CVK
(Thanks to Sarah for this tip!)Salon.com has an interesting article about “freedmen,” blacks whose ancestors were enslaved by Cherokee and other tribes, who are suing to become tribal citizens. The tribes, however, are resisting their efforts, say they are ineligible because they don’t have Indian blood:

Their frustration and anger has its roots in the early 19th century, when the Five Tribes adopted race slavery as their own. Although some slaves toiled on sprawling plantations while their masters relaxed on distant verandas, many others labored alongside their owners. Living and working in close quarters, they inevitably became family, marrying Indians and fathering or bearing their children. Intermarriage blurred racial boundaries and sometimes made it difficult to separate family slaves from family members. By the outbreak of the Civil War, the proportion of slaves in these nations ranged from a low of 10 percent in the Creek Nation to a high of 18 percent in the Chickasaw Nation. Numbering as many as 10,000, these slaves were freed by treaty with the United States in 1866. The same treaties stipulated that the Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles adopt their ex-slaves as citizens. (The Choctaw and Chickasaw treaties had escape clauses that Indians invoked to avoid naturalizing their freedmen.)

Following the war, racism was widespread in the Five Tribes but never inspired the level of violence found in the Southern states. In fact, in the Cherokee, Creek and Seminole nations, ex-slaves served as legislators, judges and emissaries until the turn of the century, when the United States violated its treaty obligations and unilaterally dissolved the governments of the Five Tribes. Not until the 1970s were these nations formally reconstituted. At that point, they ignored the 1866 treaties and expelled freedmen from their nations.