Cherokee Nation to vote kicking out black slave descendants

Nation: Forget all this tracing your ancestry back to Strom or Jefferson, trace it back to the Indians and get some casino money!

"The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation. "It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City. 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 racism and 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, one of Baldridge's family members. 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. The grass-roots campaign for expulsion has given heavy play to warnings that keeping freedmen in the Cherokee Nation could encourage thousands more to sign up for a slice of the tribal pie. "Don't get taken advantage of by these people. They will suck you dry," Darren Buzzard, an advocate of expelling the freedmen, wrote last summer in a widely circulated e-mail denounced by freedmen. "Don't let black freedmen back you into a corner. PROTECT CHEROKEE CULTURE FOR OUR CHILDREN. FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION." The issue is a remnant of the "peculiar institution" of Southern slavery and a discordant note set against the ringing statements of racial solidarity often voiced by people of color. "It's oppressed people that's oppressing people," said Verdie Triplett, 53, an outspoken freedman of the Choctaw tribe, which, like the Cherokee, once owned black slaves. Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves."

Did everyone at one time own black people as slaves? I am serious, everywhere you turn black people just got shat on by everyone else, even other black people.

And the fight over heritage is moving beyond the Cherokee Nation. The other tribes that owned slaves, and black descendants in those tribes, are watching the vote. In 2000, the Seminole Nation expelled freedmen but was compelled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal courts to take them back. The Creek Nation has battled its freedmen in court. Over the winter, Choctaw and Chickasaw freedmen formed their own association. At his home in Fort Coffee, a hamlet founded by Choctaw freedmen, Triplett said he is not trying to immerse himself in his Indian heritage. "Oh, no!" he said. "I'm black!" But a few days later he stood at Fort Coffee's Choctaw cemetery, where because of renovation a chain-link fence separates the Indian and freedman sides of the graveyard. Triplett pointed out ancestors. Leaving, he shouted a warning to the Choctaw side: "Guess who's coming to dinner!"

Fort Coffee, good one. Everyone is for everyone till money gets involved and then we get picky.

Update# They voted to kick out slaves descendants.

The Freedmen will automatically be denied citizenship because the Dawes Rolls, a census commissioned by Congress to distribute land to tribal members, put the Freedmen on a separate roll that made no mention of Indian blood. The Cherokee Nation, the second-largest tribe in the country after the Navajo, is also one of the fastest-growing, with 270,000 members and 1,000 new citizens enrolled every month. Members can even receive federal benefits and tribal services, including medical and housing aid and scholarships. "Every other Indian tribe is based on blood, and they are not accused of being racists," said John Ketcher, a former deputy tribal chief, in a full-page "Vote Yes" ad in the Cherokee newspaper. Many tribal leaders campaigned for the amendment, citing the right of a sovereign nation to determine its citizenship. Voters say they were bombarded with advertisements attacking "non-Indians" as thieves who would create long lines in Cherokee health clinics and social services centers. Freedmen supporters chalk up the claims to bigotry. They say the Cherokee Nation knows all too well that many Freedmen (who number about 25,000) have Cherokee blood. "There are Freedmen who can prove they have a full-blooded Cherokee grandfather who won't be members," said Marilyn Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. "And there are blond people who are 1/1000th Cherokee who are members."