Sovereignty Is Being Redefined — By Us

The 2026 GAO report is a landmark — but read what it actually measures. It estimates living Freedmen descendants of the Five Tribes, based on the people the Dawes clerks managed to register in a single corner of Indian Territory between 1898 and 1907. That is a narrow census, taken in a narrow window, of a narrow geography. The true population of Americans whose Indigenous identity was reclassified away is not in the hundreds of thousands. It is almost certainly in the millions. Here is why.

The Dawes Rolls counted one territory, in one decade.

The Final Rolls covered five nations in Indian Territory between 1898 and 1907. They did not count Afro-Indigenous families east of the Mississippi — in Virginia, the Carolinas, Louisiana, Florida, the Gulf Coast — who were never within the Commission's reach. The Five Tribes were not the only nations that intermarried with people of African descent. They were the only ones the United States audited.

The aboriginal Black nations were never in the count to begin with.

The GAO measures Freedmen descendants — people who appear in the colonial record as the children of slavery. It does not measure the descendants of aboriginal Black nations of this continent — the Yamasee, the Washitaw, and others whose Indigenous identity was not erased through Freedmen reclassification but through a much older project: the colonial refusal to acknowledge that dark-skinned aboriginal peoples existed at all. Those descendants were never named “Freedmen.” They were simply written into “negro” centuries earlier, and their nations dissolved on paper before the Dawes Commission was ever founded. They belong in the count too. They are missing from every measurement we have.

Even those enrolled “by blood” were reclassified elsewhere.

Many Indigenous people enrolled as full-blood or part-blood citizens on the Dawes Rolls were still recorded as “colored” or “negro” on the census, on birth certificates, on every other document that touched their lives. Being on the “by blood” roll meant a citizenship card. It did not mean an Indigenous racial classification on the rest of the bureaucracy. Their descendants today may look at one document and see “Cherokee by blood,” look at the next and see “colored” — and the African-coded record almost always became the family's inherited identity. None of these descendants are in the GAO number either.

Even within the rolls, the registered figure was the undercount.

The 23,599 Freedmen on the Final Rolls were the people who made it through a hostile enrollment process: applied in time, found a clerk who took the application, and survived appeals. Thousands more were rejected, refused enrollment out of distrust, missed the closing date, or were diverted onto other rolls. The Dawes count is not a census of Afro-Indigenous people in Indian Territory. It is a count of those the system chose to write down.

Paper genocide ran in every state with discretion to run it.

Walter Plecker reclassified Indigenous Virginians as “colored” by the tens of thousands across three decades — in one state. Census enumerators across the South exercised the same discretion with the same effect, generation after generation. Multiply Plecker's machinery by every southern state, every enumerator who recorded what they assumed instead of what was said, every birth certificate that buried an Indian grandparent under a checkbox. The arithmetic is staggering.

The 2020 Census shows the correction already in motion.

The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 9.7 million Americans marked American Indian or Alaska Native alone or in combination on the 2020 Census — an 86% increase in a single decade. Demographers credit much of that surge to people, many of African descent, exercising their right to self-identify after generations of misclassification. The wave is real, it is documented, and it is still cresting.

The conclusion writes itself.

The GAO measured a small, well-documented slice — Freedmen descendants of the Five Tribes — and counted hundreds of thousands. Apply that same arithmetic to the families never reached by the Dawes Commission, to the aboriginal Black nations who never appeared in any Freedmen count, to the “by blood” enrollees reclassified everywhere else, to every state where Plecker's logic ran unchallenged for decades, and the floor of the GAO's estimate becomes the ceiling of a vastly larger national reality. If you suspect your family is part of that count — you are almost certainly right.

On August 30, 2017, a federal court delivered the ruling Freedmen descendants had fought decades for: the Treaty of 1866 means what it says. Judge Thomas F. Hogan wrote that the Cherokee Freedmen's right to citizenship is directly proportional to that of native Cherokees — the Nation may define itself as it sees fit, but it must do so equally and evenhandedly for the descendants of Cherokee Freedmen.

The Cherokee Nation accepted the ruling and declined to appeal. Then it went further. In February 2021, the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the words “by blood” must be struck from the Cherokee Constitution itself. Today, more than 8,500 citizens of Freedmen descent are enrolled Cherokee — voting, serving, and belonging. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. has said it directly: a nation is stronger when it tells its whole story.

The court battles and treaty fights chronicled on this page are the backdrop of the modern era — proof that the reclassifications of the past are being challenged and unwound at the highest levels. But understand the scope of this site: enrollment and citizenship are each nation's own matter, separate and distinct from the work we do here. We make no assertions about tribal acceptance or recognition.

What we assert is the step that comes before all of it, and that depends on no court, no council, and no acknowledgment list: self-identification. Federally recognized, state recognized, or unrecognized — Indigenous people are Indigenous people, and official census records count those who self-identify as such. Your identity is not pending anyone's decision. Reclaim it now; whatever you may choose to pursue afterward is yours to decide.