For Black Americans Indigenous to this land isn’t a myth but tied to legal treaties.

For Black Americans, this is more than paperwork. It’s a public acknowledgment that their claim to being Indigenous to this land isn’t a myth but tied to legal treaties.

The recognition sits in tension with federal policy—budget cuts, broken promises, systemic underfunding. So while a Nation like the Cherokee might affirm belonging, Washington still controls the flow of resources that make recognition tangible.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Here's a woven draft in commentary form, pulling the
documented trail into the largercultural fight.
Cherokee Friedman, a story of treaty erasure and recognition.
For too long, the story of BlackAmericans in this country has
been flattened to a single entrypoint, 1619 chained at the
shore. That chapter is true and brutal,

(00:21):
but it's not the whole book. Buried in treaties and tribal
records is another story, one that speaks of Black presence,
belonging and sovereignty in this land, long before 40 acres
and a mule was ever a broken promise.
After the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation signed the
Treaty of 1866 with the US government.
In it, the Nation agreed that formerly enslaved people known

(00:44):
as Cherokee, Friedman and their descendants shall have all the
rights of native Cherokees. It was unambiguous.
Full rights, full belonging. Yet over the next century and a
half, those words were steadily ignored.
By the early 2000's, the nation began enforcing a by blood
clause expelling Friedman descendants and narrowing

(01:05):
citizenship to those who could prove ancestry through the Daws
rolls. That move sparked a long legal
fight. In 2017, a federal court ruled
that the Treaty of 1866 still stood affirming Friedman's
citizenship rights. And in 2021, the Cherokee Nation
itself amended its constitution to strike the by blood language

(01:27):
entirely. At last, Friedman and their
descendants were recognized not as outsiders, but as citizens
whose rights have been guaranteed all along.
That's the legal trail. The cultural weight is heavier.
For Black Americans, recognitionby a sovereign Native nation is
not just about tribal ID cards. It's a vindication that their

(01:47):
story in America cannot be reduced to a cargo Ledger.
It reframes history. Black people in this land are
not only descendants of the enslaved, but also descendants
of treaty partners. Yet even as the Cherokee Nation
corrected its course, Washingtonpulled in the opposite
direction. During the Trump administration,
the proposed budget slashed $24.5 billion from Native

(02:09):
American programs, a reminder that recognition is only as
strong as the resources behind it.
In other words, a treaty promisemay live on parchment, but
survival still depends on federal will.
So we're left with two truths colliding.
On one side, a tribal nation opening its arms to Friedman
descendants dismantling barriersof exclusion.

(02:31):
On the other, a federal system still starving Native
communities, Black and Indigenous alike, of the support
owed under its own treaties. This is why the narrative fight
matters. Because to accept Black
Americans as indigenous, in partas Cherokee Friedman long were,
is to accept that their claim tothis land runs deeper than
chains. It's to admit that treaties were

(02:53):
made not just with nations, but with their Black citizens too.
And those promises remain unpaid.