Racism and the Cherokee Nation
by William
Loren Katz
This article originally appeared on TheBlackWorldToday.
"Cherokee voters were influenced by the racist charge
‘that the freedmen if not ejected, would use up all of the tribal service
monies.'"
As President Bill Clinton and others arrived in Selma, Alabama for the 42nd
anniversary of the "Bloody Sunday" march that prodded Congress to
pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Cherokee Nation chose a lower road. It
voted overwhelmingly for an amendment to their constitution that revokes
citizenship rights for 2,800 members because their ancestors included people of
African descent.
Marilyn Vann, president of the Descendants of
Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes, has long fought racism from both
governmental officials and indigenous figures. In this instance, she claims,
Cherokee leaders misled voters by insisting "freedmen don't have Indian
blood," "the freedmen were forced on the tribe," "the
freedmen do not have a treaty right to citizenship," "the people have
never voted on citizenship provisions in the history of the tribe," and
"the amendment will create an all Indian tribe." Cherokee voters were
also influenced by the racist charge "that the freedmen if not ejected,
would use up all of the tribal service monies."
The design of the amendment, Vann points out, is
patently discriminatory. It removes membership from descendants of enrolled
African Cherokees whose documentation of Indian ancestry was affirmed by the Dawes Commission more
than a century ago as well as those without documentation of Indian ancestry.
On the other hand it accepts Cherokee members with white blood or even people
whose ancestors are listed as "adopted
whites."
This development comes at a moment of
re-examination of African and Indian alliances that followed 1492. Governor
Nicolas de Ovando of Hispaniola arrived in the Americas in 1502 with a Spanish
armada that carried the first enslaved Africans. Within a year, Ovando wrote to
King Ferdinand that the Africans "fled to the Indians and never could be
captured." To the fury of Europeans, Native Americans, the first people
enslaved in the New World, accepted African runaways. Indians saw no reason to
face the invasion alone.
In their maroon colonies beyond the European settlements
that dotted the coastlines of the Americas, each group contributed invaluable
skills. As victims of the triangular trade, Africans brought their unique experience
of European intentions, weapons, and diplomacy. Native American villages
offered runaways a safe haven for families and a base for operations, and
allowed the two peoples to forge the first "rainbow coalition." So
ubiquitous were maroon communities that a French scholar called them "the
gangrene of colonial society." Seeing these alternative societies as a
threat to their hegemony, Europeans repeatedly deployed search and destroy
armies.
"British traders introduced African slavery to the Five
Nations - the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles."
British colonial officials in what is now the
United States required Indian Nations to sign treaties promising the return of
Black runaways. (There is no record of any fugitives being returned!) To keep
Native American villages from becoming an escape hatch, officials from Florida
to Canada offered Indians staggering rewards for runaways. And to that same
end, British traders introduced African slavery to the Five Nations - the
Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Once these Nations
adopted European-style dress, Christianity and African bondage, they were
called "The Five Civilized Tribes." In Florida where the terrain
permitted guerilla warfare, African Seminoles played a commanding role in a
resistance that at times tied up half of the U.S. Army, held the U.S. military
forces at bay from 1816 to 1858, took 1500 U.S. military lives, and cost
Congress $30,000,000.
By Nat Turner's slave rebellion of 1831,
southern planters, frantic that leaks in their labor system would have
explosive consequences, joined with whites seeking valuable Indian land, to
demand removal of the Five Nations. President Martin Van Buren had 7,000 U.S.
troops drive 60,000 Indians, including black members, to distant Oklahoma. Thousands perished on this "Trail of Tears,"
Cherokees of both lineages comforted one other.
Even before they reached Oklahoma African
bondage dominated the social, political and economic life of the Five Nations,
and created the class and racial divisions evident today. A minority of
Cherokees with white blood owned slaves, claimed a superior status and rose to
leadership. "Pure Indian blood" Cherokees, the majority, became "inferior."
African Cherokees, slave and free, were relegated to the lowest rung. However
in the 1850s Heinrich Mollhausen, a noted German artist, visited the Indian
Territory and described a form of bondage unlike any southern plantation:
These slaves receive from the Indian masters
more Christian treatment than among the Christian whites. The traveler may seek
in vain for any other difference between master and servant than such as nature
had made in the physical characteristics of the races; and the Negro is
regarded as a companion and helper, to whom thanks and kindness are due when he
exerts himself for the welfare of the household.
In 1860 Cherokees in Oklahoma owned 2,511 slaves, and at
the outset of the Civil War, Cherokee leaders, pressured by pro-slavery Indian
Agents and virtually surrounded by Confederate armies, agreed to support the
Confederacy. However, Opothle Yahola, a Creek chief and pacifist, was able to
lead 7,600 people -- including half of the Seminole Nation, Cherokees,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and others, to Union lines in Kansas. By April
1862 the young men of this multicultural exodus had joined the Union Army and
helped free slaves in Missouri.
"African Cherokees soon ran barbershops, blacksmith
shops, general stores and restaurants or became ferryboat operators, cotton-gin
managers, teachers and postmasters."
The defeat of the Confederacy allowed U.S.
officials to scrap its Indian treaties. Whites who had forced African slavery
on Indians now demanded Indians accept Lincoln's "new birth of
freedom." The Seminoles, who had long treated their African members as
allies rather than slaves, embraced equality. Cherokees followed. African
Cherokees soon ran barbershops, blacksmith shops, general stores and
restaurants or became ferryboat operators, cotton-gin managers, teachers and
postmasters. O.S. Fox, editor of the Cherokee Afro-American was
enthusiastic:
The opportunities for our people in that country
far surpassed any of the kind possessed by our people in the U.S. . . . It is
nonsense for any Afro-American to emigrate to Africa or anywhere else if he can
make a living in the Indian Territory.
In 1879 African Cherokees, petitioning for full
equality, based their appeal on a shared history:
The Cherokee nation is our country; there we
were born and reared; there are our homes made by the sweat or our brows; there
are our wives and children, whom we love as dearly as though we were born with
red, instead of black skins. There we intend to live and defend our natural
rights, as guaranteed by the treaties and laws of the United States, by every
legitimate and lawful means.
How ironic and sad that people of African
Cherokee lineage still have to fight for natural rights being denied them by
the New World's first victims of virulent bigotry, imported by the European
invaders.
William Loren Katz is the
author of Black
Indians: A Hidden Heritage and forty other books, and has been associated
with NYU for 35 years. His web site is: http://www.WILLIAMLKATZ.COM
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