Cherokees and the Descendants of their Slaves

From the AP:

One of the nation’s largest American Indian tribes has sent letters to about 2,800 descendants of slaves once owned by its members, revoking their citizenship and cutting their medical care, food stipends, low-income homeowners’ assistance and other services.

The Cherokee Nation acted this week after its Supreme Court upheld the results of a 2007 special vote to amend the Cherokee constitution and remove the slaves’ descendants and other non-Indians from tribal rolls. The 300,000-member tribe is the biggest in Oklahoma, although many of its members live elsewhere.

Olive Anderson, 70, of Kansas City, Mo., called the letter she received “a slap in the face.”

“It tears me up to think they can attack my ancestors,” Anderson said.

The tribe never owned black slaves, but some individual members did. They were freed after the Civil War, in which the tribe allied with the Confederacy. An 1866 treaty between the tribe and the federal government gave the freedmen and their descendants “all the rights of native Cherokees.”

But more than 76 percent of Cherokee voters approved the amendment stripping the descendants of their citizenship.

Questions about the status of "black Indians" have never gone away, but have bubbled to the surface from time to time ever since the US government forced the tribe to accept its freed slaves as members back in 1866. Many Indians hate being lumped together with blacks and immigrants as "minorities." They consider their status to be unique. That their slaves shared the fate of the tribe throughout the nineteenth century, traveling the Trail of Tears and so on, means little to most Cherokees. They consider their identity an inheritance from their distant ancestors. Nobody can join the tribe; you have to be born into it. The addition of race to this situation creates an ugly dynamic. The US government has tried over the years to classify many people who consider themselves Indians, but don't reside on reservations, as black or mulatto. In resisting this and asserting their Native American identity, many Indians have come to think of black as the last thing they want to be. In Maryland a few years ago two different groups claiming descent from the Piscataway tribe accused each other of being mulattoes, rather than real Indians, throwing around "black blood" as a slur as if this were still 1850.

Indians and blacks have different stories and different places in the American imagination. Most Indians who take their identities seriously are determined to resist the classification of themselves as an oppressed minority. They want to maintain the connection to their past as warriors, actors in history rather than victims, and hunter-gatherers in touch with the spirit of the land. This sometimes comes out sounding like anti-black racism, but its roots are different from those of racism among whites.

I have to say that I find the desire of black Cherokees to stay in the tribe rather mysterious. I can't imagine wanting to belong to a group, most of whom so clearly don't want me. If anyone sees anything written by one of the Cherokee slave descendants explaining how he or she feels about his or her identity, please let me know, because I can't find a thing.