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FirstQuaker -> RE: Calling on the experts (8/25/2011 4:40:06 AM)
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ORIGINAL: StrangerThan
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ORIGINAL: FirstQuaker
For better or worse, the Cherokee nation made the treaty at the end of the US Civil War, in response to their former slave owning and hopes for a better future.
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ARTICLE 9. The Cherokee Nation having, voluntarily, in February, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, by an act of the national council, forever abolished slavery, hereby covenant and agree that never hereafter shall either slavery or involuntary servitude exist in their nation otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, in accordance with laws applicable to all the members of said tribe alike. They further agree that all freedmen who have been liberated by voluntary act of their former owners or by law, as well as all free colored persons who were in the country at the commencement of the rebellion, and are now residents therein, or who may return within six months, and their descendants, shall have all the rights of native Cherokees: Provided, That owners of slaves so emancipated in the Cherokee Nation shall never receive any compensation or pay for the slaves so emancipated.
TREATY WITH THE CHEROKEE, 1866.
And that was before casinos, or the Oklahoma land rush, or massive federal monies, or any other thing.
After a 150 years of detached reflection, it is a bit late to decide they made a mistake.
Interestingly, Obama is part Cherokee, in addition to being part Irish, British and Kenyan..
Some history... the issue has been at debate almost since the treaty was signed. So it's not just a casino thing. Efforts to limit or remove freedmen from the tribe have existed since the late 1870's - early 1880's. The treaty was pushed by the federal government, so it wasn't just a lone act of the Cherokee to address the prior status of slaves.
I grew up in Western North Carolina. It was hard to find anyone at the time who didn't have some Cherokee blood involved in their history.
Actually the African slavery was an issue internal to the Cherokees, even before the United States was founded, with some clans for and some against this thing, and the full-blooded Cherokee usually against it, while the Metis were often the proponents.
Cherokees even had their own Civil War to go along with that fought by the rest of the US, notice the date of the Cherokee emancipation proclamation.
And the Cherokees were divided on this chattel slavery going back into the 1700s at least. An accounting of this background is here - Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865
And certainly the Cherokees were not the only ones facing this issue, the Seminoles, Creeks, and Choctaw all also dealt with this issue in a similar manner at the time, while the Chickasaw refused to make their freed slaves tribal members.
But this European idea of chattel slavery is a gift that just keeps on giving, and now this evil returns to plague the tenth generation of those who thought it was a good thing at the time.
So what then is the answer? Are you gonna kick out people who have been part of your band for 10 some generations? What happens if Alabama or Texas decide a similar thing regarding their African Americans, (or the local Amerindians as far as that goes) perhaps the Perry ideas on state's rights allow him to think the US government forced Texas into a similar treaty or two, and now is the time to rectify it?
But in actuality the US broke the treaty way back when , most of Oklahoma was supposed to be Cherokee lands, and the US fixed that minor problem, when there was oil waiting to to be pumped.
But in another one or two hundred years many of the United States public will likely be Metis with some droplets of Cherokee blood at the rate things are going. What then, when the some nice chunk of the US is part Cherokee?
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