Five Civilized Tribes in the context of "Chickasaw"

During and after the European colonization of the Americas, European settlers practiced widespread enslavement of Indigenous peoples. In the 15th century, the Spanish introduced chattel slavery through warfare and the cooption of existing systems. A number of other European powers followed suit, and from the 15th through the 19th centuries, between two and five million Indigenous people were enslaved, which had a devastating impact on many Indigenous societies, contributing to the overwhelming population decline of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

After the decolonization of the Americas, the enslavement of Indigenous peoples continued into the 19th century in frontier regions of some countries, notably parts of Brazil, Peru Northern Mexico, and the Southwestern United States. Some Indigenous groups adopted European-style chattel slavery during the colonial period, most notably the "Five Civilized Tribes" in the United States, however far more Indigenous groups were involved in the selling of Indigenous slaves to Europeans.

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and enslavement of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.

Tribal territories and the slave trade ranged over present-day borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization. Some Native Americans were captured and sold by others into slavery to Europeans, while others were captured and sold by Europeans themselves. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, a small number of tribes, such as the five so-called "civilized tribes", began increasing their holding of African-American slaves.

From the late 18th century to the 1860s, various states of the United States allowed the enslavement of human beings, most of whom had been transported from Africa during the Atlantic slave trade or were descendants of people who had. The institution of chattel slavery was established in North America in the 16th century under Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonization.

After the United States was founded in 1776, the country split into slave states (states permitting slavery) and free states (states prohibiting slavery). Slavery became concentrated in the Southern United States. The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves banned the Atlantic slave trade starting in 1808, but not the domestic slave trade or slavery itself. Slavery was finally ended throughout the entire country after the American Civil War (1861–1865), in which the U.S. government defeated a confederation of rebelling slave states that attempted to secede from the U.S. During the war, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which ordered the liberation of all slaves in rebelling states. In December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, abolishing chattel slavery nationwide. Native American slave ownership also persisted until 1866, when the federal government negotiated new treaties with the "Five Civilized Tribes" in which they agreed to end slavery. Some argue slavery continues to exist because the Thirteenth Amendment contains an exception for people convicted of a crime.

Charles Curtis (January 25, 1860 – February 8, 1936) was the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover. He was the Senate Majority Leader from 1924 to 1929. An enrolled member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first Native American to serve in the United States Congress, where he served in the United States House of Representatives and Senate before becoming Senate Majority Leader. Curtis also was the first and only Native American and first multiracial person to serve as vice president.

Curtis believed that Native Americans could benefit from mainstream education and assimilation. He entered political life when he was 32 years old and won several terms from his district in Topeka, Kansas, beginning in 1892 as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives. There, he sponsored and helped pass the Curtis Act of 1898, which extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory. Despite Curtis being unhappy with the final version, implementation of the Act completed the ending of tribal land titles in the Indian Territory and prepared the larger territory to be admitted as the State of Oklahoma in 1907. The government tried to encourage Indians to accept individual citizenship and lands and to take up European-American culture.

The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Native Americans of the "Five Civilized Tribes", including their black slaves, between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government.

As part of Indian removal, members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River after the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. The Cherokee removal in 1838 was the last forced removal east of the Mississippi and was brought on by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush. The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after. A variety of scholars have classified the Trail of Tears as an example of the genocide of Native Americans; others categorize it as ethnic cleansing.

The Muscogee Nation, or Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is a federally recognized Native American tribe based in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The nation descends from the historic Muscogee Confederacy, a large group of indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands. They commonly refer to themselves as Este Mvskokvlke (pronounced [isti məskóɡəlɡi]). Historically, they were often referred to by European Americans as one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast.

The Muscogee Nation is the largest of the federally recognized Muscogee tribes. The Muskogean-speaking Alabama, Koasati, Hitchiti, and Natchez people are also enrolled in this nation. Algonquian-speaking Shawnee and Yuchi (language isolate) are also enrolled in the Muscogee Nation, although historically, the latter two groups were from different language families and cultures than the Muscogee.

The ownership of enslaved people by Indigenous peoples of the Americas extended throughout the colonial period up to the abolition of slavery. Indigenous people enslaved Amerindians, Africans, and occasionally Europeans.

In North America, waves of European colonization brought Amerindian dislocation and modern weapons which enabled the industrialization of Amerindian slave-raiding of Amerindians for about a century. Soon afterwards, as an accelerating Atlantic slave trade brought enslaved Africans to North America, many indigenous tribes acquired more Africans as slaves and traded them among themselves and to the colonists. Many prominent people from the "Five Civilized Tribes" purchased slaves and became members of the planter class. A number of Indian nations of the time are considered "slave societies", comparable to the canonical models of Greece, Rome, Portuguese America, and others.