The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled Monday that the tribal nation is removing the phrase “by blood” from its constitution and other tribal laws. This change formally recognizes that descendants of blacks once enslaved by the tribe – known as the Cherokee Freedmen – have the right to tribal citizenship, which means they are eligible to run for tribal office and gain office. resources such as tribal health care.
The recent decision of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court is a response to a 2017 ruling by a U.S. District Court, which determined that descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen are entitled to all rights of tribal citizenship under a treaty that the Cherokee Nation concluded with the United States in 1866..
“The rights of the freed are inherent,” wrote Shawna S. Baker, Justice of the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation. “They extend to the descendants of the freed as a birthright arising from the oppression and displacement of their ancestors as people of color registered and commemorated in Article 9 of the Treaty of 1866.”
The story of the Cherokee Freedmen is an example of the intricacy and complexity of issues of race, inequality and marginalization in the United States.
Many Native Americans were enslaved alongside African Americans during the colonial era – Brown University historian Linford D. Fisher estimates that 2 to 5.5 million Native people have since been enslaved. the time of Christopher Columbus until about 1880.
But some wealthier tribal citizens, especially those in the Southeast who had adopted certain white settler standards, also practiced slavery themselves. This includes the Cherokee people, some of whom by the early 1800s had begun to enslave African Americans.
Then, in the late 1830s, the US government forcibly removed the Cherokees from their homeland and ordered them to move to present-day Oklahoma – an exodus known as the Trail of Tears. What is not as well known, however, is that enslaved African Americans made the journey with the Cherokee citizens who enslaved them.
About 4,000 enslaved blacks lived among the Cherokee in 1861, according to the National Museum of the American Indian.
The tribe abolished slavery in 1863. And soon after the end of the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty with the U.S. government that granted full citizenship rights to those who were once enslaved by the Cherokee citizens.
But in practice, the Freedmen were often denied these rights and excluded from the tribe, wrote Lolita Buckner Inniss in a 2015 article published in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Over the past decades, the Cherokee Freedmen have fought to protect these rights through various legal proceedings.
The freed have long fought to protect their rights
In 2007, the Cherokee Nation amended its constitution to restrict tribal citizenship to those of “Indian blood”. This expelled approximately 2,800 descendants of Cherokee Freedmen from the tribe, the website of the National Museum of Native American States.
Chad Smith, the chief chief of the Cherokee nation at the time, argued that the tribe was a sovereign nation and therefore should have the right to determine who is eligible for tribal citizenship. But the Freedmen pushed back, resulting in a series of legal battles over the next decade.
In 2017, a Federal District Court ruled in favor of the Freedmen – a decision that the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation has now reaffirmed.
“The language ‘by blood’ found in the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, and all laws under it, is illegal, obsolete, and contrary to the ideal of freedom,” Baker wrote in the recent opinion. “These words insult and degrade the descendants of the Freedman, just like the Jim Crow laws that can be found in the books of the southern states some fifty-seven years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Chief Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr., praised the move.
“The Cherokee Nation is stronger when we move forward as citizens together and on an equal footing under the law,” he said in a statement Monday. “… The Court recognized, in the strongest terms, our ancestors’ commitment to equality 155 years ago in the Treaty of 1866. I hope we all share the same commitment to the future.”
About 8,500 descendants of the Freedmen are currently registered as citizens of the Cherokee Nation, according to a press release from the tribe.
