Unlike his predecessor, Chief Bill John Baker has not opposed descendants of the tribe’s former slaves, known as the Cherokee Freedmen, having rights as tribal citizens. That legal issue has been in dispute for more than a century and has yet to be permanently resolved. At stake are the Freedmen’s voting rights and access to health, housing and other services.
Baker, a former longtime member of the Cherokee National Council, has promised to abide by whatever the court of last jurisdiction decides. One federal case on Cherokee Freedmen citizenship is pending in Oklahoma, and there may be an attempt to revive another in Washington, D.C.
Most Americans are unaware that the Cherokee Nation, now one of the nation’s largest Native American tribes, permitted slavery before the Civil War. So did four other tribes that the Army forcibly relocated from the southeast to Oklahoma, then called Indian Territory, on the deadly Trail of Tears beginning in 1838.
The others are the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. The Cherokee took 1,500 Black slaves with them.
During the Civil War, large portions of those five tribes fought on the side of the Confederacy, in part because of a shared economic interest in preserving slavery. Afterward, the federal government negotiated a new treaty with each of the tribes that, among other provisions, required them to do what the Confederacy states had to do: free the slaves, recognize them as citizens and give them equal rights.
To one degree or another, the citizenship rights of the five tribes’ Freedmen and their descendants have been in contention ever since. For the past five years, the legal status of the Cherokee Freedmen, specifically, has bounced back and forth between tribal courts, federal courts and agencies, members of Congress and Cherokee voters.
“It comes up every couple generations. Every few decades, someone within the Cherokee Nation or the Seminole Nation will try to disenfranchise their Freedmen,” says Jon Velie, an Oklahoma lawyer who represents the Cherokee Freedmen. “Usually, it has been over money, not citizenship rights.”
