The Muscogee Nation Supreme Court has rescheduled oral arguments in the Muscogee Freedmen citizenship case for Tuesday, June 10, while also ordering the hearing be conducted via Zoom. A livestream of the oral arguments will be available to the public on the court’s website and the video will be publicly available until the end of the day, according to an order from the court.
After Rhonda Grayson and Jeff Kennedy, descendants of Muscogee Freedmen, saw their applications for citizenship rejected by the Citizenship Board of the Muscogee Nation, the pair sued, arguing the nation’s 1866 treaty with the United States requires they be granted citizenship. District Court Judge Danette Mouser agreed, issuing a September 2023 order in favor of citizenship for the descendants of enrollees listed as the nation’s Freedmen — or formerly enslaved persons.
“The court finds that the actions of the board in denying plaintiffs’ citizenship applications and appeals were contrary to law, specifically the Treaty of 1866 and its required inclusion of the Creek Freedmen and their lineal descendants within the citizenship of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation,” Mouser wrote in her order.
Attorneys representing the tribe quickly appealed the order, and it was stayed pending a ruling from the Muscogee Supreme Court.
Between the 1860s and 1970s, Muscogee Freedmen were citizens of the Muscogee Nation, but a constitutional convention in 1977 explicitly excluded the Muscogee Freedmen from retaining their citizenship.
“That’s what we’re fighting, this blood quantum, trying to get back and let the people control because under the old constitution, you’ve lost before you ever started,” then-Muscogee Nation Principal Chief Claud Cox said during the 1977 constitutional convention. “There were three Freedmen bands that would outnumber you today as citizens. So, if we want to keep the Indian in control, we’ve got to take a good look at this thing and get us a constitution that will keep the Creek Indian in control.”
The new constitution limited the tribe’s membership to “Muscogee (Creek) Indians by blood,” relying on the fact early 20th century federal Indian agents did not track Freedmen’s Indian descent as a way to de facto expel the majority of them from the tribe.
Long delays as Freedmen await ruling
Oral arguments in the case were initially scheduled for last summer, but another lawsuit over a special judge law derailed the original schedule. The law would have allowed the nation’s legislative and executive branches to appoint temporary special judges to hear a case before the court if a judge recused, but the law never went into effect because the court concluded it was unconstitutional in April.
Oral arguments in that case also saw delays owing to winter weather, eventually leading the court to move to Zoom oral arguments. With the special judge law question decided by the court establishing its own procedure for selecting temporary justices, the court originally scheduled the Freedmen case’s oral arguments for June 20, but a scheduling conflict with an attorney in the case led the court to move the date forward to June 10.
For more than a year, the pending case has seen heated rhetoric stemming from long-standing tensions on the topic. After the September 2023 district court ruling in Grayson and Kennedy’s favor, attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons said the fight for Freedmen citizenship has “transcended the boundaries of mere legal proceedings” for him.
“It became a poignant quest to reclaim the honor and dignity that anti-Black racism had wrongfully snatched from us,” Solomon-Simmons said.
Last July, Muscogee Nation press secretary Jason Salsman cast doubt on Muscogee Freedmen’s claims of a right to citizenship and criticized Solomon-Simmons’ pursuit of media coverage during the case.
“The brazenness with which this group lies is appalling. Individuals of African descent who are also Creek are more than welcome as citizens. Indeed, many already are citizens,” Salsman said. “The issue here is that the individuals seeking citizenship are not Creek at all, and our constitution does not allow citizenship for anyone who is not a Creek descendant by blood.”
But questions of “by blood” citizenship have been controversial for more than a century.
Genealogical research indicates Muscogee people of African descent experienced discrimination when the federal government created citizenship rolls of tribal members at the turn of the 20th century. For example, Russell Cobb’s book Ghosts of Crook County details the family tree of Thomas Adkins, a Confederate veteran and Muscogee Lighthorse officer who had a few families in different parts of his jurisdiction. Adkins’ daughter Minnie, whose mother was Euchee, was enrolled as “Creek by Blood” alongside her son — who may not have existed — despite neither being in Indian Territory when the rolls were created. Conversely, Adkins’ son Richard “Dick” Adkins, whose mother was an enslaved Black woman, went through a lengthy appeals process before he and his children who lived in the territory were allowed to be listed as “Creek by Blood” instead of as “Muscogee Freedmen.”
Muscogee Supreme Court website hack resolved
Meanwhile, as the Muscogee Nation Supreme Court prepares for oral arguments in the Freedmen case to be held online, its website has recently cleansed of hacker-placed material. About 100 spam articles on topics from online dating, buying marijuana, where to get the best deal on Viagra and “must knows” for “dating an intercourse worker/cam lady” were posted on the court’s website by unknown hackers starting sometime around 2022.
The posts — authored by a pseudonymous “Suzie” or “Suzi” supposedly between July and August 2022 — contain various links to dubious websites that appear to be mostly Turkish escort services. A search on who.is for the owners of the domain names leads to Domain Protection Services, Inc., a company accused of running internet scams with a Colorado P.O. Box (but unregistered with the Colorado Secretary of State) and an unnamed owner in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland.
While the spam articles are not linked from the main Supreme Court website, they could be found if someone wishing to access the website accidentally typed in a url on the website that does not exist. Rather than generate an error page, the court’s website instead took users to a page with links to the spam articles.
In addition to the spam articles, the hackers also inserted the links to their escort websites in fonts too small to be noticeable on the website’s homepage, a tactic sometimes used by hackers to boost their illegitimate websites in search engines.
Unauthorized access of a computer — colloquially called hacking — is a crime under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Oklahoma Computer Crimes Act. While the Muscogee Nation does not appear to have a computer crimes statute, the nation’s Supplemental Crimes Act would allow the nation to charge a defendant in tribal court under the federal and state laws. Unlike other governments in the United States, tribal governments do not have criminal jurisdiction against a person who attacks their tribal government property unless the attacker is Native American.
NonDoc discovered the spam articles in October 2024, examined the website’s source code and notified the Muscogee Nation of the apparent breach to the court’s website. The posts — which ranged from passable English to general gibberish to Finnish, Russian and Dutch — have since been removed.
Salsman, the tribe’s press secretary, did not respond to a request for an official comment prior to publication of this article.
