WaPo | About US is
a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in
the United States. Look for the About US newsletter launching this fall.
A decade after the Cherokee Nation voted overwhelmingly
to deny citizenship for descendants of the people it enslaved, a
district court judge has invalidated the tribe’s decision. The Cherokee
Nation has long argued that only those with Cherokee blood should be
citizens — excluding the descendants of its black slaves — and a legal
ruling otherwise would be an affront to its sovereignty and self-determination. Journalist Kenneth J. Cooper disagrees and is gathering evidence to show he and his relatives are among the estimated 3,000 living descendants of Cherokee Freedmen
and deserve citizenship. (Leaders of the freedmen’s group have said as
many as 25,000 descendants could be eligible to apply for citizenship.)
Cooper explains why this part of his family’s identity deserves formal
recognition:
I’m preparing to order
certified copies of birth certificates: seven of my grandmother’s from
Oklahoma, seven of my mother’s from Kansas, and 10 from Colorado, where I
was born.
I’m
getting them to enroll myself, my siblings and our nieces as citizens
of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. My birth certificate and my
siblings’ identify both our parents, in the language of that bygone era,
as “Negro.”
So why are we, African Americans, seeking citizenship in a Native American nation?
Two weeks ago, Thomas F. Hogan, a senior U.S. district court judge in D.C., ruled that
descendants of the former slaves of the Cherokee — yes, the Cherokee
had black slaves, an unusual bit of American history most people don’t
know — were entitled to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation under a treaty signed in 1866.
On
my mother’s side, some of our ancestors were enslaved by prosperous
Cherokee. Our family’s history with the Cherokee Nation goes back at
least 200 years, to the early 1800s, in Georgia and North Carolina. The
history of the Cherokee Freedmen and the Cherokee Nation are
intertwined, a point Hogan makes in his opinion.
The lawsuit that led to Hogan’s ruling was prompted
by a 2007 referendum that kicked the freedmen out of the tribe, a move
supported by the great majority of Cherokee who voted. That summer, I
confronted then-Chief Chad Smith, who orchestrated the referendum, at a
panel discussion on the issue at the Unity: Journalists of Color
convention in Chicago. I spoke angrily because of a comment Smith made to The Washington Post:
“A lot of Cherokees don’t know who the freedmen are.” I read that as
trying to erase slave-holding and my family from the tribe’s history.
Through
a decade of genealogical research, I have identified my enslaved
ancestors and most of their Cherokee slaveholders. One of those
ancestors for sure, and likely two, Thomas Still and Malinda Thompson,
separately trekked with the Cherokee on the “Trail of Tears.” Under the
Indian Removal Act of 1830, Army soldiers forced that tribe and others
from the southeast to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, so white settlers
could take over their lands.
