{"id":21273,"date":"2012-03-10T23:16:21","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T23:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=21273"},"modified":"2012-03-10T23:16:45","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T23:16:45","slug":"a-race-or-a-nation-cherokee-national-identity-and-the-status-of-freedmens-descendents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=21273","title":{"rendered":"A Race or a Nation? Cherokee National Identity and the Status of Freedmen’s Descendents"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Race or a Nation? Cherokee National Identity and the Status of Freedmen’s Descendents<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

bepress Legal Series<\/a>
\nWorking Paper 1570<\/a>
\n2006-08-17
\n72 pages<\/p>\n

S. Alan Ray<\/a><\/strong>, President
\nElmhurst College, Elmhurst, Illinois<\/em><\/p>\n

The Cherokee Nation<\/a> today faces the challenge of determining its citizenship criteria in the context of race. The article focuses on the Cherokee Freedmen<\/a>. As former slaves of Cherokee citizens, the Freedmen were adopted into the Cherokee Nation after the Civil War<\/a> pursuant to a treaty with the United States, and given unqualified rights of citizenship. The incorporation of the Freedmen into the tribe was resisted from the start, and now, faced with a decision of the Cherokee Nation\u2019s highest court affirming the descendents\u2019 citizenship rights, the Nation prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment which would impose an Indian \u201cblood quantum\u201d requirement for citizenship. If approved, potentially thousands of African-descended citizens would be eliminated from the tribal registry. In this Article, Professor Ray examines the legal and social history of the Cherokee Freedmen to criticize and reject definitions of Cherokee political identity based on either the federal Dawes Rolls<\/a> of the allotment era, or notions of \u201cIndian blood.\u201d Both, he argues, are heteronymous authorities for determining tribal citizenship criteria and should be replaced by the critical hermeneutic<\/a> of indigenous cultural resources. Professor Ray offers a model for constructing tribal citizenship criteria that attempts to deliver ancestry from biology, and law from legal fetishism of the Dawes Rolls. The wise use of sovereignty, he suggests, requires sustained dialogue between Freedmen\u2019s descendents and Cherokees by ancestry, not the \u201cquick fix\u201d of the political process.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n