Slavery to Liberation- The African American Experience, 2019a

124
interpreters were usually former slaves themselves and fought alongside their Native
counterparts resisting Removal. 15 Meanwhile, Black slaves and members of the
Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek Nations did not often experience the same
kind of freedom as the Black Seminole. However, some Creek slaves like Lucinda Davis
experienced a less intense form of chattel slavery. According to Davis, Creek slaves like
her parents had the freedom of mobility. Her parents lived in their own place and did
not have to stay on their owner’s plantation and work like “de White people and de
Choctaw and Cherokee people say dey had to.” 16 Nonetheless, it is evident that each of
the Five Tribes had contested relationships with former slaves and Black members of
their tribe. 17 As with any peoples, it is a complicated story with ambiguous answers.
These complicated issues between the Five Tribes and slavery and race remained from
the eighteenth century and shaped their lives during their forced migration to Indian
Territory in present-day Oklahoma.
The forced migration of the Five Tribes from the Southeast to the Southwest,
now known as Indian Removal, during the 1830s caused political divisions within
each tribe. In the Cherokee Nation, more traditional and often religious tribal members
urged for the emancipation of slaves for religious and political reasons. Given the
complex and ambiguous relationship between African slaves and Indians, many White
Americans throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century disliked the presence of
15
Klos, “Blacks and the Seminole Removal Debate,” 66.
16
“Lucinda Davis,” The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, (Norman: University of
Oklahoma), 107-17, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/davis1.html.
17
Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of
the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 111;
Barbara Krauthammer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and
Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina
Press, 2013), 72; Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., and Mary Ann Littlefield, “The Beams Family:
Free Blacks in Indian Territory.” Journal of Negro History 61 (1976): 121-31; Daniel F.
Littlefield Jr., The Cherokee Freedmen: from Emancipation to American Citizenship
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 9.