Cherokee freedmen controversy

During the antebellum period, the Cherokee and other Southeast Native American nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes held African-American slaves as workers and property. The Cherokee "elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners" and, in "1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves." It was slave labor that "allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before," such as John Ross, a Cherokee chief, who "lived in a log cabin directly after Removal" but a few years after, "he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch."^[1] After the American Civil War, the Cherokee Freedmen were emancipated and allowed to become citizens of the Cherokee Nation in accordance with a reconstruction treaty made with the United States in 1866. In the early 1880s, the Cherokee Nation administration amended citizenship rules to require direct descent from an ancestor listed on the "Cherokee By Blood" section of the Dawes Rolls. The change stripped descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen of citizenship and voting rights unless they satisfied this new criterion.


On March 7, 2006, the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled that the membership change was unconstitutional and that the Freedmen descendants were entitled to enroll in the Cherokee Nation. A special election, held on March 3, 2007, resulted in passage of a constitutional amendment that excluded the Cherokee Freedmen descendants from membership unless they satisfied the "Cherokee by blood" requirement.^[2] The Cherokee Nation District Court voided the 2007 amendment on January 14, 2011. This decision was overturned by a 4–1 ruling in Cherokee Nation Supreme Court on August 22, 2011.


The ruling also excluded the Cherokee Freedmen descendants from voting in the special run-off election for Principal Chief. In response, the Department of Housing and Urban Development froze $33 million in funds and the Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs wrote a letter objecting to the ruling. Afterward, the Cherokee Nation, Freedmen descendants, and the U.S. government reached an agreement in federal court to allow the Freedmen descendants to vote in the special election.


Through several legal proceedings in United States and Cherokee Nation courts, the Freedmen descendants conducted litigation to regain their treaty rights and recognition as Cherokee Nation members.^[3] While the Cherokee Nation filed a complaint in federal court in early 2012, Freedmen descendants and the United States Department of the Interior filed separate counterclaims on July 2, 2012.^[4][5] The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld tribal sovereignty, but stated that the cases had to be combined due to the same parties being involved. On May 5, 2014, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, oral arguments were made in the first hearing on the merits of the case. On August 30, 2017, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, granting the Freedmen descendants full rights to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation has accepted this decision, effectively ending the dispute. However, the Nation is still grappling with the effects. In 2021, the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court ruled to remove the words "by blood" from its constitution and other legal doctrines. The words had been "added to the constitution in 2007" and had "been used to exclude Black people whose ancestors were enslaved by the tribe from obtaining full Cherokee Nation citizenship rights."^[6]