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A Nation Divided

Seminole rift more than a black-and-white issue

By Andrew Metz | Staff Correspondent

December 22, 2003

Wewoka, Okla. - Kenneth Chambers, chief of the Seminole Nation, is absolutely sure of the truth of the matter.

"There is no black Seminole," he expostulated on a recent day, rising from his chair to drive the point home like a preacher warning of hell and damnation.

In this ink spot of an Indian town, however, not far from the tribe's headquarters on the Oklahoma prairie, the faces of Wewoka present a conflicting impression.

"My folks is Indian," said Roosevelt Davis, a man as dark as any of African descent. Walking through the long leaf pines he planted on land that has been his family's for almost 100 years, he put his hand on his chest and said simply, "I'm Seminole."

After two centuries of coexistence that has rarely made most history books, a chasm has opened between the descendants of the Seminole people, Indians and escaped slaves who banded together in Florida against the white onslaught and were eventually deposited here along what became known as the Trail of Tears.

Though history and intermingling made cousins of the two groups, time and money and the modern experiences of being black or Indian or both have chewed away at all they shared in common, leaving the ligaments of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma exposed and aching.

The blacks, still known around here as Freedmen,have been excluded from millions of dollars awarded to the Seminole in the early 1990s for the seizure of their land in Florida a century earlier. And three years ago they were stripped of their Seminole status altogether through the imposition of an ancestral blood standard for membership that few could prove.

The government later forced the tribe to restore their standing, but to this day the Freedmen are denied access to many benefits and services because they cannot show sufficient Indian heritage based on a 19th-century identification system that was stacked against them to begin with.

"You can't just judge us on the color of our skin," said Sylvia Davis, Roosevelt's daughter, who traces her ancestry to the legendary Seminole Chief Billy Bowlegs, a warrior who helped battle the United States to a draw during the Florida Indian wars of the 1800s.

Davis, 49, has been waging her own legal fight for recognition as a Seminole and the rights that come with it.

"When they were on that Trail of Tears there weren't no Freedmen. When we were in Florida, there weren't no Freedmen. It was black Indians," said Davis, a former tribal council member representing a Freedmen band. "Who are these people to say I don't have enough Indian in my blood?"

Many who have peered into this conflict have written it off to another instance of bias against black Americans, albeit from an ethnic group with its own long history of oppression. Yet the intersection of these races is as much about the complicated legacy of frontier history and American Indians' modern struggle for self-definition.

"It is overly simplistic to say, 'Oh, these people are just being racist because they want to keep all the money,'" said Circe Sturm, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, who has written on native identity and the experience of black Indians. "There are deeper forces at work. ... People who have complicated histories like the Seminole have felt for a number of years the tension to pick sides."

As far back as the mid-18th century, escaped slaves and runaways from a smattering of tribes were coalescing in Florida, according to scholars of the subject, giving birth to the multicolored confederacy that came to be known as the Seminole. The name itself is taken from the Spanish cimarron, which evolved from meaning stray cattle to slaves who ran away.

While some tribes held black slaves, the relations among the Seminole were more egalitarian, though the two groups tended to maintain their own communities within the larger coalition.

The emerging tribe appeared so intermingled during the Indian wars that one of the U.S. commanders, Gen. Thomas Sidney Jesup, told Congress that he was fighting "a Negro war."

"The Seminole was never an Indian tribe," said Joseph Opala, an anthropologist at James Madison University in Virginia, who has studied the Seminole since the 1970s. "It was a multiethnic tribe to start."

It was only once the tribe was transported to Indian Territory -- present-day Oklahoma -- that cracks formed, Opala said. The slave-holding ways of other Indians planted there infiltrated the Seminole, many of whom sided with the South in the Civil War.

In 1866, the tribe agreed to a treaty with the United States that adopted the blacks as members -- a watershed event that resonates today as the two sides grapple over entitlement to the $56-million land award, about $14 million of which was for Seminole still living in Florida.

The government and the tribe have held that the blacks were not officially Seminole members until the treaty and were not landowners at the time of the seizure of Florida in 1823. The Freedmen, however, insist that the treaty only put in writing a well-established status and that their ancestors were landowners even before the 1800s. Furthermore, they say, Congress intended the money to go to the entire tribe.