2 descendants of Black people once enslaved by tribe file lawsuit seeking citizenship

By COREY WILLIAMS
Associated Press
Two descendants of Black people once enslaved by a Native American tribe are asking a federal court in Oklahoma to force tribal leaders to issue them citizenship cards as ordered a year ago by a tribal court.

A lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City on behalf of Rhonda Grayson and Jeffrey Kennedy names Principal Chief David Hill and the Muscogee Nation Citizenship Board as defendants.

It says that Hill and the citizenship board are violating an 1866 treaty between the tribe and the U.S. government by refusing to recognize Black Creek Freedmen as citizens as ordered by the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court in July 2025.

The board denied the applications of Grayson and Kennedy in 2019 after it incorrectly determined they could not identify a lineal descendant of the tribe, but the court said the pair are entitled to tribal citizenship.

However, Hill and the board have not yet issued the citizenship cards, denying Grayson and Kennedy their “right to vote and the ability to participate fully as members of the Nation,” according to the lawsuit.

Last August, Hill blocked the tribe’s citizenship board from issuing citizenship cards until leaders decide how to change the tribe’s constitution. The tribe's headquarters is in Okmulgee, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) northeast of Oklahoma City.

A spokesman for the Muscogee Nation said late Thursday afternoon that it had not yet been served with the complaint.

“We would point out that federal law and precedent is clear that matters of Muscogee Nation law and governance are to be addressed through the Nation’s own governmental institutions,” the Muscogee Nation said in a statement.

“We are committed to ensuring that the Muscogee Nation’s Constitution and laws are followed fairly and consistently,” the statement said. “Getting policies right is always more important than getting them done quickly. Anything less would undermine the integrity of our governmental processes and the rights of our citizens.”

The Muscogee Nation is one of five tribes in Oklahoma that once practiced slavery.

Under the 1866 treaty, the tribe abolished slavery and granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved. The Muscogee Nation adopted in 1979 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.

The court's 2025 ruling also directed the board to apply the treaty of 1866 to 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.

Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, a Black Creek Indian who is one of the lawyers representing Grayson and Kennedy, said Thursday that there are about 100,000 Black Creeks across the United States.

Successful legal cases were brought against two of the five Oklahoma tribes, the Seminole Nation and the Cherokee Nation, which have since granted citizenship to Freedmen descendants.

“Every day of non-compliance is another day that Black Creek Freedman are denied our birthright and our very identity as citizens,” said Grayson, president of the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band.

“The fight is bigger than every one of us,” she told reporters Thursday. “It belongs to every Black Creek Freedman descendant who has carried this history, protected these stories and refused to let our identity be dismissed or diminished.”

Williams is a member of AP's Race & Ethnicities Team. He reported from Detroit.

Do grizzly bears belong in California?

By RYAN SABALOW
CalMatters 
The grizzly bear on California’s flag went extinct a century ago in the Golden State. Now, a group of tribes and environmentalists is urging the Legislature to study whether it’s possible to bring them back.

Grizzlies once lived across most of California. As many as 10,000 may have roamed before the Gold Rush. They were so prevalent that when California settlers tried to form their own nation, they called it the Bear Flag Republic.

Settlers systematically exterminated the animals, and they were gone by the 1920s, leaving the smaller black bear as the only surviving bear species.

A century and 34.5 million more people later, Inglewood Democratic Sen. Laura Richardson ’s Senate Bill 1305 would task the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with creating a “roadmap that evaluates whether, and under what conditions, reintroduction of the grizzly bear is feasible and advisable.”

The measure provides no funding to carry out the study, which could be provided by a future Legislature or an outside group. And even if it were funded and its recommendations acted on, it would be several years and require help from a potentially adversarial federal government before a grizzly bear’s claws ever cut tracks in California.

The proposal’s hypothetical nature has done little to ease tensions over the prospect of some day returning the continent’s second-largest land predator to the nation’s most populous state.

On one side are organizations representing rural communities, hunting organizations and ranchers.

They argue it’s preposterous to consider re-introducing aggressive 800-pound bears to California’s degraded, drought- and fire-prone landscapes. Rural areas, they say, are already overwhelmed with conflicts with mountain lions and growing black bear and wolf populations.

“I just don’t think that our California today is ready for a grizzly bear,” Republican Assemblymember Heather Hadwick told the Assembly wildlife committee last month.

Hadwick’s sprawling rural district in northeastern California has faced years of tensions over predators, especially wolves, killing livestock and frightening small towns.

Environmentalists, tribes support
At least 40 tribes, environmentalists and animal welfare organizations support the bill, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. They say bringing back the state’s biggest apex land predator would improve the ecosystem and right an ecological wrong from California’s past.

“I can see the ways in which my homeland has suffered from the loss of iconic species such as the grizzly, and that this loss lingers in our heart and in the attenuation of a millennia-old relationship,” Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe’s wildlife department, told lawmakers last month. The Yurok and Tejon tribes are the bill’s cosponsors. A 2025 study from a coalition of tribes, environmentalists and university researchers found that the Yurok lands on the north coast as well as the nearby Klamath Mountains and Trinity Alps could be suitable grizzly habitat.

The study also singled out the southern Sierra Nevada including Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia national parks as well as the Transverse mountains that span from San Bernardino County to Santa Barbara County. It estimated the habitats could sustain between 424 to 1,713 grizzlies, though it recommends bringing in a population of 25 grizzlies to start. Grizzlies can be found in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington.

Supporters of the proposal say grizzlies would help California’s ecosystem. The giant omnivorous bears till soil as they root up meals, helping restore conifer forests, prairies and oak savannas, easing fire danger.

Grizzlies also serve as a check on overpopulation of prey. Grizzlies could reduce California’s human conflicts with black bears since grizzlies compete for food with their smaller cousins. Grizzlies also kill and eat black bears.

“The loss of grizzlies might have been one of those contributing factors to that (black bear population) overgrowth,” Williams-Claussen said in an interview.

Grizzlies and the urban-rural divide
Supporters’ arguments have appealed to the Democrats who control the Legislature.

Only Republicans have voted against the bill, which is pending before the Assembly Appropriations Committee when the Legislature returns Aug. 3.

Richardson didn’t return an interview request for this story. The measure’s Democratic coauthors are lawmakers from Southern California representing predominantly urban districts.

This spring, one of the coauthors, Sen. Henry Stern, told the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committeethat a mountain lion recently attacked one of his neighbors, so he understands rural concerns about predators.

Even so, learning to coexist with them is just part of living in a beautiful state filled with wildlife, Stern said. “We want to live in a California where — that risk — there’s some beauty in it,” said Stern, who represents the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles. “To have that element in our lives, as opposed to just sterilizing our landscapes and our nature so that nothing else could ever be a risk … I think it makes us more human to have wildness in our lives.”

Elizabeth Washoe, a Native American from Modoc County, hears that kind of talk from urban residents and rolls her eyes.

“There’s nothing I would love more than to see grizzly bears on the beach at Santa Barbara chasing rich people,” she said.

But she said that would be cruel — to the bears.

Like many in California, Washoe’s people still pay homage to grizzlies through ceremonial bear dances, but she said it’s not “ethically right to bring them back.”

She hopes lawmakers consider what life would be like for the grizzlies they’d have captured and brought to California, where they would face a landscape radically different and eight times more populated than when the bears last lived here.

“The bears don’t have any say in it,” Washoe said. “Where they’re at, they’re living a pretty good life, and we’d take them and put them here in a landscape that is so dramatically changed from what it was the last time that the bears were truly living a good life here … I understand the idea of it, but to me it feels egotistical.”

State wildlife officials wary
The California agency that would be responsible for studying grizzly bear reintroduction does not appear eager to take it on.

The Department Fish and Wildlife, which hasn’t taken an official position on the legislation, does not comment on pending bills, spokesperson Peter Tira told CalMatters this week. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office also declined to comment.

But there’s no indication the department’s position on grizzlies has changed since a former spokesperson told a reporter in 2023 that wildlife officials can barely keep up with existing predator conflicts.

“Bringing another predator into the state that we would have to manage and come up with some program to figure out what happens when the grizzly attacks a human or kills livestock does not seem feasible for us,” then-spokesperson Jordan Traverso told the Alta Journal.

The department is chronically underfunded and understaffed. A legislative analysis for this year’s bill notes that Fish and Wildlife has enough cash and staff to complete just 38% of its existing duties. The department “would be unable to absorb the demand this roadmap would have on staff time and resources” according to the analysis.

David Bess, who recently retired as its top law enforcement officer overseeing California’s game wardens, said the department is “drowning in work,” much of it trying to manage conflicts with predators already on the landscape.

“I just don’t see where the department even has the capacity to do it,” Bess said.

Trump’s grizzly proposal
Now, President Donald Trump’s administration has added a new wrinkle to the debate.

Earlier this month, the administration issued a proposed rule change that seeks to return management of grizzlies to states, despite the bears being protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Environmentalists fear Trump’s proposal would allow conservative states to begin killing grizzlies to appease ranchers and big game hunters.

The proposed federal rule wouldn’t impact California’s grizzly proposal, since the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be in charge of any reintroduction program, said Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which supports Richardson’s legislation.

But having the bears in environmentally friendly states such as California could prove helpful if other states begin aggressively killing them off, she said.

“Hopefully, they would be managed more responsibly there,” said Zaccardi, whose organization has unsuccessfully petitioned the feds to return grizzly bears to California.

This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.