Native American Freedmen

The term Freedmen refers to descendants of people of African American descent who were enslaved by what are known as the Five Civilized Tribes.^[1][2] As sovereign nations within the United States, each tribe is at liberty to define their relationship to their Freedmen, with some allowing Freedmen petitions for enrollment in the tribe, and others explicitly forbidding the enrollment of Freedmen or outright disenrolling any that had historically at one point been enrolled.^[3] Some tribes have never enrolled their enslaved. The term is also applied to those who are descended from those enslaved African descendants who voluntarily joined and/or held kinship with the Seminole Nation, including those who had fled from the Seminole Nation when it adopted the practice of slavery, to Mexico — these people today being known as Mascogos.) The term Freedmen is sometimes applied in literature as encompassing both the enslaved and emancipated, as well as either class' decendants.

Freedmen, both enslaved and free, who were amongst these tribes, were forcibly deported alongside members of the tribes from the now-Southeastern United States westward to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.^[4]