Faultlines of Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship: Cherokee Freedmen

The issue of the Cherokee Freedmen is one of the more interesting intersections of sovereignty, racism, treaty rights, and tribal identity. The Freedmen are African Americans who are descended from slaves owned by Cherokees; the Cherokee Nation granted them citizenship after the U.S. Civil War, as part of its articles of surrender. (Though there were Cherokees on both the Union and the Confederate sides, the Cherokee Nation as a whole was considered part of the Confederacy.)

In 2007, the Cherokee Nation voted to approve a constitutional amendment restricting citizenship to people who could prove descent from a Cherokee ancestor, which essentially terminated the citizenship of most Cherokee Freedmen. The battle over their Cherokee citizenship has gone back and forth through many courts (both tribal and federal), and this past week, the U.S. Federal Government demanded that the Cherokee Nation reinstate the citizenship of members who were descended from Cherokee-owned slaves. Chad Smith, the current Principal Chief of the Cherokees, has voiced his support for removing the Freedmen's citizenship, as Indian Country Today explains:

Smith wrote and spoke publicly in support of the 2007 constitutional amendment to remove freedmen from Cherokee Nation citizenship rolls if they had no documentable Indian blood. “Cherokees are Indians,” he wrote in a March 9, 2007 Indian Country Today editorial. “They are the indigenous and aboriginal people of this land and there is a commonality of history, language, heritage and culture. It finally came to a point that non-Indians were claiming to be Cherokee when, in fact, they are not. So the vote was an affirmation of identity as Indian for those voting.”

Representatives of the Cherokee Freedmen strongly disagreed:

“I think it’s a huge injustice,” said Marilyn Vann, Cherokee Freedmen and president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association. “Number one, the freedmen people have citizenship based on the 1866 treaty. Our ancestors helped build up the tribe. [Citizenship] was something promised by the U.S. government and the tribal government, just as every nation that has enslaved or [colonized] people has brought those minorities into their society. Ancient Rome; the U.S. with the blacks in the Deep South; Romania, which enslaved Gypsies—they’ve all done it. That’s only the right and proper thing to do.”

This issue shows the multiple fault lines that exist when we talk about membership, citizenship, sovereignty, indigeneity, and national belonging. (It is also connected to an ongoing tribal election in the Cherokee nation, but that's a whole other story.)