An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

Affairs to approve amendments to the Cherokee Nation constitution. The
nation’s argument is that it seeks to enact sovereignty, a rationale that, in
theory and mostly in practice, I agree with. The illegally elected chief,
Chad Smith, appoints two more judges, and they rule, in a 3–2 decision,
that the Cherokee Nation can hold a vote on the status of the Freedmen.
2007: In March, the Cherokee Nation holds a vote with less than 4
percent of the total population participating, and they vote to remove the
Cherokee Freedmen “not on the Dawes blood rolls from the nation.”
Again, this signaled out those who were not considered blood. In May,
the Cherokee Nation determines that it will allow registered Freedmen to
vote in the June 2007 election for tribal officers. They could vote, but
their rights were restricted to second-class citizenship.
There are more details that would further fill out the picture, but I
wanted to lay out all of that to highlight how the dispute developed. The
current dilemma involves a web of interests for tribes, Freedmen, and the
federal government, and they go something like this: the Five Tribes
maintain that it is an incursion on their sovereignty for the US to force them
to include the Freedmen as citizens, and that the US forced them to sign
those treaties. The Freedmen believe that the Five Tribes should simply
honor the treaty that they signed with the US in 1866. The US government,
led by Black congresspeople, believe that the Five Tribes’ exclusion of the
Freedmen is simply an act of antiblackness. All three of these perspectives
are true. In their own vulnerability, the Five Tribes’ blatant discrimination
perpetuates the one thing that continues to hinder Black freedom: a lack of
belonging, or a place to call home. Black people are hardly full citizens in a
white supremacist country, not all Black people whose ancestors are rooted
in the soil of the US can return to Africa, and on top of that, their
Indigenous relatives don’t want them. Where are they supposed to go? This
is where I think current Native congresspeople could step in and make a
small contribution to Black humanity.
The Freedmen Twitter account has critiqued former representative and
now secretary of the interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) for her stances
against the Freedmen. Although I read carefully through her sponsored bills
for clues, I couldn’t glean her stance on the Freedmen issue. The Freedmen