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.
Friday, March 2, 2007
I've posted on SSRN this paper, arising out of Villanova's fine conference last fall on The Meaning of the Preferential Option for the Poor for Law and Policy. Here's part of the the abstract:
IP lies at the heart of debates over globalization and whether it is working to help poor nations or to impose new costs on them while increasing the wealthy nations' relative advantages. The Catholic Church has weighed in on these issues, most clearly in favor of limiting patent rights over essential medicines for combating AIDS and other epidemics. . . .
. . . Intellectual property, like other forms of property, serves important purposes related to human dignity, productivity, and (especially) creativity, and Catholic teaching therefore affirms it. But for a variety of reasons, limits on intellectual property are equally important: the full extension of IP rights may harm the poor, and certain limits on those rights are important to benefiting and empowering the poor. In particular, certain existing or proposed limits on IP rights can resonate with Catholic concepts such as maintenance of the common good and the importance of subsidiary organizations defined neither by the state nor by the market. And expressions of skepticism in Catholic thought about bureaucratic approaches to the poor reflected in the social assistance state have relatively little application to the kind of limits on IP rights that may be adopted to empower the poor.
Tom
For the next several days, I'll be in Heaven, a.k.a., Little Cottonwood Canyon, near Salt Lake City. (Brigham Young was right: "This is the place.") So, no blogging for me. Feel free, however, to click here for the snow report.
Here's a question -- a "bleg", some call it -- for all MOJ-ers and readers: Which colleges and universities are best for Catholics? Now, I do not mean to limit the possibilities to Catholic colleges and universities. Are there places -- Catholic or not -- where the Catholic community is particularly strong, where the Catholic campus ministry is particularly good, where scholars (Catholic and not) are noteworthy for taking seriously religious perspectives, questions, and commitments? Are there any resources out there that might answer this question?
