The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest American Indian tribes in the U.S., approaching 400,000 members. Most live in Oklahoma. In the 18th and 19th centuries the Cherokees purchased African-American slaves, and when the Cherokees were driven out of the Southeast, many of those slaves were taken along. In 1866 a treaty guaranteed the former slaves “all the rights and privileges of native Cherokees.”
The treaty provisions were never fully implemented, and descendants of former slaves were often denied tribal membership because they weren’t Cherokees “by blood.”
The Cherokees have now rectified the situation, and since 2017 have enrolled over 5000 descendants of former slaves. The Principal Chief of the Cherokees said the tribe was fulfilling a promise. “The United States government has broken all of its treaty obligations. The Cherokee Nation is better than that.”
The United States is a very complicated country.
Info for this post is from Mark Walker, “Cherokee Address Bias Against Slave Descendants,”New York Times, (25 Feb 2021), p. A15.
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