The Treaty with the United States let's the black folks have all the same rights.
BTW, all those black descendants probably have as many Cherokee ancestors as the white ones.
There's a Mohawk group in Canada who want to do a one time only elimination of the blood quantum for all Indians, and let people chose their identities.
Then they close the books again and those issues are settled for a generation.
Some groups (e.g. other Iroquois) keep the membership rolls secret so someone whose folks got away from the tribe would probably have to prove decent with birth records and such. There's a Pocahontas Society made up of descendants of Pocahontas (actually the Powhatan Indian Tribe). They've been around a long time and are not recognized as a tribe.
The little blue card does have some value to some people I guess, but to most the certified birth records have more value.
More important than all of that a good number of North American Indian groups have the X-Factor DNA sequence that denotes Sa'ami ancestry. That's the kind of list you want to be on ~ have it inscribed in your very genome.
WELL, NO, the terms in that Treaty were THAT MEMBERSHIP IN THE CHEROKEE NATION IS BASED ON BLOOD!
“BTW, all those black descendants probably have as many Cherokee ancestors as the white ones.”
ONLY if they have a BLOOD RELATIVE on that census roll! Not just because they were freed men with no blood tie to the nation. If you’re not a BLOOD RELATIVE, you don’t get voting rights on Nation issues.