Introduction

On June 12, 1998, a suit came to court that had been filed within the Judicial Appeals Tribunal of the Cherokee Nation on behalf of Bernice Riggs, a descendent of Cherokee Freedmen. The suit sought the restoration of the terms of an 1866 treaty that would allow descendants of former slaves and free persons of color in the Cherokee Nation to be treated as Cherokee citizens entitled to all the rights and privileges of such including voting in National elections.² The action in this suit dates back to litigation first filed as a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June, 1984 by sixteen people who claimed that the rights of citizenship of the tribe's black freedmen have been continually ignored in spite of the precedence established by the 1866 treaty.³ The suit has yet to be resolved.

The struggle for an inclusive Cherokee Nation which these lawsuits represent is not a new one; the 1866 treaty was forged following the bitter struggle of the Civil War in the Indian Territory-- a war in which the Indian Territory paid a higher price than perhaps any other state in the union.⁴ One of the people participating in the current lawsuit is David Cornsilk, a Cherokee activist,⁵ and a lifelong member of a traditionalist secret society among the Cherokee Indians entitled the Keetoowah Society.⁶ In participating in the lawsuit, Cornsilk continues the struggle that began even before the Civil War and battles for the ideals established by his ancestors in the Keetoowah Society. The Keetoowah Society was formed in the mid nineteenth century among "fullbloods" in the Cherokee Nation and helped frame the ideal of an Cherokee identity that was rooted in traditional culture as opposed the prevailing ideology of "race." The Keetoowah fought and gave their lives for this ideal in the Civil War, and their survivors established the terms for the 1866 treaty which granted citizenship to freedmen and free persons of color of Cherokee origin.⁷ That David Cornsilk continues the struggle of his foreparents speaks to the continuing importance of their values and the enduring nature of their story. It also speaks of the continuing struggle for justice in the Cherokee Nation. This dissertation is an attempt to tell that story.

The issue of what it means to be a "Cherokee," or moreover what it means to be an "Indian," is one of the most controversial and pivotal issues that confront Native Americans today.⁸ It is more than just an academic discussion when people assume Cherokee identity in order to reap the economic benefits of tribal identity, the religious benefits of Native American spirituality, or the social benefits of becoming an "oppressed minority." In the twentieth century, identity has come to be defined according to standards established by the federal government with respect to issues such as "blood quantum" and genealogical descendance from persons "recognized" as Cherokee by the federal government. However, this emphasis upon the ideological construct of "race" in defining Cherokee identity as derivative of percentage of Cherokee "blood" defined within the framework of genealogy as in the sense of "fullblood," "mixedblood," or "part-Cherokee" is a recent phenomenon in the Cherokee Nation.⁹ Before the nineteenth century, it was hardly even a issue. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it became the issue for the Cherokee Nation.

The question of what it means to be a Cherokee was perhaps the pivotal issue in the Civil War as it came to pass in the Indian Territory. The "civilization" program of the federal government carried out under the auspices of federal agents and missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sought to redefine Cherokee identity in terms of assimilation to European concepts of civilization and modernity. Many of the Cherokee went along with the program of civilization, began to define themselves in the terms of white culture and values, educated their children in Christian missions, and adopted the plantation farming system of the Southeastern United States. Others resisted this tendency towards accommodation and clung to the culture and values that found expression in Cherokee language and worldview, traditional religious practices, inherited social structures, and conservative political formations. From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, these values were held in subtle tension by the syncretic and inclusive nature of traditional society; it was the issue of slavery that shattered this fragile balance and dragged the Cherokee Nation into a maelstrom from which it was barely able to emerge intact.

Slavery represented the quintessential evil of European culture. Many of the Native Americans having been slaves themselves from the sixteenth century onward, they had developed a particular disaffection for the "peculiar institution." The Cherokee had also seen the terribly destructive influence that the Indian slave trade had played upon their own economic and social structure in the latter half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth. That white "civilization" in the developing United States was being built upon a system of racial codification and disenfranchisement and the implications of such for themselves could not have failed to escape the eyes of people for whom the concept of "race" was an anomaly. When persons of their own culture began to abandon traditional teachings and embrace this alien and threatening ideology and all of its social, economic, and political trappings, it set in motion forces that could not be constrained. These forces came to a cataclysmic collision in the years 1861-1865.

The Civil War in the Indian Territory was a component of the larger contest for national unity that helped define this United States, yet the causes which motivated the partisans in these battles were quite different. These were very much rooted in the struggle for identity within the Cherokee people as well as a larger national identity for the Cherokee Nation. While history books often detail the struggle for the preservation of the United States from the divisive challenge of a pernicious ideology of inequality, they seldom explore the powerful conflict for national sovereignty that was made manifest on the faraway plains of what is now Oklahoma. Though the battles were yet few, the losses were as great and the price paid as high as any other participant in the Civil War. Playing a decisive role in this struggle were African American troops, many of whom were members of the Five Nations of the Southeastern United States. Though the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry gets the glory for being the first blacks to see combat in the Civil War, the honor actually goes to these First Kansas Colored Volunteers.

This is also a history of the Cherokee people that deals with the complex issue of "race" and attempts to represent the presence of African Americans in the Cherokee Nation as more than just peripheral. It is also an attempt to capture the complexity of religious forces that shaped the Cherokee Nation in this critical period of its history. As the Baptist churches arose within communities of "fullblood Indians" and African Americans, these churches were from their very beginnings in the Indian Territory composed of multiracial congregants. These Baptist churches served as a rallying point for organized resistance to the "civilization" program and recruitment centers for those opposed to the institution of slavery. Out of these communities of resistance came the forces that turned the tide of the Civil War in the Indian Territory. Race and religion were dynamically interrelated forces in the Indian Territory in the nineteenth century, together they worked to create a tremendous impetus for political and social change.

At the center of the conflict that resulted in the Civil War in the Indian Territory were two secret societies, each profoundly influenced by the Freemasonic lodges which arose within the Indian Territory as early as the late eighteen forties. The "progressives" organized the Knights of the Golden Circle, a forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan closely affiliated with ideology of the white supremacist George W.L. Bickley. The "progressives" dedicated the organization to promoting the interests of slavery and punishing abolitionists within the Cherokee Nation. The "conservatives" organized and founded, in a Baptist church, the traditionalist Keetoowah Society that committed itself to the preservation of the "old way" and the abolition of slavery. It was in the Baptist churches and through the mechanisms of the underground abolitionist movement within the Baptist missionary outreach that the Keetoowah Society carried out its political mobilization. These two secret societies, both composed of many former members of Indian Territory Masonic lodges, fought each other on opposite sides in the Civil War. From the first shots at Wilson's Creek to the defining moments of the reconstruction of the Cherokee Nation, these secret societies stood at odds with each other over the nature and constitution of Cherokee identity.

And when it was over, the Cherokee Nation healed its tattered soul and arose from the catastrophe of the Civil War as a unified political entity. Through the power of the "old way" and the traditional ethic of harmony, former enemies put aside their ancient hatreds that the Nation might once again stand tall in the face of continued aggression by the forces of mercantilism and cultural deconstruction. At the center of the rebirth of the Cherokee Nation following the Civil War was the Keetoowah Society. Throughout the history of the Cherokee Nation during the turbulent years of the mid-nineteenth century, the Keetoowah Society fought for the preservation of the "old ways" and the perpetuation of a national unity rooted in traditional culture. When some in the Cherokee Nation lost their souls to the false idolatry of race, of class, and of a foreign culture, the Keetoowah clung to that which granted them unity in community, political freedom, and religious transcendence.

The Civil War in the Indian Territory was fought so that African American Cherokee would be granted all of the rights and privileges of membership in the Cherokee Nation. After five years of desolation the Cherokee emerged from the war with their numbers reduced from 21,000 to 14,000, and their whole nation in ashes. Some 2,200 Cherokee fought on the Union side; as many as eight hundred lost their lives. Even as early as 1863, one-third of the adult women in the Nation were widows and one-fourth of the children were orphans. No state was to suffer greater losses than did the Indian Territory in the Civil War. The Cherokee Treaty of 1866 granted freedom for all former slaves, abolished slavery forever, and granted African Americans all of the rights of native Cherokee. In spite of this, African American Cherokee are to this day denied the rights of Cherokee citizenship that the Ketoowah ansd their forefathers fought and died for. Until this historic injustice is corrected, their losses will have been in vain. It is towards that end that this work is dedicated.