Do not make the mistake of thinking that because my conclusion is the same as another person's that my reasoning is the same
When Racial Discrimination Is Not Just Black and White
By BRENT STAPLES
The historian John Hope Franklin is black to the naked eye. A boulevard named in his honor runs through Greenwood, the black section of Tulsa, Okla., where he lived as a child. The Franklins are not just black, however, but also Native American. Milley Franklin, Mr. Franklin's grandmother, was one-quarter Choctaw and was raised as Choctaw, attending Indian schools. Her children — including John Hope Franklin's father, the lawyer B. C. Franklin — are clearly listed on the official tribal rolls that determined who was a member of the Choctaw Nation. The rolls were important, since tribal members got land when the reservations were dissolved.
Americans are often shocked to learn that black Indians exist at all — and that Native Americans actually held slaves. Like the white slave owners they emulated, Native Americans often fathered children by enslaved women and occasionally — as in Milley Franklin's case — treated those children as family. As a result, millions of black Americans are descended from black people who were either members of the tribes during slavery or adopted into them just after Emancipation.
White families have begun to acknowledge mixed-race connections after centuries of denial. But the attitudes of some Native Americans have not evolved in the same way. Both the Seminole and the Cherokee tribes have employed discriminatory policies to prevent black members from receiving tribal benefits — and to strip them of the right to vote in tribal elections.
The Interior Department, which oversees the tribal governments through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, has historically regarded this kind of racial discrimination as a violation of 19th-century treaties that required the Indian nations to treat black members as full citizens. But the Bush administration could conceivably change course and actually validate these discriminatory policies.
Posted by P6 at September 12, 2003 10:12 PM | Trackback URL: http://www.prometheus6.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1622The book "Indians in American History" edited by Frederick Hoxie and Peter Iverson has a lengthly discussion of Native Americans in the South and how and why they got into slave-holding. Ultimately, it seems to be the same as some other minority groups: they hoped to pass as white rather than be classed as black, so they adopted white ways as much as they could.