Oklahoma’s Semi-National Nation Denied Vaccines to Black Citizens

At the time, the Seminole nation of Oklahoma began distributing vaccines to tribal citizens, LeEtta Osborne-Sampson had already witnessed nearly two dozen family members die from COVID-19. She was relieved that doses of the vaccine finally arrived to protect those who remained.

But when she showed up at the Indian Health Service clinic in Wewoka, the capital of the Seminole Nation, officials refused to give her a chance. They told her that she was not eligible because her tribal identity card identifies her as a free man, a Seminole citizen who is a descendant of enslaved blacks. When she demanded answers, officials called a tribal policeman.

“It’s a terrible day to find out that your own people are going to let you die,” said Osborne-Sampson, who sits on the tribal council of the Seminole Nation.

Although tribal leaders and the Indian Health Service have been hailed for their successful launch of COVID vaccines across the country, Osborne-Sampson is one of six freed men who told BuzzFeed News that the Seminole nation has denied them vaccines, health services. COVID health and financial relief based on ancestry listed on their tribal ID cards. The freedmen make up about an eighth of the nearly 20,000 citizens of the Seminole Nation and are counted in the tribal census – which the federal government used to allocate more than $ 16 million in CARES funds to the tribe.

The distinction between a “Native American” and a “free man” depends on what free men call racist and outdated ideology “blood citizenship”. All Seminole Freedmen receive tribal identity cards with the words “Citizen Freedman, indigenous blood 0/0” on the front and “Voting benefits only” on the back. Other tribal citizens receive cards that list their quantum of blood (their fraction of “indigenous blood”) without restrictions. Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that the Seminole tribe used these identification cards to deny freedmen access to COVID’s financial and health services.

Indigenous communities across the country have been hit hard by the pandemic, with Native Americans and Alaskan natives dying at more than twice the rate of whites in the United States – higher than any other racial or ethnic group. But for the freedmen, decades of exclusion from their local tribal health services have left them particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 – the same kind of disparities experienced in black communities in the USA.

In early March, just after BuzzFeed News started reporting this story, the Wewoka clinic changed its policy of offering vaccines to anyone over 18, regardless of tribal status. But IHS allocates vaccines to the clinic based on the number of active patients – and since the freedmen are not eligible for any type of healthcare across the Seminole nation, they were not included in the records that determine how many vaccines the clinic receives, the agency confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

In response to questions about why Freedman citizens of the Seminole Nation were denied vaccines at the Wewoka clinic, IHS said it was “coordinating closely with the tribes and the state of Oklahoma to ensure that vaccines reach the indigenous country as soon as possible. quickly and equally as possible. ” Asked about the freedmen being excluded from other services besides the vaccine, the IHS said that “it is not involved in determining the tribal enlistment of individual citizens”.

Seminole Nation did not respond to several requests for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Osborne-Sampson and other freed leaders have been fighting for all the rights and recognition of their tribal governments for decades. Now, they say, the stakes are even higher.

“I don’t want my name on the lights,” said Osborne-Sampson. “I want my place at the table so that our people can survive.”

Dora Thomas, an elderly woman freed and a former member of the Seminole Nation’s tribal council, and his son, Patrick Thomas, a commercial truck driver who is battling his recent removal from the council, requested emergency financial relief from the tribe’s COVID last summer. Both were denied assistance, according to letters sent by the Seminole Nation’s COVID-19 Emergency Assistance Committee: “The review committee determined that you are not eligible to receive Program funding because you do not have a valid Tribal Member card for the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. “

Dora and her husband were hospitalized with COVID-19 in January, and both were placed on ventilators. He died about two weeks later, while she was in a rehab. As a Freedman, Dora was not entitled to health care through the Seminole Nation, so she went to the state to receive public insurance.

The following month, Patrick called to see if he and his mother could be vaccinated through the tribe. He was informed that they were not eligible.

“They hate us so much,” said Patrick. “We are stuck in a system that doesn’t care about us.”

Until March 1, the vaccine policy at the Wewoka Clinic prioritized the health of citizens “by blood,” making exceptions for Libertos living with “Native Americans,” according to a telephone recording reviewed by BuzzFeed News.

Anthony Conley, a member of the Seminole Nation’s tribal council, called the Wewoka clinic in February to see if the freedmen were eligible. A representative said the clinic does not “honor the freedmen” – but if they shared a home with or were caregivers of a “Native American”, they would be eligible.

Despite the policy change, because of these experiences, Conley, Patrick, Dora and Osborne-Sampson said that they no longer want to be vaccinated at the Wewoka clinic.

Blocking access to the vaccine is the latest chapter in a long struggle to deprive freedoms of their rights. The Seminole Freedmen are descendants of formerly enslaved blacks who fled to what is now Florida. After fighting together in the Seminole Wars in the 19th century, both the freedmen and the Seminole Native Americans were forced to move to the Indigenous Territory in modern-day Oklahoma. In the 1866 treaty that the Seminole Nation signed with the United States, the freedmen and their descendants were recognized as equal citizens within the tribe.

But a series of legal struggles has since pitted the tribe – whose leaders assert their sovereign right to determine their own affiliation – against the freedmen. Despite heavy fines from the federal government and a series of lawsuits, which determined that the freedmen were considered full tribal citizens, many say they are still being denied services and treated as second-class.

Tensions between the seminole nation and the freedmen reveal the complicated and often overlooked racial dynamics within many tribes. Cherokee Freedmen, after a series of lawsuits, were declared full citizens in 2017 and now receive full health and financial services. In February, the Cherokee Nation’s Supreme Court removed the term “by blood” from its constitution and laws. Freedmen from the Chickasaw, Creek and Choctaw tribes are not considered citizens and are not eligible for any tribal services. The Seminole Freedmen, meanwhile, stay in the middle: although they are tribal citizens who can vote in elections and have representatives on the council, they still do not have access to health or financial services.

The freedoms controversy gained renewed attention last year after Gary Batton, head of Oklahoma’s Choctaw Nation, wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, resisting a clause in a housing bill that would compel tribes to grant freedoms to full citizenship. In the letter, Batton wrote that the provision would “subjugate the sovereignty” of the Choctaw Nation. “Congress should not be allowed to abuse its power, forcing the Choctaw Nation to fix America’s longstanding problems of systemic racism, rooted in the enslavement of African Americans across America,” wrote Batton, although the Choctaw Tribe also enslaved blacks previously.

Osborne-Sampson thinks that anti-freed tribal leaders hide behind sovereignty as an excuse for their own racism.

“I thought that sovereignty was building the nation, not destroying it,” she said.

After hearing stories of other free men having the vaccine denied, many free men seminole do not bother to try to gain access through the tribe.

Sache Primeaux-Shaw was not prepared to put her 85-year-old grandmother in the humiliating process of not receiving medical care from her own tribe, she said. Instead, after some research, she managed to find a vaccination appointment for her grandmother at a clinic owned by Black in Oklahoma City.

Primeaux-Shaw, a genealogist and historian of the Freedmen, was enrolled as a Seminole Freedman at birth. At primary school, however, she changed her enrollment to her mother’s tribe, the Oklahoma Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, which provides full tribal benefits and services to all citizens. This means that she can now access health benefits that her grandmother, a citizen of the Seminole nation, cannot.

“I don’t want her to die as a second-class citizen,” said Primeaux-Shaw, who believes that anti-blackness within the five tribes has worsened over the past decade in response to growing efforts to defend freedmen.

Marilyn Vann, the president of the Descendants of the Freed of the Five Civilized Tribes, has been organizing for years. His group has spread awareness about the history of the freedmen and advocated that they have equal citizenship in their respective tribes. Vann, a retired engineer from the United States Treasury Department, is also a candidate for the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council.

“When Jim Crow ended, the sky did not fall. It’s not falling now, ”said Vann, referring to when the Cherokee Freedmen were given full citizenship. She believes it is time for the other four tribes to do the same, especially as the pandemic devastates the freedmen community. “As long as people are oppressed, the whole community will become weaker.”

Meanwhile, groups of free men in Oklahoma are organizing to vaccinate their elders. Sylvia Davis, a Seminole Freedmen and former member of the tribal council, said that trying to work with tribal leaders did not get them anywhere. Therefore, Davis, Osborne-Sampson and the Seminole Freedmen say they are raising money to fight exclusions in court. Osborne-Sampson was reluctant to leave the tribe with his affairs, but said the crisis left them with no choice.

While raising money to cover legal costs, leaders of freedmen are organizing demonstrations and working to educate others about their history in the hope of galvanizing the community. They also plan to make the exclusion of freedmen a problem in the upcoming Seminole elections this summer.

Despite their losses, the leaders of the freedmen are hopeful that the pandemic will be the spark that will finally give them their rights. But as the cases continue to spread, Osborne-Sampson said that he fears that this will happen at a very high cost: “How many of us will be left in another six months?” ●

Joseph Lee is an Aquinnah Wampanoag writer who lives in New York City.