A year ago the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court ruled that Black Creek Freedmen are citizens of the Nation. The treaty promised it in 1866. The highest court inside the Nation confirmed it in 2025. Chief David Hill and the Citizenship Board have not issued a single citizenship card. Rhonda Grayson and Jeffrey Kennedy are now suing in federal court because the Nation’s own word, endorsed by its own court, has been made to mean nothing.
This is not complicated. The Citizenship Board denied Grayson and Kennedy’s applications in 2019 because they could not identify a lineal descendant of the tribe. The Muscogee Nation Supreme Court said the treaty covers them. The Chief has declined to act. A year of silence is not administrative delay. It is refusal.
The 1866 treaty was not a gift. The Muscogee Nation signed it after the Civil War as a condition of rebuilding the Nation in Indian Territory. The Nation had allied with the Confederacy. The treaty required the Nation to abolish slavery and extend citizenship to the people it had enslaved. Those were debts the Nation agreed to pay. The Freedmen did not petition for membership. They were promised it by a sovereign nation that owed them.
The Cherokee Nation set the precedent. In 2017 the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee 1866 treaty guaranteed citizenship for Freedmen. Cherokee Freedmen citizenship cards were issued within months. The Nation learned to live with the decision. The Muscogee Nation Supreme Court reached the same conclusion in 2025. A year has passed. No enrollment has followed.
The pattern is the one you learn to recognize when institutions have been writing down obligations and walking away from them your whole life. The obligation is clear when it is convenient. The exceptions appear when it is time to pay. Berry calls it the membership question — who belongs to a place and what the place owes them. The Muscogee Nation signed a treaty that answered that question in 1866. The Citizenship Board is pretending the question is still open.
I have seen this in Adams County. The bank whose consolidation agreement with the community has fine print that lets it close branches three years later. The county development corporation that redefines its mission when the grants run out. The corporation that signs a permit promising certain practices and then, once the cameras are gone, operates differently. The mechanism is the same every time: write down the obligation, let people make decisions based on it, then walk away when the obligation comes due.
The Citizenship Board’s demand — prove your lineal Muscogee descent — attempts to rewrite the history of the relationship. The Freedmen are not people who need to prove they belong. They are people the Muscogee Nation owes. The Board expects a paper trail from 1866 that slavery was designed to destroy. The blood-quantum test erases that debt by pretending it was never owed. David Treuer, an Ojibwe novelist and historian who has spent years writing about the gap between what federal treaties promise and what Native communities actually experience, has documented how enrollment criteria shift when they become inconvenient. The Freedmen are living inside that shift right now.
Here is the practical problem. The Constitution recognizes tribal sovereignty. Federal courts can enforce treaty rights through the Indian Civil Rights Act. But enforcement requires the Justice Department to act. It requires political will. A 2026 GAO report found that enrolled Cherokee and Seminole Freedmen descendants are sometimes asked for proof of “Indian blood” when seeking federally funded services — the kind of barrier that does not show up in reports and does show up when someone walks into an office and is told their papers are not in order. Studs Terkel spent his life interviewing people who had been promised something by an institution and then watched the institution find a reason the promise did not apply to them. The form changes. The structure does not.
Rhonda Grayson said it better than any columnist can: “We won in the Nation’s highest court, but one year later we are still being treated as though the judgment never happened.” She serves as chairwoman and band leader of the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band. She has been fighting this fight in every venue available to her — tribal court, federal court, public advocacy. The Muscogee Nation Supreme Court is the highest court inside the Nation. If the Chief can ignore it without consequence, the court has no authority that matters.
What does it mean when a nation’s own highest court rules and the executive branch simply does not comply? In Adams County we know the answer. It means the institution that wrote the promise no longer respects its own word. The people who relied on the promise are left holding a ruling they cannot enforce and a citizenship they were told they had.
The question is not who these Freedmen are. The question is whether treaty promises in this country mean anything. The 1866 treaty was signed, ratified by the United States Senate, and affirmed by the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court. Three separate recognitions of the same right. And a Chief who will not honor any of them.