Cherokees vote to expel descendants of former slaves

Members of the Cherokee nation voted yesterday to expel descendants of black slaves they once owned. In a special election to amend their constitution citizenship is to be limited to those listed as “Cherokee by blood”. The move stripped tribal membership from freedmen (those descended from slaves) and blacks who were married to Cherokees. They had enjoyed full citizenship rights for 141 years.

The ballot, which followed a ruling by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court in March 2006 confirming citizenship to freedmen descendants, will now limit citizenship to those who can trace their heritage to a “Cherokee by blood” list, part of what is known as the Dawes Rolls census created in 1906. Under that census, anybody with a trace of African-American blood, even if half Cherokee, was placed on the freedmen roll. Those with full Cherokee or mixed white and Cherokee ancestry were put on the “Cherokee by blood” roll.

Supporters say that it was a long-overdue move by Cherokees to determine their own tribal make-up. In their view freedmen were granted tribal membership under duress in an 1866 treaty with the US Government. Those who wanted to expel freedmen said that, without the vote, thousands more descendants would seek to cash in on the tribe’s revenue and welfare network.

Opponents of the vote denounced it as a racist plot to deny tribal revenue to those not deemed full-blood Cherokee, and to block them from claiming a slice of the tribal pie. A minority of the 270,000 Cherokees are descendants of freedmen. Members are entitled to a share of the $350 million annual budget from federal and tribal revenue, housing and medical support.

The vote has reopened a chapter in Native American history –that some country’s largest tribes were slave holders and sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Cherokees, Choctaws, Chicksaws, Creeks and Seminoles were known as the Five Civilised Tribes because they adopted many of the ways of the Confederate South, including the ownership of black slaves.

This may well not be the end of the story: In 2000 the Seminole Nation expelled its freedmen. But the federal Government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and federal courts, refused to recognise the Seminoles as a sovereign nation. Faced with such a loss of status, they took the freedmen back.