Afro-Netizen: Cherokee Nation votes to expel slave descendants

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Cherokee Nation votes to expel slave descendants

By Murray Evans
The Associated Press

OKLAHOMA CITY — 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.

With a majority of districts reporting, 76 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of "by blood" tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission's rolls from more than 100 years ago.

The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians' collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood.

Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.

Tribal officials said the vote by the 250,000-member Cherokee Nation was a matter of self-determination. "It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said last month.

But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.

"They know these people exist. And they're trying to push them aside, as though they were never with them," said Andra Shelton, who has at least one black ancestor. Shelton, 59, can recall her mother gossiping in fluent Cherokee when Cherokee friends and relatives visited.

People on both sides of the issue say the fight is also about tribal politics — the freedmen at times have been at odds with the tribal leadership — and about money.

Advocates of expelling the freedmen call it a matter of safeguarding tribal resources, which include a $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, and Cherokees' share of a gambling industry that, for U.S. tribes overall, takes in $22 billion a year.

Chrisrabb! on Sunday, March 04, 2007 at 10:39 PM in Race, Culture & History | Permalink

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Sunday, March 04, 2007

Cherokee Nation votes to expel slave descendants

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