Juneteenth may mark the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas found out they had been freed, but thousands of people in Oklahoma are still fighting for full citizenship in the tribal nations that once held their ancestors in bondage.
Several tribes practiced slavery, and five in Oklahoma — The Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Muscogee nations — signed reconstruction treaties with the U.S. in 1866 abolishing it three years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. They granted the formerly enslaved, known commonly as Freedmen, citizenship within their respective tribes.
