The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the tribal nation removes the expression “by blood” from its constitution and other tribal laws. The change formally recognizes that the descendants of black people who were once enslaved by the tribe – known as the Cherokee Freedmen – have the right to have tribal citizenship, which means they can be eligible for a tribal office and access to resources such as tribal health care .
The recent ruling by the Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation is a response to a 2017 ruling by a U.S. district court, which ruled that the descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen are entitled to full citizenship rights under a treaty signed by the Cherokee Nation in 1866. with the US. .
“Freedom rights are inherent,” Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice Shawna S. Baker wrote in the opinion. “They extend to descendants of Freemasons as a birthright arising from the oppression and displacement of their ancestors as colored people recorded and commemorated in Article 9 of the Treaty of 1866.”
The history of the Cherokee Freedmen is an example of how complex and layered issues of race, inequality and marginalization are in the US.
Many Indians were enslaved with African Americans during the colonial period – Brown University historian Linford D. Fisher estimates that between the time of Christopher Columbus and about 1880, about 2 to 5.5 million Indigenous people were slaves.
But some wealthy tribal citizens, especially in tribes in the Southeast who adopted certain norms of White settlers, also practiced slavery themselves. These include the Cherokee people, some of whom began enslaving African Americans in the early 1800s.
In the late 1830s, the U.S. government forcibly expelled the Cherokee from their homeland and ordered them to relocate to present-day Oklahoma – an exodus known as the Trail of Tears. What is not so widely known, however, is that addicted African Americans undertook the journey with the Cherokee citizens who enslaved them.
According to the National Museum of the American Indian, by 1861 about 4,000 addicted black people lived among the Cherokee people.
The tribe abolished slavery in 1863. And shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Cherokee nation signed a treaty with the United States Government granting full citizenship rights to those formerly enslaved by Cherokee citizens.
But in practice, Freedmen are often denied these rights and excluded from the tribe, writes Lolita Buckner Inniss in a 2015 article published in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law. Cherokee Freedmen have fought in recent decades to protect their rights through various lawsuits.
Free people have been fighting for a long time to protect their rights
In 2007, the Cherokee Nation amended its constitution to restrict tribal citizenship to those with ‘Indian blood’. It expelled about 2,800 descendants of Cherokee Freedmen from the tribe, the website of the National Museum of the American Indian States.
Chad Smith, the then head of the Cherokee nation, argued that the tribe is 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 ruling that the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court has now reaffirmed.
“The ‘blood language’ contained in the Cherokee Nation Constitution, and any laws arising out of the language, are illegal, outdated and repulsive to the ideal of freedom,” Baker wrote in a recent opinion. “These words insult and humiliate the descendants of the Freedman, just as the Jim Crow laws occur some fifty-seven years after the enactment of the Civil Liberties Act on the books in Southern states.”
Chuck Hoskin Jr., head of Cherokee Nation, praised the decision.
“Cherokee Nation is stronger when we move forward together as citizens and on an equal footing,” he said in a statement Monday. “… The court has strongly acknowledged that our ancestors recognized their commitment to equality 155 years ago in the 1866 Treaty. My hope is that we will all share the same commitment going forward.”
About 8,500 descendants of Freedmen are currently enrolled as citizens of the Cherokee Nation, according to a news release from the tribe.
