The late Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography the following words: “The truth is that the practice of slavery will forever cast a shadow on the great Cherokee Nation.”
The repercussions of slavery are still being felt within the Cherokee Nation, as a five-year legal battle between the Cherokee Nation and the descendants of freed Cherokee slaves ended on August 22, with the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruling against freedmen who had sought to have their status as citizens of the Cherokee Nation validated.
The ruling upheld a 2007 Cherokee Nation Constitutional amendment that requires the nation’s citizens to have at least one Indian ancestor on the Dawes Rolls, the primary document used to determine Cherokee Nation eligibility. That amendment was passed after the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the freedmen could qualify for tribal citizenship. This latest ruling immediately revoked the citizenship of approximately 2,800 non-Indians, whose enrolment had been reinstated by a Cherokee Nation District Court four years ago. This ends the membership of Cherokee Nation members who are descendants of freedmen or of intermarried whites who had been granted Cherokee Nation citizenship.
One of the main legal arguments of the freedmen was based on a treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the U.S. government in 1866, after the end of the Civil War. Article 9 of that treaty states that the Cherokee Nation abolished slavery by 1863 and 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.”