Here is an update on the Cherokee Nation ruling of last week wherein 2,800 Freedmen/Women had their citizenship taken from them. Now the United States government, via the Bureau of Indian Affairs, is at odds with the Cherokee Nation decision.
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Cherokees May Reconsider Expelling Descendents of Black Slaves
U.S. government objects to tribal court’s ruling banishing freedmen.
By Will Oremus| Posted Wednesday, Sep. 14, 2011, at 5:50 PM EDT
The U.S. government is at odds with the Cherokee Nation over its decision to expel the descendants of black slaves from its ranks.
The tribe, the country’s second-largest, revoked the citizenship of 2,800 black members last week. The move cut them off from health care, food stipends, and other services, the Associated Press reported.
It followed a decision by the tribe’s Supreme Court that upheld a 2007 constitutional amendment limiting the Cherokee Nation to those with Cherokee blood. That excluded the descendants of slaves who had been owned by wealthy Cherokee individuals until being freed after the Civil War. In an 1866 treaty between the tribe and the U.S. government, those “freedmen” were guaranteed full tribal membership rights.
In response to the exclusion, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs this week warned that it would not recognize any election by the tribe that doesn’t include the freedmen. Cherokee Nation leaders fired back, saying their citizenship rolls are a matter of tribal sovereignty. “The Cherokee Nation will not be dictated to by the BIA,” the tribe’s acting principal chief said.
As the Guardian points out, the dispute raises some of the ugliest chapters in American history. There’s always something dispiriting about one historically mistreated group taking away the rights of another. And then there’s the irony of the U.S. government admonishing Native Americans to give back to a disenfranchised minority what’s rightfully theirs.
Wednesday brought hope that the mess could be resolved soon, as Cherokee Nation attorney general Diane Hammons agreed with an Oklahoma lawyer’s request that the Supreme Court reconsider its ruling. “The nation believes that a reopening of the case… is in the best interest of the nation,” she wrote, according to the Tulsa World.
Ann
