Elite Native nations in Indian Territory enslaved Black people and allied with the Confederacy.

Evidence

The concerns of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association relate to the outcome of the Civil War in Indian Territory. After the expulsion of the slaveholding Native nations from the South, the wealthiest among them reestablished estates in present-day Oklahoma and used enslaved Black people to rebuild their homes, towns, and fortunes. When the Civil War erupted in South Carolina, it had an impact far beyond the American Southeast. Native leaders to the West in Indian Territory faced a dire decision. Their governments and towns stood within a unique territory on the margins of the United States and the Confederate states. Like the slave states in the South, they might choose to secede and ally with the Confederacy, which would include political representation in the Confederate Congress, or they could elect to remain “loyal” to the Union. Would these Native nations support the United States, with which they had forged many (violated) treaties in the past and by whom they had been abandoned at the start of the war as violence broke out in Indian Territory, or would they join with the Southern Confederacy, the government with which they shared certain principles of custom and racial ideology but had no history of treaty relations? After decades of participation in Southern plantation culture, Native leaders in Indian Territory identified as slaveholders and referred to their people as slaveholding nations. Though the political picture was complex, in many of these nations significant factions chose to support the Confederate states. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing thesis: slavery’s reach extended beyond the Anglophone South into Native nations, deepening the ‘foundational not peripheral’ case.
• QUESTION: The framing notes the US ‘abandoned’ these nations at the start of the war — worth chasing how the US violated or voided its Indian treaties during the conflict.