File under: indigenization, decolonization, land protection, protect the South River Forest, Muscogee (Creek) Tribe, 2021 stomp dance ceremony, Native American Heritage Month
Dropping my interview with Muscogee (Creek) Tribe members—Mekko (Chief) Chebon Kernell currently based in Helvpe Ceremonial Grounds in Eastern Oklahoma and Dr. Craig Womack, professor of literature formerly of Emory University—which was recorded on Nov. 15. This aired on WRFG on Friday and I’m sharing some additional resources here to go along with this. Listen in here for a special explainer in the beginning. Intro music track “By Summer” by Often.
To fully understand this movement, it’s important to develop political education regarding the complicated history of harm that is colonization. Last week, my education path took me to the ongoing controversy within the tribe regarding the Creek Freedmen and the history of slavery. This conversation is ongoing and there are efforts being made to build bridges of connection and healing within communities, as expressed by the Mekko. I look forward to sharing more conversations and insights on this soon as we continue to build relationship and with informed prior consent of the tribe.
Some additional resources I said I would share:
– The book The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family by Mark Auslander
– Wikipedia page for the Creek Freedmen.
Quote: “Most of the Freedmen were former slaves of tribal members who had lived in both upper and lower Creek territories in the Southeast. In some villages, Creek citizens married enslaved men or women, and had mixed-race children with them. Interracial marriage was then common, and many Creek Freedmen were partly of Creek Indian ancestry. Because most of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation allied with the Confederacy, after the Civil War’s Union victory, the United States in 1866 required a new treaty with the Creek Nation and others of the Five Civilized Tribes, which also had allied with the Confederacy.”
– An article in The Hill reporting on the Creek Freedmen’s push for their birth rights; the Creek Freedmen were disenfranchised by the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe in 1979. The Creek Freedmen refers to African Americans who were given their freedom from Native American tribes in 1866 and their descendants; many don’t know that both freed and enslaved Africans “once lived with and were owned by Native Americans.” (Published Dec. 2020)
– Wikipedia page of the Five Civilized Tribes, which includes Muscogee (Creek)
– “Black Native American descendants fighting for right to belong,” NBC News, Nov. 2020.
– “Tribes to Confront Bias Against Descendants of Enslaved People,” New York Times, May 2021.
– “Black, Native American and Fighting for Recognition in Indian Country,” New York Times, Sept. 2020
– “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” Kathryn E. Holland Braund [scholarly article, 36 pages]
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INDIGENOUS LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This interview and writing were recorded and produced on the sacred, ancestral lands of the Muscogee (Creek) Tribe now known as “Atlanta, Ga.” The Muscogee (Creek) tribes were forcibly removed from their homelands beginning in 1821. Tribal members, whose ancestors have resided in so-called Eastern Oklahoma at the Helvpe ceremonial grounds for generations, returned to their sacred homelands for the first time in 200 years to be in ceremony and reconnect with the land this past Saturday, Nov. 27. This migration took place on the heels of Atlanta City Council’s decision to authorize a ground lease of 381 acres of South River Forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation for $10/year.
