Real Cherokees vs Elizabeth Warren, VERSUS Black Cherokees vs. Real Cherokees

I'd been threatening to do this on Twitter since Wednesday morning, when the issue of Warren and her American Indian false moves, plural popped up.

I've blogged and Tweeted about Warren plenty, from the exposure of her claims to American Indian ancestry to the stupidity of her doing a DNA test, then over-interpreting it while publicizing it, and all sorts of things in between.

But, I'd also referenced, on Twitter, black Cherokees from time to time.

And now, with Oklahoma's primary coming up on Tuesday, and folks behind a Medium site called "ewarrenisnotcherokee" writing her an open letter about these issues, it's time to fire back.

Since I'm a deliberate contrarian (I'm also at times a troll on Twitter, but columns like this are deliberate contrarian stuff, not trollery), this is right up my alley.

That's in part because the "real Cherokees" behind some of this stuff hoist themselves by their own petard, and most of them know the history they're swimming upstream against when they do this.

Let's start here:

While the average American thinks of Native Americans as a racial category, we are actually political groups.

So, that means you can't exclude black Cherokees on blood quantum grounds. At least not logically and non-hypocritically.

What? What? What? you may be telling yourself. Who are these "black Cherokees" and why have they been excluded from anything and why can't they be?

Well, Wikipedia calls it the "Cherokee freedmen controversy." I'll give you the nickel version.

Slave cabin kitchen, Chief Vann House.

The Cherokees, like others of the white-labeled "Five Civilized Tribes," practiced chattel slavery of Africans, just as did whites. (Set aside that many American Indian tribes, including the Cherokees, practiced other types of slavery before the Columbian contact. It was different in large part because slave status was not generally heritable.)

Chief Vann, the owner of the slaves who lived in that cabin, owned more than 100 by the year 1800. That put him in the top 10 percent of all slaveowners in the U.S. Son Joseph Vann had more than 200.

This also led to things like slave codes in Indian Territory and above all, in Cherokee lands there, just as in southern states. HNN has the details.

Of course, after 1865, this was illegal. These tribes had fought as co-belligerents with the Confederacy. Post-Civil War treaties generally required them to give their freed slaves tribal citizenship.

Starting in the 1980s, the Cherokee, along with Creek and Seminole, started tightening tribal rolls. See more here for "Black Indians" in general. (Specifically, in 1983, Black Cherokees lost voting rights because they were "not Cherokee by blood.")

The hypocrisy grows deeper with the Cherokees, because the efforts to exclude the freedmen used blood quantum as a tool. This process was completed under the (great, or "great") Chief Wilma Mankiller.

In a long and messy legal process with multiple parts that eventually moved from the Cherokee court system to the federal court system, the federal judiciary eventually restored freedmen's citizenship.

Here's my analogy, and where we're going to hear those petards further.

If the Cherokee (and other tribes) are sovereign nations, it is still and nonetheless under a certain aegis of the federal government. That would include the Fourteenth Amendment. As black slaves, sub specie slavo, were members of the Cherokee Nation, I think a correct extension of the Fourteenth Amendment supports the federal court ruling. Wiki also notes that the 1866 agreements, if the Cherokee want to play up the sovereign nation angle, have treaty status and there's an argument to be made that they can't be unilaterally broken. (OTOH, the USofA did just that regularly.)

Beyond that, as Wiki also notes, the Cherokee have willingly incorporated other people, whether individuals or groups, in the past.

This particular issue also seems to be fueling intra-Cherokee conflect between the Cherokee Nation, incorporated after people of the tribe got back full tribal election rights, and the old United Keetoowah Band. The UKB does use, and require, a blood quantum (one-quarter) but, at the same time, offers honorary associate memberships. And, to square the circle, a number of signatories of the open letter specifically identify as UKB members.

Cherokee Chief John Ross,
not a Cherokee if one
follows UKB blood quantum.

And, to throw the circle into total disorder, famed principal Chief John Ross wouldn't meet the one-quarter blood quantum.

In all of this, as some Cherokees also admit, there's a certain amount of racism. What? Racism by Indians? Yes, and click that "black Indians" link above for more, and it exists among Indian tribes who never had slaves, either.

And, given that the court ruling was just six years ago and final acceptance just three years ago, this is still an open issue.

So, I challenge every signatory of that letter to declare his or her personal stance on the Cherokee freedmen issue. That goes double for any hypocrite signatories identifying as UKB.

I've already asked one directly. On Twitter earlier, I responded to a tweet from a friend who had responded to Rebecca Nagle, a signatory of that letter:

Rebecca Nagle is a real Cherokee my dude. Why should she wait to hold politicians accountable?

— Dave Schwab 🌻 (@FreeDaveSchwab) February 26, 2020

Having since, via Memeorandum, seen that letter, I went back to the Tweet, rechecked the name, and of course, did a search down the page on Medium and found her name.

So, I Tweeted back to her, Dave and the other two:

That said, having also seen that letter on Medium, I'm just going to be direct and ask Rebecca what she thinks about:
1. Black Cherokees;
2. The Cherokee Nation's treatment of them.

— I'll Be Biden Time in South Carolina primary 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 26, 2020

And, I'll either have a response or not. As of the time this went live, I did not.

Yeah, Twitter's low signal-to-noise ratio means one shouldn't read too much into it, if Nagle doesn't respond.

On the other hand, I'm not just tagging her, I'm responding to part of a dialogue. 

So? If she doesn't say anything? Per the old proverb: "Silence gives assent."

Meanwhile, another signee, Santee Dakota Kim TallBear, writes a piece about this for High Country News. Hypocrisy from her for not mentioning the black Cherokees, and what I will only take as willful ignorance from HCN, and not the first time from it on identity politics. This one, with Instagram Influencers in the great, capitalist-invested outdoors, claiming they were being picked on because racism, not capitalism, was a doozy. (And HCN has never pulled back on it.)

Per this New Scientist profile piece about her, it appears the Santee, like the UKB Cherokee, use a blood quantum.

So, both among the Santee and among many Cherokee, we gots us a bunch of fricking hypocrisy.

I want to get back to pre-Contact versions of American Indian slavery, which continued post-Contact. In many such cases, slaves were eventually adopted into the tribe. Which means, of course, no blood quantum for the new adoptee.

I don't agree with Dawes-type termination, but all of this indicates that the federal government would be best behooved by having a uniform policy, not just on tribal membership, but on many other things, with all tribes/nations.

It's true that tribes have had to jump through hoops at times with the federal government, as the modern Cherokee Nation essentially replacing the UKB shows. Having grown up in the Southwest, I know this. That said, in a general sense, the feds have not forced specific methods of tribal membership determination on particular tribes except in cases like this where other legal issues were involved. Nor did Southerners, whether individuals or state governments, force the Cherokee or others of the "civilized tribes," whether qua tribes or qua individuals, to adopt chattel slavery in addition to older non-heritable versions of slavery.

Once again, I agree that fictitious appropriation of American Indian history — whether by Elizabeth Warren or someone else, and Cherokees or another tribe involved — is a real problem.

But, we need to talk about the actual forms of such history, not whitewashed or New Agey versions of such.

And, as for the racism? It's real. Growing up next to the Big Rez, I know plenty a Navajo expressed anti-black comments.

As for HCN? This is just another log on the smouldering fire of why I let my subscription lapse and have no current plans to renew it.