Some Cherokee families held enslaved Black people and mixed blood lines

Evidence

It is this struggle that the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association was founded to advance. And it is an indication of this complicated racial and political history that the association’s founder and current president is Marilyn Vann, a descendent of the extended family of “Rich Joe” and James Vann. Marilyn Vann is Cherokee “by blood” as well as the descendant of Black people owned by Cherokees. She and others among the conference organizers and speakers bear the surnames of influential plantation-owning nineteenth-century Native American families. Some of these families had been formed, in part, through sexual intimacies across the color line, both freely chosen and forced. Other Native Americans in these tribal nations did not share blood ties with Africans but did share a history of cultural exchange. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing argument that slavery was foundational to Indigenous as well as settler-American development.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘slavery is foundational, not peripheral’ thesis the reader is tracking as a case study.