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.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
One last comment on the Edith Stein Project. The conference organizers received financial and non-financial support from various sources. During the past two years MOJ's Elizabeth Kirk - through Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture - provided invaluable support and guidance to the project.
I am humbled in the face of a conference like the Edith Stein Project for a number of reasons. (I’ll mention two).
First, the profound insights of these young women (and men) in their late teens and early twenties leaves me awestruck. (not to mention organizational ability to pull off a major conference). At their age, I was an observant Catholic but my mind was 1) less developed, 2) less serious, and 3) more secular. With these young people, we see the fruits of John Paul the Great as these young people take their places in the world as part of what has been dubbed the JP II generation.
Second, the major work of cultural transformation and renewal will NOT come (IMHO) from the part of the vineyard that I have been given to till (my vocation in the law) but from changing hearts and minds in the broader culture. To be sure, we in the law have much work to do. Some of us are involved in a sort of rear guard action, defending against legal attempts to further marginalize the religious voice from the public square and/or defending the Church from those who would impose currently fashionable secular norms on the life of the Church. Others are involved in critiquing secularist (agnostic or a-theistic) legal thought. Still others are imagining a legal system that took seriously the integral humanism proposed by the Church (and others). But, the seeds we plant will not bear fruit unless the soil of our culture has been tilled by those working outside the law.
The dynamism of this conference came from a blending of academic discourse, reports on direct action, and personal testimony. Even the more academic talks had components of either direct action or personal testimony. The direct action and personal testimony allowed us (the participants) to descend from the ivory tower with hope that the ideas presented could be implemented.
- Jennifer Kenning and Brandi Lee explored the problems associated with the false image of the “ideal” woman portrayed in women’s magazines like Cosmo, Seventeen, etc. In addition to the critique, they shared with the audience their responses, which are aimed at helping transform and heal the culture.
- Jennifer, an ND grad, used her senior project - a pilot issue of “Wirl,” a magazine for teenage girls, as a positive and healthy alternative to the fare available at the grocery store checkout counter.
- Brandi’s talk, “Young Women & the Media: Fighting Back Against a Beauty Obsessed Culture” and her commercially successful “True Girl” magazine are powerful examples of how each of us can use our unique gifts to heal a wounded culture.
- Beth Bauer, who works with Rachel’s Vineyard post-abortive healing ministry spoke on “Trauma and Healing after Abortion: ‘Neither Do I Condemn You.’”
- Caitlin Shaughnessy, a recent ND grad who helped plan the 2006 Edith Stein Project, works at the Women’s Care Center of South Bend and spoke on “Healing Our Culture: Planting the Seed.”
- Cathy Nolan, also of the Women’s Care Center, spoke on “The Healing of the Feminine, A Case in Point.”
- Danielle Haley who is at home with her one year old spoke on “Calling All Homegirls: Exploring True Femininity and True Friendship.
Perhaps the most moving talks at the conference came from several Notre Dame students who were courageous enough to speak about brokenness and healing in their own lives. A panel of young women discussed the experience of being raped and the painful process of healing afterwards. Two young women spoke about their eating disorders and the importance of community - family and friends - in the struggle to overcome the problem and to begin to face and heal the underlying cause of the disorder. And, two young men spoke about the destructive effects of pornography in their own lives (one of the students had overcome an addiction to pornography), and the problems associated with the relative silence (as compared to alcohol and assault) about the issue on college campuses.
One of this year’s conference organizers wrote that she felt “tremendously blessed to have, quite literally, stumbled across the Edith Stein conference last year.” “Fascinated by the personalistic-norm paradigm,” she “dove excitedly into planning” the 2007 conference. Drawing from the Edith Stein Project, this same young woman is currently piloting an outreach initiative for high school aged girls in her the South Bend-Ft. Wayne Diocese.
My hat’s off to this group of 19 to 22 year old women and men for a fantastic job in putting on such a rich and thought-provoking conference.
