Who You Are Not

Last month, the Cherokee Nation voted overwhelmingly to purge its ranks of nearly 3000 members—all of them black. Citing their status as a sovereign nation, the Cherokee defended their right to define citizenship requirements, even if those requirements are unabashedly racist.

Cherokee members held black slaves until 1865, when they and their Confederate allies were defeated in the Civil War. Following their emancipation, many black “freedmen,” as they are still known, chose to remain among the Cherokee, retaining their cultural heritage. Freedmen were officially recognized as members of the Cherokee Nation in the Final Dawes Rolls, a government effort to determine Native American citizenry. Consequently, Cherokee freedmen, as the Nation continues to label them, have come to identify themselves as citizens endowed with all the rights of the Cherokee. That is, until now.

With a 76.6 percent majority vote, the Cherokee have issued a powerful message of intolerance and bigotry. The vote effectively denies freedmen legal rights as Native Americans and membership in their own community, despite their Cherokee lineage and identity.

Of course the most surprising and disappointing aspect of the situation is that few groups of people have suffered through more racism, scorn, and exclusion than the Cherokee themselves. To marginalize the freedmen, much less vote them out, reveals deep hypocrisy in a nation that prides itself on cultural memory.

Why would the Cherokee, a group all-too-familiar with cultural ignorance and racist categorization, publicly expel its freedman members?

Part of it could be a misguided effort to divorce themselves from their slave-owning past—an unsubtle attempt at historical revisionism. But more important is the emphasis on maintaining a “pure” tribe of Indians by blood—the insecure, marginalized community striking out at its own marginalized minority. The Cherokees’ concern with preserving their culture and heritage enables their most vocal members to play on tribal fears.

As Darren Buzzard, a Cherokee proponent of the law change, warned his tribe in a public e-mail, “Don’t get taken advantage of by these people [freedmen]. They will suck you dry.”

But it is also a matter of money: The Cherokee benefit from a $350 million yearly grant from the federal government and, with no freedmen around, there is more left for “pure blood” Indians.

As regards the U.S., this entire debacle is an issue of self-determination. The Cherokee repeatedly assert their hard-earned right to self-determination, and in this instance, the right to determine their citizenry. But their position is contradictory; self-determination is not just the right of the majority to exclude, but the right of a people to self-identify. If the freedmen identify as Cherokees and can stake a legitimate historical claim to that heritage, they should be allowed membership in the Cherokee Nation.

By excluding members because of race, the Cherokee are engaging in the very practices they object to in the U.S. They are acting as an overbearing authority determined to tell you the freedmen who they are, who their ancestors were, and with whom they identify. If that’s self-determination, then maybe the Cherokee Nation and their sovereignty need to be reevaluated.

Fortunately, the American government has the ability to respond with force. The Seminole tribe decided similarly in a 2000 vote to exclude its freedmen descendants, but the action was short-lived. With the mere threat to remove federal funding, the American government forced the Seminoles’ hand, restoring the freedmen their much-deserved citizenship. If the government were to reissue this threat against the Cherokee, the freedmen would likely be reinstated, even if only out of Cherokee self-interest.

Of course, we can’t legislate racist attitudes out of existence, but we can give Cherokee freedmen the choice of whether to remain in the home of their cultural legacy and identity or whether to abandon a nation that has shown them little humanity.

Jeff D. Nanney ’10, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Matthews Hall.