The Cherokee Nation acknowledges that descendants of people once enslaved by the tribe should also qualify as Cherokee
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Updated 8:53 PM EST, Thu February 25, 2021
(CNN)A longstanding dispute over who can be considered a citizen of the Cherokee Nation finally came to a conclusion this week.
The Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the tribal nation remove the phrase "by blood" from its constitution and other tribal laws. That change formally acknowledges that the descendants of Black people once enslaved by the tribe -- known as the Cherokee Freedmen -- have the right to tribal citizenship, which means they are eligible to run for tribal office and access resources such as tribal health care.
The recent decision by the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court is a response to a 2017 ruling by a US district court, which determined that the descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen are entitled to full tribal citizenship rights under a treaty the Cherokee Nation made with the US in 1866.
"Freedmen rights are inherent," Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice Shawna S. Baker wrote in the opinion. "They extend to descendents of Freedmen as a birthright springing from their ancestors' oppression and displacement as people of color recorded and memorialized in Article 9 of the 1866 Treaty."
Enslaved Black people journeyed on the Trail of Tears
The history of the Cherokee Freedmen is an example of just how complex and layered issues of race, inequality and marginalization are in the US.
Many Native Americans were enslaved alongside African Americans during the colonial period -- Brown University historian Linford D. Fisher estimates that 2 million to 5.5 million Native people were enslaved from the time of Christopher Columbus to around 1880.
But some wealthier tribal citizens, particularly in tribes in the Southeast that had adopted certain norms of White settlers, also practiced slavery themselves. That includes the Cherokee people, some of whom in the early 1800s had started to enslave African Americans.
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