Cherokee People! Cherokee Tribe! So Proud to Live! So Glad We're White!
A fascinating story about Indian history, alleged racism, too much money, and science. Link. Excerpts:
The Cherokee kept black slaves until 1866, when an emancipation treaty freed them from bondage and granted them full tribal citizenship. Known as the Freedmen, these men and women were embraced by the Cherokee as equals, and often married the offspring of their former masters. . . [T]hey identified with local cultures, spoke tribal languages, and took part in tribal religious rites. . .
Once paragons of racial inclusion and assimilation, the Native American sovereign nations have done an about-face and systematically pushed out people of African descent. "There's never been any stigma about intermarriage," says Stu Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in central Oklahoma. "You've got Indians marrying whites, Indians marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money."
These are boom times for the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma - the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole - due in no small part to the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act that allowed the tribes to construct their own casinos. The Chickasaw's net assets have more than doubled to $315 million in the two years since it opened the mammoth WinStar Casinos complex in Thackerville. The corporate arm of the Cherokee Nation, Cherokee Nation Enterprises, is on track to make nearly $70 million this year thanks to a new casino in Catoosa. Then there's the government reparations fund. In 1990, the Seminoles received a $56 million settlement as compensation for the seizure of the tribe's ancestral lands in Florida almost 200 years ago.
And so, in recent years, a rush of Indians has come forward to claim tribal citizenship and get their share of the benefits. In 1980, there were 50,000 members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; today, there are more than a quarter million. But even as the official ranks of the Five Civilized Tribes have swelled, they've revised membership guidelines to exclude the Freedmen.
For the better part of the 20th century, black Indians were permitted to vote in elections, sit on tribal councils, and receive benefits. Tribal leaders now insist that the Freedmen were never actually citizens and that they will never attain the honor of membership because they don't have Native American blood. In 1983, the Cherokee tribe established a rule requiring citizens to carry a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This federal document is available to anyone whose ancestors are listed on the Dawes Roll - a 1906 Indian census that excludes Freedmen. In 2000, the Seminoles expelled all 2,000 black members and denied their families a cut of the reparations money - never mind that their ancestors joined the tribe in the 18th century, endured the march from Florida to Oklahoma in the 1830s, and have considered themselves Indian for generations.
Outraged, numerous Freedmen have turned to the courts for help. In the most celebrated case, a black tribal leader named Sylvia Davis filed suit against the Seminole tribe in 1994 to get her son a $125 clothing stipend from the Seminole reparations money. But US courts have repeatedly refused to meddle in Indian affairs, noting that the sovereign nations determine their own membership criteria. Davis suffered a serious - and perhaps final - setback last year, when the Supreme Court refused to consider her appeal of a lower court's ruling that the Seminoles could not be sued in federal court. (The Bush administration filed a brief on behalf of the tribe.)
Now, just as the Freedmen's struggle appears all but lost, new hope is emerging from an unlikely place - the front lines of genetic science. Last year, several Freedmen leaders were approached by a molecular biology professor named Rick Kittles. As head of African Ancestry, a company he had recently founded to sell DNA testing services to amateur genealogists, Kittles promised to reveal any customer's preslavery roots, whether they stretch to the Tikar of Cameroon or the Mende of Sierra Leone.
I guess Paul Revere and the Raiders came pretty close:
They took the whole Cherokee nation
And gave us casinos on a reservation
They took away our ways of life
And gave us roulette tables and blinking lights.
They took away our native tongue
And gave reparation millions to our young
And all the beads we made by hand
Are now gold tokens in our land.
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So glad we're white
They took the whole Indian nation
And gave us slaves for us to ration
And now I wear a shirt and tie
And I ain't a black man deep inside.
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So glad we're white
And some day when they've learned
Black-less Indian will return
Will return will return
Will return will return
(I'm painfully aware someone will allege racism in these lyrics, but if I were to decline to post something potentially funny because of the Sensitivity Police, this blog would become dormant.)
