Taking Citizenship From Descendents of Former Slaves

Yesterday, the Cherokee Nation voted to strip the descendents of its former slaves of tribal citizenship.  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post (before yesterday’s vote).  For the full article, click here.  How would one approaching law from the perspective of Catholic Legal Theory analyze this issue?

Cherokee Nation To Vote on Expelling Slaves' Descendants

By Ellen Knickmeyer

Washington

Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 3, 2007; A01

VINITA,

Okla.

-- J.D. Baldridge, 73, has official government documents showing him to be a descendant of a full-blood Cherokee. He has memories of a youth spent among Cherokee neighbors and kin, at tribal stomp dances and hog fries. He holds on to a fair amount of Cherokee vocabulary. " Salali," Baldridge says, his face creasing into a smile at the word. "Squirrel stew. Oh, that was good."

What Baldridge, a retired

Oklahoma

county sheriff, also has is at least one black ancestor, a former slave of a Cherokee family. That could get Baldridge cast out of the tribe, along with thousands of others.

The 250,000-member Cherokee Nation will vote in a special election today whether to override a 141-year-old treaty and change the tribal constitution to bar "freedmen," the descendants of former tribal slaves, from being members of the sovereign nation.

"It's a basic, inherent right to determine our own citizenry. We paid very dearly for those rights," Cherokee Principal Chief Chad Smith said in an interview last month in

Oklahoma City

.

But the Cherokee freedmen see the vote as less about self-determination than about discrimination and historical blinders. They see in the referendum hints of racism and a desire by some Cherokees to deny the tribe's slave-owning past.

"They know these people exist. And they're trying to push them aside, as though they were never with them," said Andra Shelton, one of Baldridge's family members.

Shelton

, 59, can recall her mother gossiping in fluent Cherokee when Cherokee friends and relatives visited.

People on both sides of the issue say the fight is also about tribal politics -- the freedmen at times have been at odds with the tribal leadership -- and about money.