congress to retain full ownership and control of its lands under the Supreme court rulings of United States v. Sandoval and United States v. McGowan.
United States v. Sandoval determined that Congress can regulate distinct Indigenous communities as long as the designation isn’t arbitrary. In McGowan, the Supreme Court determined that Congress has the power to define what are Native lands.
Under this model, instead of the BIA holding the legal title to property, the land would be held in trust by the band while receiving all protections and benefits of Native land status, which allows for federal funding and access to programs like Indian Health Services.
The 1866 Treaty between the U.S. and Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes abolished slavery and granted the Freedmen and their descendants citizenship in those tribes.
“The Choctaw Nation amended its constitution to require blood quantum for membership — a standard specifically designed to exclude Freedmen descendants, many of whom have both African and Choctaw ancestry but were classified as ‘Freedmen’ by the Dawes Commission regardless of their actual lineage. Overnight, an entire community was erased from the rolls of a nation they had been part of for nearly a century,” Bey told ICT.
The Dawes Rolls were compiled between 1898 and 1914 to dismantle communal tribal landholdings and allotted individual land parcels among the Five Civilized Tribes.
The rolls designated individuals with varying degrees of Indigenous ancestry from full Native to non-Native.
The amended Choctaw Constitution of 1983 uses the final rolls to trace lineal descent. Any person labeled as a Freedman would not qualify for membership under the 1983 Choctaw Constitution.
ICT reached out to the Choctaw Nation inquiring about its support for federal recognition for the Okla Falaya Nation. A Choctaw spokesman said, “We are currently evaluating this issue and our legal team will review this matter further.”
The petition asks for Congress to use its unrestricted powers to recognize the band as opposed to the BIA 83 process, which is an administrative process used by the Department of the Interior to officially acknowledge a group as a federally recognized tribe.
Part of the BIA 83 process includes a blood quantum requirement that the band says is “structurally inaccessible to Freedmen communities.”
Congress has recognized Native communities before with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina being the most recent federally recognized tribe recognized in this manner.
“This is our Trail of Tears. Not a march across stolen land, though our ancestors endured that too, but a march through courthouses where the doors keep closing before anyone reads what we have to say,” Bey told ICT. “We are still marching.”
The post A Choctaw Freedmen Band is seeking federal tribal recognition appeared first on ICT.
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