Posted on 03/03/2007 9:06:01 AM PST by rabidralph
VINITA, Okla. -- J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good."
What Baldridge, a retired Oklahoma county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along with thousands of others.
The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation.
"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in Oklahoma City.
But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of racism and a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
A very interesting story. I'm not entirely sure where to begin unraveling this ball of yarn.
Well that's crap. Either is you is or you ain't. Are they going to tell them to sit in the back of the teepee?
No they didn't...they held them captive not as slaves.
Europeans (English and Spanish) owned slaves...not the natives. Mexico is basically controlled by the same 20 or so european families that have always controlled Mexico.
"That's pretty sad. Is it correct to assume that reservations are not subject to Federal laws regarding equal rights etc?"
I don't know. They have their own tribal police, for example, but I've heard of county sheriffs arresting people on the reservation. Just to complicate things, it may vary from tribe to tribe (or nation to nation). Some of the tribes/nations lost more than others in various treaties. The Cherokee lost much of their land and independence after siding with the Confederacy during the Civil War, despite also having people fighting on the Union side.
The battle for most favored minority is heating up I see, wait until we have the next amnesty for the majority minority.
These are desperate times. If the Cherokee Nation can't reduce their numbers they're going to have to assimilate into society, get jobs and all those other unpleasant things us Non-Hyphenated-Americans have to do.
"Which PC group wll give in first".
In the PC world of "Group Rights", Blacks are atop the heap but that is changing. Hispanics are gaining rapidly and will displace them before long.
"Faggotts" are gaining even more rapidly and could gain the #1 spot over both Hispanics and Blacks.
Revealing.
More people recognized Miss Ellen's feeble grasp of history than I thought.
The unifying traits within the journalism profession today are a.) ignorance and b.) inability to perform even a modicum of research.
;^)
I'd offer up that it is by design and not so much incompetence. At least generally speaking.
Yes, the Cherokees did unite behind the Confederacy, because they had no trust at all of the Federal government and a special animosity toward Andrew Jackson.
I would imagine this is the doing of the muckety-muck higher ups.
There are quite a few Blacks with Indian ancestry, and the big honchos (if I can call them that ;)) probably don't want any of their power diminished.
MINORITY FIGHT!!!
Heh heh heh. I'm part Cherokee and Blackfeet, myself.
You are quite mistaken.
This guy has it all figured out.
Too bad our government hasn't figured out the same thing...
Semper Fi
Surely you kid. Why the Indians were earth loving,peaceful family people, they had a great peaceful religion. It is the evil white Europeans that owned slaves, treated women like dogs, ate dogs, Scalped enemies, scraped the skin off live humans with clam shells then pitiched them into a fire,committed genocide of other white tribes. They even washed their hands in the brains when they scalped them and exposed the brain. Evil I tell you Evil. I know I am one-eighth indian and my indian ancestors were soo peace loving compared to my evil white ancestors. (sarcasm)
The only people of that region who did not get sent on the Trail of Tears were the Catawba, because they actually helped the Federal Government return slaves to their owners.
As an aside, they were consuming themselves in alcoholism and dying out in the last century until they adopted Mormonism and stopped drinking. They have a healthy little community now in South Carolina.
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