Cherokees Revoke Citizenship of Blacks
by Jeff Davis
Many Americans think that slavery in America involved only white Southern plantation owners and black slaves. The most lucrative part of slavery and the most cruel was the slave trade, which was overwhelmingly run by Jews. And not all slave owners were white. Some Indian tribes including the Cherokees bought slaves to help with their farms. When the Civil War ended, the Union was faced with the odd situation of Cherokees still owning black slaves. A treaty was drawn up in 1866 and the Cherokees freed their slaves (most likely under threat of invasion or after being compensated by the US government). Apparently these black ex-slaves and their descendents have been living as a racial minority, unassimilated, ever since. Today the issue of race in the Cherokee Nation has suddenly cropped up in a big way.
A Yahoo news article reports “Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves. With all 32 precincts reporting, 76.6 percent had voted in favor of an amendment to the tribal constitution that would limit citizenship to descendants of ‘by blood’ tribe members as listed on the federal Dawes Commission’s rolls from more than 100 years ago. The commission, set up by a Congress bent on breaking up Indians’ collective lands and parceling them out to tribal citizens, drew up two rolls, one listing Cherokees by blood and the other listing freedmen, a roll of blacks regardless of whether they had Indian blood. Some opponents of the ballot question argued that attempts to remove freedmen from the tribe were motivated by racism.” (more…)