Why Marguerite Scypion's Case Is Ignored for Winning While Dred Scott Is Center Stage for Losing

The Legal Erasure of Black Indigenous Identity and Birthrights to the Land and 14th amendment deception 

⚖️ Two Freedom Suits. Two Legal Giants. One Erased.

In U.S. legal history, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is infamous: a Supreme Court case declaring that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

But 21 years earlier, in 1836, another freedom suit won by a Black woman of Natchez Indian and Black descent, Marguerite Scypion, resulted in:

• The end of Indian slavery in Missouri

• The legal emancipation of over 300 Black-Indigenous descendants

• A direct challenge to the racial hierarchy long before the Civil War

Yet Scypion is rarely mentioned. Not in textbooks. Not in major law reviews. And not even in the same breath as Dred Scott, despite being from the same state, involving the same courts, and tackling the same question:

Who counts as free on American soil?

 Why Scypion Is Suppressed: The Threat of Black-Indigenous Birthright

Marguerite Scypion’s court battle didn’t just argue for freedom — it argued for land-based rights rooted in Indigenous bloodlines. That makes it dangerous to colonial narratives for three reasons:

 1. Scypion Confirms Indigenous Identity for "Black" People

Scypion's victory proved in court that people labeled “Negro” or “Colored” could actually be descendants of  American Indian women illegally enslaved — like her Natchez grandmother.

This explodes several colonial lies:

• That Black and Indian identities are mutually exclusive

• That “real Indians” only lived on reservations

• That “Black Indians” are just cultural claims, not legal lineages

The courts had to admit: not all enslaved people were African — some were American Indian, and many were both.

2. She Weaponized Partus Against the State

The 1662 Virginia law (partus sequitur ventrem) said the child follows the condition of the mother — meant to lock generations into slavery. “baby follows the belly” law

But Scypion flipped it:

“If my grandmother was Natchez — and Natchez Indian slavery was outlawed in 1769 — then we were born free.”

She turned the logic of slave law inside out.

Lawyers and courts today avoid citing this precedent because it:

• Opens the door for Urban Indians to reclaim identity, status, and even land

• Proves that Black families have a legal path to recognition outside the federal tribal system

Challenges the entire legal foundation of misclassification and paper genocide

3. Scypion Threatens the Settler Narrative of Ownership

Unlike Dred Scott — whose case reinforced white dominance by denying Black citizenship — Scypion’s victory exposes how the U.S. illegally enslaved Indigenous people and then buried the proof.

Her lawsuit:

• Predated the 13th and 14th Amendments

• Existed outside the plantation South

• Was won by a woman, through Spanish colonial and matrilineal law

If courts and schools taught Scypion today, the result would be:

• More Urban Indians tracing matrilineal descent

• More legal claims based on freedom suits, not Dawes Rolls

• More questions about who really has birthright to the land

And that terrifies the institutions built on stolen territory and legal erasure.

Dred Scott Is Famous Because He Lost. Scypion Is Ignored Because She Won.

Let’s be honest: Dred Scott’s defeat reinforces a tragic narrative where white supremacy is inevitable and Black freedom is always denied.

But Scypion’s win? That’s radical. That’s generational. That’s reparative.

She proved:

• Black Indigenous people had legal standing before emancipation

• That women of Black and Native descent could use colonial law against the colonizer

That birthright and identity were already documented, even if hidden in court archives and dusty church records

How to Reclaim the Scypion Legacy Today

For Black Urban Indians and researchers:

• Dig into local court records: Freedom suits often contain hidden Indigenous ancestry

• Challenge racial coding in archives: Many American Indian families were labeled “Black” or “Negro” by default

• Use the Scypion precedent: Her case is a model for partus-based arguments in reparations, recognition, and identity law

Push law schools to teach Scypion: Not as a footnote — but as a primary challenge to white legal supremacy

Final Word: Marguerite Scypion Was Never a Myth

She wasn’t folklore. She wasn’t a curiosity. She was a strategic legal mind who used colonial law to liberate hundreds and rewrite her people’s place in American history.

She wasn’t erased by accident.

 She was erased because she proved too much.

🪶 Why Marguerite Scypion’s Story Is Important in Modern Times and for Future Generations

A buried blueprint for freedom, identity reclamation, and legal resistance

1. 🌆 Because Black Urban Indians Are Still Being Erased Today

In 2025, Black Indigenous people across the U.S. are still:

• Misclassified on birth certificates, census records, school enrollment forms, and tribal applications

• Denied access to Indian Health Services, housing programs, land trusts, and cultural protections

• Forced to choose between “Black” and “Native” identities because of outdated systems built on colonial race science and blood quantum

Marguerite Scypion’s case proves this is not new. It’s systemic.

She was labeled “Negro,” enslaved, and nearly erased — but she proved in court that her lineage was Indigenous. That’s the same fight today’s Urban Indians are in.

🧬 Her story gives us a legal, historical, and spiritual precedent for undoing paper genocide.

2. 📜 Because the Legal System Already Admitted the Truth — and Then Buried It

Scypion's victory in 1836 wasn’t symbolic — it was a legal acknowledgment of Afro-Indigenous freedom, birthright, and matrilineal sovereignty.

Yet law schools, textbooks, and courts act like it never happened.

Why?

Because her case dismantles the foundations of:

• Racial capitalism: where wombs created property

• Settler colonialism: where land was stolen by erasing the people who belonged to it

• Tribal gatekeeping: where enrollment systems today still exclude people like her descendants

⚖️ Her victory is the legal proof that the U.S. enslaved American Indian people — and that descendants of that trauma have legal rights, not just cultural stories.

3. 🌱 Because It Teaches Future Generations to Reclaim What Was Stolen

For the children, the students, the researchers, the misclassified:

• Scypion teaches that you don’t need federal validation to be real.

• That the archives hold receipts: freedom suits, baptismal records, Spanish edicts, court transcripts.

• That your ancestors already fought for you — and won.

🔥 This is not about DNA alone — it’s about land, law, and legacy.

4. 🧠 Because It Rewires Our Understanding of Who Built This Country

History books talk about:

• Slavery (Black/African)

• Indian Removal (Red/Indigenous)

• Immigration (Ellis Island narratives)

But they ignore the people who lived at the intersection — Afro-Indigenous women like Marguerite Scypion, who:

• Were enslaved twice — by race and by ancestry

• Were raped, bred, and erased

• Still resisted and rewrote their status through the legal system

✊🏾 U.S. history is incomplete without her. So is the story of America’s resistance movements.

5. 🛠️ Because It’s a Tool — Not Just a Memory

For legal scholars, genealogists, activists, and Urban Indian youth, Scypion’s legacy offers tactical power:

Use Case	How Scypion Helps
Reparations claims	Shows documented generational harm, court-validated lineage
Enrollment challenges	Proves identity can exist outside BIA-controlled rolls
Education reform	Highlights Afro-Native legal victories left out of textbooks
Land and cultural reclamation	Demonstrates historical misclassification used to strip rights

🔥 Final Word: This Is Living History

Marguerite Scypion’s case is not just important — it is urgent.

• It exposes a long-hidden Black-Indigenous truth

• It offers a weapon for today’s erasure battles

It gives future generations the blueprint to fight back using evidence, law, and ancestral courage

She won for us.

 Now we have to make sure we learn and WE WIN AGAIN!

ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1826–ALMOST 200 YEARS AGO - enslaver Pierre Chouteau’s lawyers filed a Motion for New Trial after a jury found in favor of St.

Louis freedom suits plaintiff, Marguerite (Scypion),

who had been permitted to file her case in July 1825, under the “new“ Freedom Act. Although the statute did not have any specific requirements as to the allegations of enslavement, the Scypion family relied in court on the pre-Missouri laws that native Indians (the Scypions had Natchez ancestry) could not be enslaved. By December 1826, Marguerite and her two sisters, Catiche and Celeste, had been embroiled in multiple court battles for their freedom throughout the previous 20 years. Ultimately, they all would win, but not before multiple trials were held, some overturned and tried again and then, only after the United States Supreme Court declined to review the defendants’ request to overturn the verdict in favor of all the freedom seekers in 1838.

One must wonder if Chouteau’s New Trial Motion made that cold December day feel even more bitter for Marguerite. The simple and vague motion is one of the images here and it reads as follows:

Marguerite, a colored woman v

Pierre Chouteau

Motion for new Trial for following reasons

1 Verdict against evidence

2 Against Law

3 That judge erred in leaving the matter of law to be inferred or decided by the Jury

4 That jury founded their verdict upon the supposed emancipation of the plaintiff and not upon any original right to freedom as derived from either her maternal or paternal ancestor

5 The court erred in giving the Instructions prayed for by the plaintiff to the jury.

 - Spalding Lawless Bates & Geyer for defdnt

The back of this quarter-folded Motion reads: Marguerite vs P. Chouteau

Reasons filed for new trial December

11th, 1826

        AG clk [Archibald Gamble clerk]

The third ancient document shown here was from the “March Term 1827“ and records that “Marguerite by Isaac McGirk, her agent and attorney files her affidavit in this case and prays an appeal to the Supreme Court, which is granted and the record and proceeding is ordered to be certified up accordingly.“ Below that, and sometime later, the same document states: “I, Archibald Campbell, do hereby certify that the above is a correct transcript of the record as the same remains in my office…”. It is dated May 8 “…in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and twenty seven…”.

What cannot be a part of this post is the extensive trial court record, including witness testimony at trial, depositions of witnesses, which were read at trial, pleadings, motions, as well as what appears to be the handwritten pre-cursor to a type-set version of a Missouri Supreme Court opinion. All this, in a court file in the 1830s! The court file also contains a lengthy, handwritten opinion, complete with signatures of Missouri Supreme Court Judge Mathias McGirk and Judge George Tompkins (see image).

All that we have discussed, here might be the equivalent of about a split second of all the time that occurred in the Scypion freedom suits litigation, not only for Marguerite, but also for her two sisters, Catiche and Celeste and all their children. William Foley, in his brilliant and early work on the raw bravery of this family observed: “Even though their names disappear from the pages of recorded history after the conclusion of the case in 1838, their lengthy legal odyssey stands as a tribute to courage and perseverance.” “Slave Suits Before Dred Scott: The Case of Marie Jean Scypion’s Descendants”, Missouri Historical Review, Volume 079, Issue 1, October 1984, William E. Foley, at p. 22. Today, we might also do well to add that the attorneys who joined the battle against the powerful Chouteau family shared those qualities, even if not quite as intensely.

This is but one chapter in the true and compelling stories of freedom suit plaintiffs in America.

Paul Venker

President

Freedom Suits Memorial Foundation

“We Must Remember. For Them. For Us.”

stlfreedomsuits.org 

Official partner of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program of the National Park Service

Marguerite is the last named plaintiff for 1825. Her name is 32nd on the list of 326 named freedom suit plaintiffs on the Freedom Suits Memorial.

FIRST TRIBE