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32  From Kin to Intruder: Cherokee Legal Attitudes toward People of African Descent in the Nineteenth Century Fay A. Yarbrough In the spring of 2007, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma grabbed national, and even international attention, with its March 3 decision to revoke the citizenship rights of 2,800 Cherokee freedmen—that is, the descendants of slaves owned by members of the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century—by stipulating that individuals be able to trace ancestry to the “by blood” rolls to claim Cherokee citizenship, in effect instituting a blood requirement for citizenship.1 Of course, such rhetoric ignores the fact that some of the freedmen do in fact have Cherokee ancestry, but because of the policies of the Dawes Commission, their ancestors were placed on the “freedmen” rolls instead of the “by blood” rolls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.2 The Dawes Commission, created by a federal act, enumerated the membership of various nations in the rolls, and each member then received a parcel or allotment of land. This process of enrollment and allotment was part of a larger policy of dissolving tribal governments and ending communal land ownership in favor of individual land ownership among the Cherokee Indians and other tribal groups.3 Only the “by blood” roll of the Dawes Commission’s enumeration includes information about Cherokee blood quantum, a concept that traditional Cherokee practice did not recognize.4 Some indigenous groups use these lists or rolls as the basis for determining citizenship today. As a part of the campaign to expel the freedmen descendants, Darren Buzzard circulated an electronic message that warned in part, “FOR OUR DAUGHTER[S] . . . FIGHT AGAINST THE INFILTRATION,” a message that invoked the old fear of interracial sex.5 John Ketcher, a member of the Cherokee Nation, claimed that he never saw a black person until he was ten years old and was skeptical that the freedmen descendants are part of the Cherokee community. “I think they want some of the goodies that are coming our way,” he said.6 His views no doubt reflect those of many others in the Cherokee Nation. These responses and the decision to revoke freedmen citizenship came in reaction to the successful legal attempt by Lucy Allen, a descendant of a Cherokee freedman, to obtain voting rights for herself and other freedmen descendants and is part of a much longer legal struggle over the inclusion or exclusion of those freedmen descendants From Kin to Intruder  33 in the Cherokee citizenry, a struggle with roots in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation. Throughout the nineteenth century, American officials and indigenous populations negotiated terms for coexistence. Federal and state governments were unsure just what status indigenous nations held. The federal government continued to make treaties with indigenous groups as distinct sovereign nations but frequently disregarded such agreements over territorial boundaries, and states such as Georgia insisted that indigenous governments had no authority and passed laws that applied to indigenous persons despite the objections of native peoples. Indigenous groups such as the Cherokees, on the other hand, understood their national sovereignty to be complete and total. To emphasize this point, during the first third of the nineteenth century, Cherokee legislators wrote a constitution much like that of the United States Constitution. It included provisions defining membership in the Cherokee Nation, outlining voter eligibility, regulating property ownership, and establishing criminal behavior and punishment. At the same time, Cherokee Indians formulated and formalized their own racial ideologies and attitudes toward individuals of African descent. Indian removal, the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the introduction of the population of freedmen combined to create a tumultuous century in the Cherokee Nation when ideas about race and racial difference crystallized. Several nineteenth-century legal cases delineate the evolution of Cherokee racial attitudes toward people of African descent. Together these cases demonstrate that official Cherokee policy on the treatment and inclusion of blacks in Cherokee society was in flux during the nineteenth century. Cherokee legal authorities incrementally developed a concept of Cherokee identity that excluded individuals of African descent. In my judgment, this change in Cherokee legal attitudes toward individuals of African descent reflects a shift in thinking about race and racial hierarchy in the larger Cherokee society. In other words, the legal variation in the treatment of blacks in the Cherokee Nation embodies the Cherokees’ own changing self-perceptions within a larger racial hierarchy that included the United States.7 Early in this era, the...

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