Property and Belonging: Allotment and the Transformation of Muscogee (Creek) Citizenship

This paper examines the ways that the federal policy of allotment affected Muscogee (Creek) legal thinking on citizenship in ways that made it more difficult for blacks to assert their citizenship in the Creek Nation.  The paper takes as its point of departure an 1896 ruling by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Creek Nation that the Creek tribal council had no authority to extend citizenship to “any colored persons” who were not included in the nation as part of the 1866 treaty.  Chief Justice T.J. Adams reasoned that this would take lands from Creek citizens in a zero sum struggle for property in land: “The effect of adoption would be to take a portion of the property belonging to each citizen and bestowing it on the adoptee.”  Adams’ statement reduced citizenship to a property right in “the common estate of the tribe.”  In one sense, access to the national lands had always been central to Creek citizenship.  But Adams’ pronouncement depended on a new, but unstated, situation: the US government would soon force the Creek common estate to be divided into individual parcels.  Adopting blacks therefore threatened to reduce the lands that other Creeks would receive as their own.  Adams’ ruling on citizenship marked a sharp shift in Creek thinking toward a more property-centered notion of political inclusion.  Federal pressures to accept allotment catalyzed this shift, undermining a tradition of black political inclusion in the nation, and placed in the position of fighting over something that would divide them and over who was “the nation.”  Furthermore, the rules of this zero sum game were mostly set by Washington, and in order to engage those rules, it was almost impossible not to use the racial logic of the American government.