Native slaveholders were a tiny elite who wrote the new laws

Evidence

Even so, within the nations that had signed treaties at Hopewell Plantation, slavery gradually took root. Among the Indigenous nations, Cherokees enslaved the largest number of people, but Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws also developed entrenched systems of Black enslavement tethered to racial prejudice. And although it is the case that enslavers in Native nations were always a small minority of their populations (approximately 2.3 percent by the 1860s, in comparison with approximately 20 percent in the white South), they were also elite members of their rapidly changing societies. These were the men who formed new centralized governing bodies, wrote the laws, and negotiated treaties. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 487

Categorization

• DEFINE: The 2.3% vs 20% comparison defines the scale of Native enslavement while explaining why such a small minority exercised outsized political power — key to the foundational-vs-peripheral taxonomy.