This is a difficult subject to bring up, and I see several possible conflicts over how and why it could be classified as folklore/cultural material, and conversely why it's simple politics.

I'm starting it off as a BS thread, simply because it remains to be seen whether our people will find it just another bit of politics, or whether it has value as an episode with significance in the cultural history (perhaps some few years hence) of some of us.


A Washington Post article reports that on March 2, 2007, the Cherokee Nation was to vote on whether to eject black members of the tribe. The measure was, as of my reading of the article, expected to pass.

The Cherokee, and other tribes involved, who held black slaves, fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War, and in a treaty at the end of the war were tasked to absorb black slaves held by them into the tribes. Relatively few of the black Cherokee, called Freedmen in the treaty and by tradition since, have applied for recognition of Cherokee heritage, but potentially their descendants could be numerous.

Cherokees, along with Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, were long known as the "Five Civilized Tribes" because they adopted many of the ways of their white neighbors in the South, including the holding of black slaves.
Tribe's slaves became citizens
Many of the Cherokees' slaves accompanied the tribe when it was expelled from its traditional lands in North Carolina and Georgia and forced to migrate in 1838 and 1839 to Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands of Cherokees died during the trip, which became known as the "Trail of Tears." It is not known how many of their slaves also perished.
The tribe fought for the Confederacy. In defeat, it signed a federal treaty in 1866 committing that its slaves, who had been freed by tribal decree during the war, would be absorbed as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.


I would strongly urge reading at least the full WP article before venturing conclusions about what's right and what's wrong here. I'm afraid that I've had enough NA friends to recognize the difficulty many of them have in feeling ownership of their own traditions, but far too few such friends to be able to see what the real motivations for this action might be.

Maybe if someone who knows more of what's going on could give us a song, I'd understand better.

John