Replies

For the record...from what I can glean on this...I think the black Cherokees got the shaft. It doesn’t seem right

I want all NeoYankees and race baiters here who call me racist day in and day out to take note.

thanks

Cherokees fielded army units for the Confederacy—the First and Second Mounted Rifles—many fought at Elk Horn Tavern for the south. The last Confederate General to surrender was a Cherokee. They supported the Lost Cause in hopes that they could, after the south won the war, become a state of their own in the CSA.

It looks like they may be within their rights, based on what the treaty says. But I don't know that any of the slaves were considered as members of the tribe before the civil war, so I don't know why they should be now. If the Cherokee would have left their slaves behind when Andy Jackson kicked them out of N. Carolina, they would have just ended up as someone else's slaves anyway. It seems to me that freeing of the slaves due to the civil war would make them United States citizens, not Cherokee Nation citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_freedmen_controversy#Treaty_of_1866

Some people against membership for Freedmen descendants support Chief Smith's stance that the Freedmen are not Cherokee citizens because their ancestors were listed on the Freedmen Roll of the Dawes Rolls and not on the "Cherokee By-Blood" Roll. Smith and supporters claim that the Freedmen and their descendants have not been active in the tribe for 100 years, that the Freedmen were compensated for slavery with their Dawes land allotments and not tribal membership, that they were forced on the tribe due to the Treaty Of 1866, and that they are solely after the tribe's resources and Cherokee Nation's federally funded programs