Cherokees Vote Out Slaves' Descendants

Quoth the Associated Press:

Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

Between the arrival of European colonists in the seventeenth century and the forced migrations of the 1830s, some landholding Cherokees owned African slaves. When the Cherokees were forced to move to what is now Oklahoma along the deadly Trail of Tears, they took their slaves with them. After the Civil War and Emancipation, a treaty in 1866 guaranteed freed slaves of Cherokees and their descendants membership in the tribe.

But when the Dawes Commission stripped the tribes of their communal lands and swapped it for individual plots for individuals who registered on the Dawes Rolls at the turn of the twentieth century, black freedmen and their descendants were not recognized as tribe members or given back land in the swap. In keeping with the values of the Jim Crow era, One black ancestor was considered enough for the Dawes Commission to deny a person's membership in a tribe, regardless of their other ancestry

The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled in March 2006 that descendants of slaves of Cherokee were full members of the tribe. This election alters the Cherokee Nation constitution to revoke that citizenship.

The Dawes Rolls were basically a scam by which the federal government once again took land from the Native Americans so it could be given to Europeans, and in the process disinherited a substantial fraction of tribal membership who feared the consequences of ethnic registry.

The issue is surely about entitlement to a share of revenues from Cherokee-owned casinos. It is a scandal and a shame that current members of the Cherokee Nation should use anything so tainted as the Dawes Rolls to determine a person's heritage or identity.

Rachel at Alas, a Blog has more.

Note: I'm 31/32 European by ancestry; the remaning fraction is Apache. I don't identify as Native American. One whole branch of my family owned slaves in the antebellum South. It is all too easy for white Americans to call the Cherokee Nation on its apparent racism without taking a good close look at their own.