18 Facts About Black Seminole

Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms.

Since the 1930s, the Black Seminole Freedmen have struggled with cycles of exclusion from the Black Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma.

In 2000 the Black Seminole Nation voted to restrict membership to those who could prove descent from a Black Seminole on the Dawes Rolls of the early 20th century, which excluded about 1,200 Freedmen who were previously included as members.

The Black Seminole held some slaves, as did the Creek and other Southeast Native American tribes.

Black Seminole culture that took shape after 1800 was a dynamic mixture of African, Native American, Spanish, and slave traditions.

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Black Seminole society was based on a matrilineal kinship system, in which inheritance and descent went through the maternal line.

The Black Seminole settlements were highly militarized, unlike the communities of most of the slaves in the Deep South.

The military nature of the African and Seminole relationship led General Edmund Pendleton Gaines, who visited several flourishing black Seminole settlements in the 1800s, to describe the African Americans as "vassals and allies" of the Seminole.

That changed again in the new territory when the Black Seminole were obliged to settle on fixed lots of land and take up settled agriculture.

Conflict arose in the territory because the transplanted Black Seminole had been placed on land allocated to the Creek, who had a practice of chattel slavery.

The Black Seminole followed the nativistic principles of their Great Spirit.

Black Seminole enslaved people had a syncretic form of Christianity brought with them from the plantations.

Together, in Florida, they developed Afro-Black Seminole Creole, identified in 1978 as a distinct language by the linguist Ian Hancock.

The black Seminole Scouts played a lead role in the Texas-Indian Wars of the 1870s, when they were based at Fort Clark, Texas, the home of the Buffalo Soldiers.

In 1900, Black Seminole Freedmen numbered about 1,000 on the Oklahoma reservation, about one-third of the total population at the time.

However, the black Seminole descendants asserted their ancestors had held and farmed land in Florida, and suffered property losses as a result of US actions.

The Black Seminole Freedmen believed the tribe's 21st-century decision to exclude them was racially based and has opposed it on those grounds.

In October 2000, the Black Seminole Nation filed its own suit against the Interior Department, contending it had the sovereign right to determine tribal membership.