“Chattel slavery and Indian Removal have bequeathed us a ‘hard history’ indeed.”

In 2020, during debates about the reauthorization of the Native American Housing and Self Determination Act (NAHASDA) in Congress, Representative Maxine Waters proposed an amendment to the law that would deny federal housing monies to any Native nation that denies tribal citizenship to Native “persons who are lineal descendants of Freedmen.” To Waters, the issue was not one of tribal sovereignty; rather, she insisted that it was about “fairness and equality … for one minority group to discriminate against another minority group cannot stand.” In Waters’s opinion, the “lineal descendants” of those who suffered enslavement at the hands of Indigenous people were long overdue their inheritance of citizenship and inclusion.