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Shuts and Failures

by Michael Maiello

Feds Sue Cherokee Nation Over Freedmen

by flowerchild 7/8/2012 - 1:04 pm

The United States has filed a countersuit against the Cherokee Nation in an ongoing federal case to determine Freedmen descendants' eligibility for tribal citizenship.

Filed Monday with the Northern District of Oklahoma, the federal government's suit requests a decision that would allow the Freedmen descendants to retain their tribal citizenship rights and prohibit the Cherokee Nation from denying eligible Freedmen descendants those same privileges.

Read the full article at http://www.nativenewsnetwork.com/feds-sue-cherokee-nation-over-freeman.html

In March 2007, the Cherokee Nation voted to amend its constitution to restrict tribal citizenship to people who could show they were a descendant of at least one person listed as Indian on the Dawes Rolls.

I can do that -- twice.  

The question really is: should I?  I think not.

As cool as it would be to be listed, no one in my direct lineage has lived on a reservation since 1904.  Why should I be included if ~3000 people who have lived with and as Cherokee are excluded?

 

by EmmaZahn 7/8/2012 - 2:18 pm

I knew you would find this of interest, Emma.

A similar thing happened within a nearby band of Anishinaabe Indians. Years ago, a much smaller band was 'absorbed' into a bigger band of our tribe in the area. This was all done by tribal vote among the two bands. The big band voted whether or not to let the smaller band in. The smaller band voted whether or not to join the bigger band.

The result was that by agreeing to and being accepted into the larger federally recognized band, the smaller band gained a lot of advantages even though a portion of the smaller band members were excluded because they were unable to provide 'official' documentation of lineage that the larger band required to be recognized as a member of a recognized tribe.

The lack of documentation had not been an issue with the smaller federally unrecognized band, mainly because everyone knew everyone else and who were their grandparents/great-grandparents, ect.  

However, that was an inter-band situation dealt with inside the tribe. The Elders had their say and the vote stands without any interference/involvement by the Feds.

There were and still are a lot of hard feelings about the whole thing and for other tribes going through a similar situation, there are some who say disenrollment amounts to paper genocide.

The Cherokee/Freedmen situation is soooo much more complicated because issues of slavery are factored in.

Personally, I think  why the Feds are getting involved is because they are trying to mop up the mess they made with the damn Dawes Rolls b.s. I don't know anything for sure -- I'm not a legal scholar -- and I'm still debating in my head whether I like the Feds getting involved with the Cherokee/Freedmen case. But, I do know the Dawes Rolls are the sticking point of every case I've read about concerning disenrollment of tribal members.

A lot of Native Americans, if they could pass for white, purposely stayed off the Dawes Rolls so their children wouldn't be taken from them and sent to the Indian Boarding Schools. It was a desperate move in denying their tribal heritage to save their bigger culture.

If only 500 years ago those Indians had written down with pen, ink, and paper, and in English, their family pedigrees instead of relying on their traditional oral histories that had sufficed for 10,000 years, it would have saved a lot of modern headaches. wink

So now, we are left to sort it out personally as you have done, Emma, or not sort it out at all and just let the legal people give us an answer...

...which we will either agree with or we won't.
 
 

by flowerchild 7/8/2012 - 7:26 pm (re: EmmaZahn)

After posting, I had, not second thoughts, but did think the 2007 rule could backfire if enough people like me showed up asking to the included.   There were easily 100+ relatives at the last family reunion which was my parents' generation.  Now there are for sure three more generations, maybe four. My maternal great-grandmother had 14 children.  Add to that my maternal grandfather's extended family and we could probably come up with 500 people.  What a mess that would make. devil

It has been several decades but if I recall correctly, Cherokee wives of Europeans were exempt from removal so it was not a matter of passing for white in my maternal grandmother's line.  OTOH,  the Cherokee in my maternal grandfather's line was male so his descendants headed for the North Georgia hills to avoid removal.  

Whatever.  Eventually ancestry will probably be determined by Y chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA.  That will still end up excluding some but will it ever flood the rolls. smiley

 

by EmmaZahn 7/8/2012 - 8:26 pm (re: flowerchild)

It seems the Cherokee Tribe has the same attitude towards the Freedmen that Burt Lancaster had towards Ossie Davis in the western comedy/drama, The Scalphunters. Mr Davis, who is black, was 'traded' from an outlaw Telly Savalas who was using Davis as a slave, over the point of a gun, for Lancaster's huge bale of furs.

Davis claims he has rights as an adopted member of the Comanche tribe, but Burt calls him a 'black son of Africa and no Comanche' and treats him as a slave.  At the end of the movie Davis and Lancaster emerge as friends and equals.  Seems like the current Cherokee legal conflict will not work out so easily.

by NCD 7/9/2012 - 1:43 pm

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