For more than 40 years, Black Creek descendants like Rhonda Grayson have been fighting to regain citizenship in the Creek tribe.

The Creek Nation adopted chattel slavery as a strategic effort, Roberts said, to ally with white settlers by assimilating to their culture.

In the 1830s, the federal government forced the Creek people from their land in Alabama and Georgia to the newly created Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.

About 24,000 Creek people were removed on the Trail of Tears, and by 1860, the Creek Nation held 1,600 people in bondage.

Historians estimate that by 1861, 8,000 to 10,000 Black people were enslaved by various tribes in Indian Territory.

Aiding that process were the Dawes Rolls, which were created by the federal government to categorize Creek people by their blood quantum or as "freedmen," people who had been enslaved or were descended from the formerly enslaved.

"So a lot of it was what they think an Indian or Black person looks like and acts like.".

"There are plenty of examples in all the tribes in which people in the same family are put on two different rolls," Roberts said.

The people designated as Creek Freedmen were full citizens of the Creek Nation — until 1979, when everything changed.

Around this time, Roberts said, many tribes, like the Creek, were seeking new ways to reinforce their sovereignty from the U.S.

Since the 1970s, descendants of Creek Freedmen like Perryman-Lenzy have tried to re-enroll and been denied.

For the Creek Freedmen descendants today, disenrollment has meant the loss of cultural identity, including recognition of the Creek Nation's practice of slavery.

It has also fractured the descendants' sense of belonging, a source of pain that Rhonda Grayson said is still felt today.

"If we say that we're Black Creeks, we will get flak from not only people who don't look like us, but from people who look like us," Grayson said.

Disenrollment has also amounted to incalculable material losses across generations, including the right to vote and run in tribal elections and access to federally funded programs for housing and health care, as well as financial assistance for college or, Grayson said, Covid-19 financial support.

"How many people of African descent have been affected by Covid-19 and could use that payment?" Grayson said.

Grayson estimates that there are a few thousand Creek Freedmen descendants like her who should be eligible for tribal citizenship.

In 2018, Grayson and Lenzy-Scott's organization, the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band, filed a federal lawsuit against the Creek Nation and the Interior Department.

The Creek Nation said in a statement that "the grave injustice done to the slaves owned by some Creeks has to be acknowledged and discussed" but that blood lineage is essential to protecting the tribe's identity.