Seminole Nation Divided by Race, Money

WEWOKA, Okla. — Wilburt Cudjoe holds a piece of his identity in a black, wrinkled hand.

The white plastic card says he is a member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. It also says he is the descendant of African slaves, people who escaped plantations in the 1700s to join the Seminoles.

The card does not say that Cudjoe, 78, is an Indian by blood. And that turns his soft, warm eyes sad.

Tribal leaders say Cudjoe and 1,500 other black Seminoles who cannot trace at least one-fourth of their ancestry to native people may not sit on the tribal council. And those without at least one-eighth native blood, they say, cannot vote in tribal elections or share in $42 million Congress allotted in the 1990s as compensation for running the Seminoles out of Florida more than 100 years earlier.

The dispute, now tied up in federal courts, is ripping the Seminole Nation apart, threatening to break a bond that spans four centuries. It’s a battle of race, money and the right of a sovereign nation to decide who is an Indian.

“We were just like brothers and sisters until this little money come up,” said Cudjoe, a small, soft-spoken man. “They are forgetting their history. Their past is entwined with the blacks.”

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To understand what is happening to the Seminoles, it is necessary to know something of their unusual history.

Unlike other tribes, they were not a distinct people before the white man arrived on North America. Their origins lie in small bands of refugees -- members of the Creeks and about five other tribes who escaped white invaders by fleeing into the empty swamps of Florida in the mid-1700s. Soon, escaped slaves from plantations in South Carolina and Georgia joined them for the chance to live free.

Together, they struggled to survive in the Florida swamps, built communities, fought U.S. soldiers and evolved into a distinct people.

Intermarriage and time have blurred the lineage of many Indian tribes. Black blood flows strong through the Narragansetts in Rhode Island, Lumbees of North Carolina, northeastern Pequots of Connecticut. And as bingo halls and casinos enrich some once-poor tribes, there have been frequent disputes over who has enough native blood to qualify as an Indian.

What makes the Seminoles different is that blacks -- estelusti, in the Seminole language of Muscogee -- were part of the tribe from the beginning, owning land, serving as interpreters and negotiators with the whites, teaching the others how to grow rice.

“It was an Afro-Indian tribe, a multiethnic reliance,” said anthropologist Joseph Opala of James Madison University in Virginia.

Even their name says so. Seminole is a corruption of the Spanish word “cimarron,” meaning “runaway,” he said.

In Florida, the Seminoles still could not completely evade the U.S. Army, which was intent on forcing tribes throughout the South to move west of the Mississippi in the 1820s and 1830s to make room for white settlers. Hundreds of Seminoles agreed to leave and were taken west by boat across the Gulf of Mexico, then on barges up the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers to Oklahoma.

Some bands battled on deep in the swamps. Today, their ancestors make up the Seminole Tribe of Florida -- which never signed a peace treaty with the government.

But for the Seminoles who moved to the golden prairies of Oklahoma, life changed quickly.

Black Seminoles found that their knowledge of rice cultivation and their resistance to swamp diseases no longer had value. Worse, the federal government initially put the Seminoles under the control of the Creeks, another transplanted tribe. The Creeks held blacks as slaves, Opala said. And by the mid-1850s, the Seminoles followed their example.

During the Civil War, several tribes, including the Seminoles, sided with the Confederacy. In 1866, the federal government imposed a new treaty on the Seminoles, reducing their land holdings in Oklahoma and restoring blacks to equal status in the tribe.

Relations between black and blood Seminoles were strained during the long era of segregation when, even in Indian territory, blacks went to separate schools.

But for the last 40 years, the Seminoles have lived together mainly in harmony -- until the federal money came.

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Wayne Shaw, chairman of the Seminole general council, takes a lazy drag off his cigarette and shakes his head. “There’s no such thing as a black Seminole,” he said.

Since the $42 million arrived, the opinion has been heard often in Seminole County, scrubland where many of the 15,000 blood and black Seminoles live side by side in houses and shacks, the black Seminoles outnumbered 9-to-1.

From the start, the tribal council decided that only blood Seminoles were entitled to a share of the money, which it doles out in small amounts to tribal members who apply for help with such expenses as home repairs and school tuition.

Two years ago, the council formalized the distinction between black and blood, changing the tribe’s constitution to double the blood requirement for tribal council representation to one-fourth Indian ancestry. Generally, federal law gives Indian tribes the right to decide who is a member and who is not. However, every tribe’s freedom of action is limited by its treaties with the United States and its own constitution, which can’t be changed without federal approval.

The treaty of 1866 made black Seminoles full members, and the federal government has refused to ratify the constitutional amendments that effectively banished black Seminoles from the tribe.

The Seminole Nation sued and held a new election for tribal positions, with only blood Seminoles allowed to vote. Ken Chambers, a half-blood Seminole whose followers wear T-shirts that say, “Seminole by Blood,” was elected chief.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs recognizes the former chief and is withholding the compensation money from the tribe. Federal officials declined comment on the situation, citing the pending litigation.

Chambers insists that when the blacks fled to Florida to escape their white masters, the Seminoles took them in, but that the two cultures never truly mixed.

Black Seminoles don’t speak Muscogee, he says. They don’t know how to cook blue bread or grape dumplings or sofkey, a corn dish similar to hominy. They don’t join the blood Indians as they welcome another harvest by stomp dancing and singing into the night.

Blacks never had equal rights within the tribe, Chambers contends, and aren’t entitled to them now.

In Indian country -- a smattering of meeting grounds and gambling halls about 60 miles east of Oklahoma City -- blood Indians say money isn’t really the issue. Rather, it’s preserving their heritage and their right as a sovereign nation to decide who is a member and who is not.

“If you want to keep the bloodlines going, you got to keep ‘em separate,” said Jerry Harjo, who serves up fry bread and bean soup for the tribal lunch program. “The way we’re heading now, the Indian tribe will probably not even exist.”

Lewis Johnson, assistant curator of the Seminole Nation Museum, said the tribe is not trying to rewrite history. It’s just that the common fight for freedom that brought blacks and native people together 200 years ago doesn’t apply anymore, he said.

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Cudjoe, the 78-year-old black Seminole, believes that his great-great-grandfather came on a slave ship from the west coast of Africa. He was sold to a rice plantation, then escaped to Florida and joined the Seminoles in the late 1700s.

Two of Cudjoe’s brothers, twins who sat on the tribal council before their deaths, once traveled from Oklahoma to Sierra Leone, where they were honored by the president as stolen members of the Gullah tribe.

He smiles as he looks at a yellowed photograph of his grandfather, Witty, who is said to have lived to 116 on the Seminole County grassland that the government gave him.

His ancestor may have been black, but he was very much a Seminole, Cudjoe says. He spoke Muscogee. He ate fry bread and Indian corn. He passed on the creed of the black Seminoles to his grandchildren.

Wilburt Cudjoe still owns 72 acres of the Oklahoma land where his ancestors farmed cotton and peanuts. He takes his great-grandchildren fishing there in a pond. He tells them: Never sell the land. Never forget the past.

“I’m of the Seminole tribe,” Cudjoe said. “I don’t care what nobody says.”