In Oklahoma, Juneteenth highlights tribal slavery descendants' fight for recognition and citizenship
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.
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Winnipeg Free Press
23-07-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Muscogee Nation court rules descendants of enslaved people are entitled to citizenship
The Muscogee Nation Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that two descendants of people once enslaved by the tribe are entitled to tribal citizenship. The court found that the tribal nation's citizenship board violated an 1866 treaty when it denied the applications of Rhonda Grayson and Jeffrey Kennedy in 2019 because they could not identify a lineal descendant of the tribe. 'Are we, as a Nation, bound to treaty promises made so many years ago? Today, we answer in the affirmative, because this is what Mvskoke law demands,' the court wrote in its opinion. The Muscogee Nation is one of five tribes in Oklahoma that once practiced slavery, and in that 1866 treaty with the U.S. government, the tribe both abolished it and granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved. But in 1979, the tribal nation adopted a constitution that restricted membership to the descendants of people listed as 'Muscogee (Creek) Indians by blood' on the Dawes Rolls, a census of members of the five tribes created around 1900. When the Dawes Rolls were created, people were listed on two separate rolls: those who were Muscogee and those who were identified by the U.S. government as Freedmen. In its ruling Wednesday, the court remanded the matter back to the Muscogee Nation's citizenship board and directed it to apply the Treaty of 1866 to Grayson and Kennedy's applications, as well as any future applicants who can trace an ancestor to either roll. The decision could create a path to tribal citizenship for thousands of new members who are not Muscogee by blood. The ruling is a long-awaited affirmation of their ancestors and their rightful place in the Muscogee Nation, said Rhonda Grayson. 'While this victory honors our past, it also offers a meaningful opportunity for healing and reconciliation. It's time now to come together, rebuild trust, and move forward as one united Nation, ensuring future generations never again face exclusion or erasure,' she said in a statement to The Associated Press. 'When I heard the ruling, I felt generations of my family exhale at once,' Kennedy added in a statement. 'Our ancestors signed that treaty in good faith, and today the Court finally honored their word.' The court also found that any reference of 'by blood' in the Muscogee Nation's constitution is unlawful, which could mean the tribe will have to overhaul parts of the governing document. One provision of the constitution requires that citizens be at least one quarter Muscogee 'by blood' to run for office. 'We are currently reviewing the order to understand its basis as well as its implications for our processes,' Muscogee Nation Chief David Hill said in a statement. 'It may be necessary to ask for a reconsideration of this order to receive clarity so that we can ensure that we move forward in a legal, constitutional manner.' Successful legal cases were brought against two of the five tribes, the Seminole Nation and the Cherokee Nation, which have since granted citizenship to Freedmen descendants. But how that citizenship is implemented could come down to politics, said Jonathon Velie, an attorney who worked on behalf of Freedmen in both cases. The roughly 2,500 Freedmen citizens in the Seminole Nation are not allowed to run for higher office and do not have access to certain resources, like tribal housing and education assistance. The 17,000 Freedmen citizens in the Cherokee Nation, however, have been embraced by the last two administrations and are given the full benefits of tribal members. When it comes to the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees many of the resources owed to tribes through treaty rights, the Freedmen citizens in both tribes are the same, said Velie — their tribes just honor their citizenship differently. 'I hope the (Muscogee) Creek Nation welcomes them back in, because what they won today wasn't the U.S. Government or the U.S. courts telling them, they told themselves in their own judicial system,' Velie said.
Edmonton Journal
23-07-2025
- Edmonton Journal
Adventures in Streaming: When the president becomes an action figure
'Get off my plane.' In 1997, Harrison Ford uttered that line to Russian terrorist Gary Oldman in the Wolfgang Peterson movie Air Force One (streaming on Paramount+). It didn't seem a culturally pivotal moment at the time, but it apparently opened some sort of pipeline wherein U.S. presidents would become action heroes in films as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Olympus Has Fallen. Article content Article content Prime Video is currently streaming two different variations of the formula (which, let's face it, was created in a Hollywood lab utilizing Die Hard as the agar in the petri dish). Article content Heads of State stars John Cena as Will Derringer, a newly elected American president, leaping into the White House after a career as a movie action hero. (One can only feel nostalgia toward the 2006 satire Idiocracy which portrayed that notion as ridiculously far-fetched.) Article content His feel-good presidency goes wrong when a vengeful Russian terrorist (Paddy Considine), launches an assault on an Air Force One mission to Europe for a NATO conference, with the British Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), caught up in the crossfire. Clarke is ex-military and, once the two leaders parachute to safety, he is given to mocking Derringer's pretend fighting experience. If their spark-striking conflict seems familiar, Cena and Elba shared an even more deadly enmity in The Suicide Squad. Article content Article content The film is helmed by Ilya Naishuller, the Russian director who made Hardcore Henry and the Bob Odenkirk actionfest Nobody. Naishuller is skilled at live-action cartoons, but when the stakes are raised, that makes for some tonal needle scratches as we go from mass murder on Air Force One to Cena being smacked in the face with sheep udders as he and Elba are smuggled out of Belarus on a livestock truck. Waiting in the wings to confuse things even further is Priyanka Chopra Jonas, in John Wick mode, playing Noelle, Sam's love interest and saviour. Article content With its relentless action beats, and it's road-movie squabbling, it's mostly silly, disposable stuff. But you have to admit, it's certainly an interesting time for a Russian filmmaker to make an American action movie with a Russian villain in cahoots with a would-be American demagogue plotting to destroy the NATO alliance.
Vancouver Sun
23-07-2025
- Vancouver Sun
Adventures in Streaming: When the president becomes an action figure
'Get off my plane.' In 1997, Harrison Ford uttered that line to Russian terrorist Gary Oldman in the Wolfgang Peterson movie Air Force One (streaming on Paramount+). It didn't seem a culturally pivotal moment at the time, but it apparently opened some sort of pipeline wherein U.S. presidents would become action heroes in films as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Olympus Has Fallen. Prime Video is currently streaming two different variations of the formula (which, let's face it, was created in a Hollywood lab utilizing Die Hard as the agar in the petri dish). Get top headlines and gossip from the world of celebrity and entertainment. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sun Spots will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Heads of State stars John Cena as Will Derringer, a newly elected American president, leaping into the White House after a career as a movie action hero. (One can only feel nostalgia toward the 2006 satire Idiocracy which portrayed that notion as ridiculously far-fetched.) His feel-good presidency goes wrong when a vengeful Russian terrorist (Paddy Considine), launches an assault on an Air Force One mission to Europe for a NATO conference, with the British Prime Minister Sam Clarke (Idris Elba), caught up in the crossfire. Clarke is ex-military and, once the two leaders parachute to safety, he is given to mocking Derringer's pretend fighting experience. If their spark-striking conflict seems familiar, Cena and Elba shared an even more deadly enmity in The Suicide Squad. The film is helmed by Ilya Naishuller, the Russian director who made Hardcore Henry and the Bob Odenkirk actionfest Nobody. Naishuller is skilled at live-action cartoons, but when the stakes are raised, that makes for some tonal needle scratches as we go from mass murder on Air Force One to Cena being smacked in the face with sheep udders as he and Elba are smuggled out of Belarus on a livestock truck. Waiting in the wings to confuse things even further is Priyanka Chopra Jonas, in John Wick mode, playing Noelle, Sam's love interest and saviour. With its relentless action beats, and it's road-movie squabbling, it's mostly silly, disposable stuff. But you have to admit, it's certainly an interesting time for a Russian filmmaker to make an American action movie with a Russian villain in cahoots with a would-be American demagogue plotting to destroy the NATO alliance. G20 stars another Suicide Squad vet Viola Davis as American president Danielle Sutton, obliged to kick butt when the titular conference, taking place in South Africa, is hijacked by security forces led by a crazed Australian mercenary played by Anthony Starr, who has honed his villain act on the superhero series The Boys. At least G20 has a consistent tone, attuned to Viola Davis's gravitas. Sure, many people are killed. But at least Danielle and her estranged teenage daughter (Marsai Martin), will get closer in the process. In the face of all this exhausting fantasy, the movie that best reflects realpolitik is the most ludicrous of all. Rumours (screening on Crave), is a caustic satire from Guy Maddin, writer Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, now an established trio (The Forbidden Room, The Green Fog). Eschewing big, elaborate production values, the movie is set in Germany's lush, idyllic countryside (it was filmed in Hungary), where world leaders congregate on a mission to draft a statement in response to an unspecified global crisis. The money is in the cast, toplined by Cate Blanchett as the German chancellor, backed by an international assortment including Charles Dance as the American president, and a sublime Roy Dupuis as the lovelorn Canadian Prime Minister, a man determined to redefine the term 'affairs of state.' The premise is maddeningly but deliberately vague, yet even more fantastical as one of the designated threats is reanimated, onanistic bog people. Left on their own, the world leaders busy themselves on creating the perfect, unctuous political speech, hilariously delivered at the end by Dupuis. It's not so much an illustration of the banality of evil so much as a scathing portrait of self-serving political speak: the evil of banality.
