Cherokee Nation Votes Out Black Members, Is It Justified?

I write a lot about Native-Americans here On-Walkabout so this recent news about citizenship requirements of the Cherokee Nation I found quite interesting:

The nation’s second-largest Indian tribe formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.

The Cherokee nation voted after the Civil War to admit the slave descendants to the tribe.

But on Monday, the Cherokee nation Supreme Court ruled that a 2007 tribal decision to kick the so-called “Freedmen” out of the tribe was proper.

The controversy stems from a footnote in the brutal history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. When many Indians were forced to move to what later became Oklahoma from the eastern U.S. in 1838, some who had owned plantations in the South brought along their slaves.

Some 4,000 Indians died during the forced march, which became known as the “Trail of Tears.”

“And our ancestors carried the baggage,” said Marilyn Vann, the Freedman leader who is a plaintiff in the legal battle.

Officially, there are about 2,800 Freedmen, but another 3,500 have tribal membership applications pending, and there could be as many as 25,000 eligible to enter the tribe, according to Vann.  [Reuters]

I hadn’t realized that the Cherokee had a large slave population until I watched the excellent PBS documentary “We Shall Remain” that showed how the Cherokee plantation owners had grown wealthy with the use of slaves.  Wikipedia has a good posting that chronicles the Freedmen citizenship issue that is not nothing new and has been going on for decades.  It seems the heart of this matter appears to be a combination of Cherokee saying that blood matters in regards to determining who is Cherokee as well as the number of Freedmen joining the tribe just to access services provided by the Cherokee such as free health care.