The Cherokee Freedmen issue hasn’t been much in the news lately, but it’s still going on. The Hill has an update:

A dispute between the Cherokee Nation and members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) looks likely to continue despite a lobbying push that the tribe had hoped would resolve the issue.

[...]

The Cherokees hired the Podesta Group, a firm with strong Democratic ties, in July and signed on McBee Strategic Consulting in October. Several Native American groups have passed resolutions condemning the bill. More than 6,000 letters have also been sent to Congress in opposition to the legislation, according to an attorney for the Cherokees.

Meanwhile, CBC lawmakers, who have joined Watson in protesting the Cherokees’ decision, plan to meet with the Department of the Interior’s assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, Carl Artman, to discuss the Freedmen in the coming weeks, according to a Watson aide.

To respond to something that’s been popping up in comments here, several of you have argued that the Cherokees are their own nation, with the right to do what they want, and “outsiders” should keep out of it. But since when are nations exempted from criticism? If the Cherokees want to be treated like grown-ups in the community of nations, they have to be ready for the attention, both positive and negative, that comes with the position. And if a nation pursues a policy that others see as an extreme injustice, it’s not unprecedented for the international community to take action.

Take for example the sanctions against South Africa during Apartheid or against Iran to stop them from pursuing nuclear weapons. You can argue for against those actions for individual cases, but you don’t get to claim nationhood and then walk away free of all claims.

Is it unfair that the United States has done far worse in its past, and in some ways its present, but is too strong to be challenged by an outside power? Of course. But that is a rather flimsy excuse for the Cherokees’ own bad behavior.

Update: I don’t want this to be misunderstood. I am not saying the actions regarding the Cherokee Freedmen are anywhere as bad as Apartheid, even if they are discriminatory. Nor are they half as bad as what the U.S. has done to American Indians. But being a victim of discrimination does not justify turning further discrimination against another disenfranchised group. And whether or not a sovereign Indian Nation has the right to do it, it is wrong.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America, Oklahoma

This excellent USA Today article looks at the effect on the economy of Oklahoma’s strict new anti-immigration law. Namely, many employers are facing a crisis of figuring out how to replace Hispanic employees disappearing en masse to other states. The anti-immigration forces have always argued that these workers are taking American jobs and using up our social services, while others argue for a net positive effect of both legal and illegal immigration, so it will be an interesting case study.

Even if it’s revealed that immigrants benefited Oklahoma, the debate certainly won’t end. Fears of immigration are as much if not more about cultural anxieties as economic ones. Of course the cultural concerns are even more misguided and in many ways racist, but for the same reason they won’t be amenable to being disproved by objective numbers. Looking too deep into our immigration fears is to witness some of the worst parts of the American psyche (as when the conservative focus group watching the New Hampshire debates disapproved of McCain’s call for a “humane” immigration policy).

Photo by Flickr user Crashworks used under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: HB 1804, immigration, Oklahoma

Another angle on the Cherokee Freedmen story is that it is part of a larger problem in Indian Country of disenrollment being used as a political tactic. An unfortunate side effect of rising wealth in the tribes is a new temptation for unscrupulous groups to reduce the number of people they have to share with.

Tags: Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

Tazmin: Thank you for the comments. We will probably continue to disagree, but I appreciate hearing your perspective. I’ve put up a response at my new blog here.  I do agree that the media has not done the best job of covering the issue, so if there are better sources of information that you would recommend, please let me know how to find them.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

Tazmin comments on a post at my old blog about the Cherokee Freedmen:

On the other hand, with so many wannabe groups out there claiming to be Native American with the intent to scam the unknowing public, verifying legitimate groups are essential. If someone is not Native American then they should not be a citizen of a Native American tribe. I completely agree with the one drop rule for allowing tribes to protect their identity and culture. Personally I would rather see a blood quantum of 1/4 or more for citizenship status. Then where would the Non-Indian Freedmen fall.We all know that the Dawes rolls had flaws but we also know that the Dawes rolls was not completely based on what a person looked like as so many new papers have reported. There is just as much proof that says this.

Following the media that seems to be where you are getting your facts has been completely one sided and full of mis-information. Besides, the issue is really the rights of a Sovereign Nation to determine it’s citizenship just as the US government does today.

I will start with what we agree on. Tazmin is correct to say that the rights of a sovereign nation are important to consider. But like I argued in a previous post, it is also about racism. We have to decide which concern trumps the other, and the answer isn’t easy.

Media coverage of the issue has been terrible. I wouldn’t necessarily say it is full of mis-information, but there definitely has not been enough information in media reports to really tell what is going on. It may be difficult to get any sources to talk about this, but I think an important story is being missed about the internal politics of the Cherokee Nation that led to the split in the first place.

For instance, a recent Tulsa World story begins:

Former Cherokee Nation Chief Joe Byrd said Friday that his tribe’s efforts to disenfranchise descendants of former slaves have allowed racism to resurface.

Without referring to him by name, Byrd blamed Chief Chad Smith for not stepping forward to stop those efforts.

Smith responded by accusing Byrd of making “hollow and desperate” allegations against his tribe to “salvage his devastated political aspirations.”

Clearly much more is going on here than is revealed in the article. What is Joe Byrd’s political history? Does Smith have a valid point, or is he simply trying to deflect attention from his own mess? Without more background on Cherokee politics, there’s simply no way for us to know.

Other stories have done little to answer these questions, or even made it worse.

Still, whatever might remain about the current situation, I don’t think it’s hard to see serious flaws in the Dawes Roll. Kevin Noble Maillard, a law professor and member or the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma, wrote in Indian Country Today:

“Indian blood,” as it is known today, was invented by white Northeasterners on vacation. In the late 19th century, a group of whites known as “Friends of the Indian” met annually at Lake Mohonk, a resort in upstate New York, to propose speeches and papers addressing solutions to the ”Indian problem.” From this group of politicians, scholars and missionaries emerged the General Allotment Act. Each adult citizen of the various Indian nations would receive plots of land. These farms represented a physical testament to the Indians’ ”entry wedge” into mainstream culture. And they also freed more tribal land for white settlement.

In deciding who would get a farm, the “Friends” engaged the federal government to locate the eligible Indians. Thus, in order to solve the “Indian problem,” the bureaucrats had to ask, “Who is Indian?” For them, a person who was part-white and part-Indian could still qualify as Indian. But an applicant with partial African ancestry was irrevocably classified as black. The social rules of miscegenation, or the mixing of races, allowed for white-appearing Indians, but excluded anyone partially black.

The Friends intended to create order from chaos, and we still feel their impact. Supposedly, contemporary freedmen have no Indian blood because no record of it exists. No record ever existed, even when the reality did.

Tazmin is right that there needs to be some way to keep people from taking advantage of Indian Nations by claiming membership unfairly. But I’m not convinced that the Dawes Roll is the right way to do that.

Many Cherokee Freedmen are active in Cherokee culture and politics, with a long history in the tribe. Their ancestors traveled on the Trail of Tears. They are certainly not a “wannabe group.”

Photo by Flickr user Piero Sierra used under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

If you are here looking for info on the Cherokee Freedmen, you can find my latest posts at the new blog:

Who is an Indian?

Race, sovereignty, politics

Don’t use that word

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

I agree with almost everything in today’s Our View on the Cherokee Freedmen. I have to take issue with one line, though. The editorial approvingly cites Rep. Diane Watson’s comment that expulsion of the Cherokee Freedmen is akin to “ethnic cleansing.”

That is a totally inappropriate use of the term, which typically refers to the mass slaughter of an ethnic group. It is needlessly inflammatory to use a word referring to one of the worst crimes that humanity is capable of in ordinary politics. Some variation of Godwin’s Law has to apply here.

Not to mention that when it comes to both Indians and former slaves, the United States government is far more guilty of ethnic cleansing than the Cherokees will ever be.

While I ultimately support her side in the issue, Rep. Watson has on the whole been a terrible advocate for the Freedmen’s cause, whether through irresponsible talk about ethnic cleansing or an earlier claim that she is a descendant of Pocahontas.

It’s a cliche that anyone white or black or any color in between will claim to have an “Indian princess” ancestor, which is too often a superficial appropriation of Indian identity by people who do not take it seriously. Frustration at such sentiments may be one of the reasons that the vote to expel the Freedmen passed so overwhelmingly.

From an editorial by Indian Country Today:

In the Indian world, it is said that aside from tribal enrollment or documented proof of citizenship, it is indicative of one’s identity as an Indian person if you consider yourself part of something rather than part-something. As a vocal proponent for the freedmen, Watson should realize that their strongest claim to full Cherokee citizenship lies in their family and community ties to the nation. These tangible bonds matter just as much as Watson’s notions of indiscernible Indian-ness by blood.

While it is important to protect the Freedmen’s right to be in the tribe, if it is done at the expense of making all other Cherokees into villains then it will do lasting damage to the Cherokee Nation. Watson and other overzealous defenders of the Freedmen would do well to recognize this.

Photo: Rep. Diane Watson (D – Calif.)

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Diane Watson, Native America

The AP picks up on some Cherokee Freedmen related ugliness in California:

Diane Ross-Neal grew up hearing about her Cherokee heritage, so when the tribe promoted clubs for the thousands of members living in California, it seemed natural for her to share her own story. She soon realized that not everyone wanted to hear it.

At meetings, she says, organizers tried to pry the microphone from her hands, called her a liar or refused to let her speak at all. The reason, Ross-Neal says, is simple: She is black.

… “I went to all the meetings and I felt so unwelcome,” Ross-Neal said of the California clubs. “I kid you not, it was like, ‘What are you doing here? You’re black, you’re not Cherokee.’ It was so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

The sides in this fight have tended to line up as sovereignty versus racism. Defenders of the expulsion try to muddy the waters over the racism complaint by bringing out dark-skinned Cherokees who remain in the tribe. And some of those Cherokees take that side themselves:

At a recent meeting for California Cherokees at a park in Riverside, about a half-dozen black Cherokees shared a Cherokee blessing, potluck dinner and nature walk with several dozen other club members. The black attendees, however, were quick to point out that they had Cherokee blood — unlike the recently ousted freedmen like Ross-Neal who can’t prove it.

Lloyd Thompson, who is one-quarter Cherokee, said he supported the tribe’s vote to kick out the freedmen because those with no Indian blood were trying to use race to get benefits they don’t deserve. “There are people who are dark-skinned, like mine, and they interbred with the Cherokee and they lived with the Cherokee. They are authentic,” he said. “These other people are interlopers. Cherokees are a proud people and we know who we are.”

But the truth is, it is about both sovereignty and racism. Cornell University professor Eric Cheyfitz sums it up very effectively in Indian Country Today (emphasis mine):

Morally, the issue is clear: Why attempt to disenfranchise a particular group of Cherokee Nation citizens based, it would appear, solely on their race? The response from the government of the nation has been that this move, contrary to the way it appears, is not racist – there are black Cherokees on the ”blood” rolls, it argues – but a matter of sovereignty, a question of who gets to decide tribal enrollments: the nation itself or the federal government. While under federal Indian law the tribes are granted autonomy in the area of enrollment, the Secretary of the Interior, under the same proviso, has a right to intervene in these decisions. Legal matters notwithstanding, a nation constituted by ”blood” is a nation constituted by racial borders; and a nation constituted by this kind of exclusivity is by definition racist. The irony here is that the constitution of tribal rolls by blood quantum is a federal imposition of the Dawes era, a stricture that the tribes themselves later adopted in contradiction of traditional practices.

Legally, the issue is also clear: as noted above, Article 9 of the Treaty of 1866 grants the ”freedmen … all the rights of native Cherokees.” End of story. If Indian nations expect the federal government to abide by the treaties, which are the foundation of federal Indian law, recognizing the government-to-government relationship between Indian nations and the United States, then the federal government has a right to expect the same, even though the trail of treaties broken by the government is all too long. The irony here is also evident – the habitual treaty-breaker insists on the sanctity of the treaty – but does not negate the principle or fact of the law.

What complicates the legal issue, but has gone unstated, is that the relationship between the tribes and the federal government, as determined by federal Indian law, is a colonial relationship, in which Congress has ”plenary power” (final say) in Indian affairs. Within this structure, the tribes are ”domestic dependent nations” (my emphasis), effectively minors before a law in which the federal government holds their lands in ”trust.”

One can only understand the Watson resolution, then, if one understands that the history driving it is not only the violent and troubled history of race in the United States but also the violent and troubled history of the struggle for sovereignty of colonized Indian nations with the colonizer.

It is unfortunate that the sovereignty of an Indian Nation is being endangered over this issue. Even if Congress resolves the legal and moral complaint by removing Cherokee sovereignty and forcing them to readmit the Freedmen, the Cherokees will be left a divided people, once again at the mercy of their colonial overseers. Is it worth the cost? I’m not sure.

But there are hints of a more sinister story beneath the elevated principles of national identity and race. Again from the AP:

John Velie, an attorney for the freedmen, said that until the recent ouster, freedmen were more politically active in the tribe and voted in much higher numbers than their non-black counterparts. He sees the new communities for far-flung Cherokees as an effort to counter that influence and drum up new voters who will toe the tribe’s anti-freedmen line.

It hasn’t been discussed much in the media, but it’s suspicious that Principal Chief Chad Smith’s great defense of sovereignty has the added bonus of kicking out an active group of citizens who do not support him politically. It would be doubly tragic if this whole conflict began as a venal grab for power by Smith.

Photo by Flickr user dbking used under a Creative Commons license.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

I have followed the Cherokee Freedmen story quite a bit at my old blog. If you’re unfamiliar with what is going on, here’s a quick primer:

The Freedmen are descendants of slaves once held by Cherokees. The tribe originally sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, so after the war the federal government required them to give full citizenship to their freed slaves. In 1893, the Dawes Rolls formalized the classification, defining most Cherokees with any amount of African blood as Freedmen.

The Freedmen remained citizens of the Cherokee Nation until the 1980s, when the Cherokee government took away their enrollment. In March 2006, the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion was unconstitutional, so a constitutional amendment was voted on and passed by a very large margin to keep Freedmen out of the tribe.

Congress, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, responded with a bill that would remove federal recognition from the Cherokees and deny them approximately $300 million in federal funds if they did not reinstate the Freedmen. The legislation passed, but an amendment by Rep. Dan Boren allows the tribe to keep its funding while the issue works its way through the Cherokee courts.

Dan Boren’s amendment was the right thing to do. If the issue can be solved within the Cherokee Nation, it will be much better for the Freedmen, the Cherokees, and the relationship of all Indian tribes with the federal government. Any punitive measure by the United States quite understandably awakens memories of the many terrible crimes done by our government to Native Americans in times past.

However, that should not blind us to the sad truth that the expulsion of the Freedmen repeats many of those same sins once done to the Cherokees. OU English professor Robert Warrior makes the case in an editorial for Indian Country News:

To be blunt, a history of modern slavery is also a history of rape. To be a slave among the Cherokees was to be sexually available to those who controlled your life. By the 1890s, a legal distinction between the Freedmen and those who were Cherokee “by blood” emerged, but in the moral universe such a distinction was hard to make, and even today the claim of those in the Cherokee majority who say they are primarily interested in maintaining their nation for those who can verify that they have Cherokee lineage rings hollow alongside the murky history of violence that Cherokee slaves and their descendants have inhabited. Such claims fail to rise to the level of those earlier Cherokees who understood that the tragic absurdity of reconciling a nation to its history of slavery requires wisdom and compassion, not insulting and ridiculous appeals to faulty membership requirements and the poses of victimhood.

Some have tried to claim the expulsion of the Freedmen has nothing to do with race, pointing to the many recognized Cherokee members with black skin. But as Warrior shows, the lines cannot be drawn so cleanly. The Dawes Rolls themselves are based on outdated 19th Century ideas about race. A thriving Indian culture and people should be looking for ways to be more inclusive, to spread their language and traditions to more people, not force them out.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America

A letter-to-the-editor in the LA Times makes a curious leap of logic on why the Freedmen should be excluded from the Cherokee Nation. Here is the full text of the letter:

Re “Who’s a Cherokee?” Opinion, July 10

Heather Williams writes that the Cherokee tribal constitution has been amended to require proof of a by-blood connection to be granted citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles) believes that this is discrimination and that federal funds to the tribe should be cut off by reason of racism.

My family has long passed down stories of Cherokee blood in our ancestry, and I am convinced that I am part Cherokee, although I am not a citizen of the nation. The Dawes Roll census in 1906 was considered a slap in the face by many of the Cherokee people, who purposely did not sign it, not realizing what importance it would have on their descendants. My ancestors were part of this group. I am sure that I am not alone.

I am fed up with people who scream racism at the first sign of disagreement. Withholding federal funding from the Cherokee Nation until it bows to Watson’s demands is extortion. The tribe has every right to make whatever citizenship requirements it thinks are appropriate.

If the Cherokee Nation is forced to change its constitution to allow descendants of the non-Indian freedmen citizenship, it will further muddy the waters of the Cherokee people. Those of us who have Cherokee blood (but didn’t sign the Dawes Roll) will not be able to claim their Indian heritage, while hundreds of people without Indian blood will be given that privilege. This is not acceptable.

CHARLOTTE SALE

It threw me because, based on the second paragraph, Sale looked to be headed towards supporting the Freedmen. She correctly states that the Dawes Roll is not a reliable record of who is Cherokee by blood. But then she abruptly reverses herself. Is she saying that if she can’t be a Cherokee citizen, then others shouldn’t either?

Why not instead make the argument that the Cherokees need a new model for citizenship, one that tries to remedy the mistakes of the past, not perpetuate them.

I know the tribe can’t open up to anyone who feels like calling themself a Cherokee. But there are many different models for citizenship.

For example, to be a United States citizen one can either be born from parents who are U.S. citizens, or go through a process that involves learning about the country and demonstrating that you will be a productive, law-abiding citizen. U.S. immigration laws are clearly not perfect, and they create plenty of controversies of their own. But even that flawed model has much greater flexibility than that of the Cherokees.

The blood quantum model is clearly racist. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It is by definition based on 19th Century ideas about race. Nothing should force the Cherokees, or any other tribe, to be contained by those outdated concepts.

Perhaps prospective citizenships would have to pass a test on the Cherokee language and history. Perhaps they would need to be sponsored by a current member or demonstrate in some other way a commitment and connection to the tribe.

That would have the side benefit of creating a real incentive for a new group of people to learn and participate in Cherokee culture. We often hear that many Native American languages are dying out because they are not spoken by younger generations. A better model of citizenship could inject new life into those struggling cultures.

Neither side of the debate so far has demonstrated any imagination on these issues. Supporters of the Freedmen accuse the tribe of discrimination, while supporters of the tribal government say it is a simple matter of the Cherokees’ right to choose their own members. Where are the voices saying that, though it may be their right, this is not the best way for the Cherokees to define citizenship?

My proposal above may not be a perfect fit for the Cherokees, but it is just one example of the many possibilities that are being missed. Ideas right now unfortunately seem to be constrained by very short-term political considerations. But if the goal is to ensure thriving, independent Indian cultures and peoples, we are thinking too small.

Tags: Cherokee, Cherokee Freedmen, Native America