Rumors are swirling around everywhere, but the biggest news, which is not a rumor, is that the Congressional Black Caucus member Diane Watson introduced a bill (link is to s PDF of the full text) to sever federal ties with the Cherokee Nation.
The bill is the talk of the message board over at Cornsilks, and Principal Chief candidate Stacy Leeds has a statement about the bill on her site. Time magazine is also covering the Freedmen debate, but they didn’t say much at all about the election.
Time had a good interview with a professor, Tiya Miles who is a Native American Studies professor at the University of Michigan. I strongly agreed with her assessment of the Native American/Black relations:
Perhaps more importantly, they (the Freedmen) have considered themselves Cherokee their whole lives. “There’s a tremendous amount of cultural identification that former slaves felt with Native tribes, of shared homeland, food, familial ties,” says Tiya Miles, a historian who runs the Native American Studies program at the University of Michigan. Cherokee had slaves. Cherokee also married, and slept with, blacks. And there were blacks who were adopted into the Cherokee tribe though they had no blood or slave ties. They all walked the Trail of Tears with the Cherokee, from the Deep South to Oklahoma.
These are the facts, but for blacks, especially, the mythology holds equally strong sway. A kinship with Native Americans has been a logical way to claim some sort of “non-black” status in a society where black is the most demeaned racial category. It’s also helped ground many black people searching for an original homeland, says Miles. “Native America was connected to freedom,” says Miles. “It was said slaves could run away to tribes and find shelter.” Clearly that wasn’t always the case, and the Cherokee controversy is, for Miles, “the end of innocence about what the historical relationship between African Americans and Native Americans really consisted of.”
The article author also made the following statement, “And it creates new complications for the relationship between blacks, who have long held a romantic view of their kinship with American Indians, and Native Americans, some of whom owned black slaves and fought for the Confederacy.” I think there definitely is a difference in how African Americans and Native Americans view their relationships with each other. I have very rarely heard any anti-American Indian sentiment from Blacks who I know. ((The same could not be said for Asians and Latinos; I’ve heard plenty of African Americans make disparaging stereotypical comments about these two groups.)) Most African Americans may be ignorant about the issues facing contemporary Native Americans, but I tend to agree with the professor; many African Americans do have a romantic notion of Black/Indian relations, and with this whole Freedmen issue, the romance may be over. ((I’d venture to say that very few blacks or whites know that some Native American tribes had black slaves. I suspect many Native Americans don’t know that either.)) I’m afraid that anti-black sentiment among Native Americans is much stronger than anti-Native American sentiment among blacks; of course, someone needs to do an actually study of this, but for now that would be my hypothesis. I will also add that there are many Native Americans who are not anti-black and see this Cherokee fiasco and the Seminole Freedmen case as evidence of Native Americans engaging in self destruction. The people in this group generally believe that American Indians should not base tribal and national identity only on “blood quantum” and race, opposed to culture and history. The idea here is that blood quantum was created by Europeans as part of the genocide against American Indian people and cultures, so continuing to use it, is racist and self destructive. ((If you really want to see this debate play out go read the comments in this thread over at Wampum, where MB Williams and The Local Crank take on a commenter named Charlotte.))
Having followed this very closely, I think it is fair to say that the mainstream media (MSM) hasn’t done well at covering the complexities of this election and the Freedmen issue. My first critique would be that many MSM outlets consistently ignore Native American political issues, so the Cherokee election is completely off the radar for many media outlets. ((One very obvious example of ignoring Native American politics would be the Jack Abramhoff scandal. Many of his clients were Native American Nations, and he was caught making many disparaging remarks about his Indian clients and stole millions of dollars from them. That angle of the story was buried in much of the coverage. Of course, there are other issues not so directly connected to white politicians, including sovereignty issues, poverty, racial identity politics, and numerous other issues that we don’t even hear about at all.)) A few MSM outlets have covered the Freedmen issue, and very few (mostly local Oklahoma papers) have covered the election. What so many of the mainstream media articles miss is how Cherokee politics play into these debates. They usually let Chief Smith give his “we are a tribe of Indians” answer, but they don’t talk to the council members and the other candidate for Chief. I’m glad they talked with David Cornsilk, but they also need to bring in other elected officials, so people realize that this view that the Freedmen need to be ousted is highly contentious, and it hasn’t even been supported by the Cherokee Supreme Court. ((It really makes the Cherokees look like a huge mass of racists, with only a few dissenters, but I think there are many more dissenters, including powerful political people.))
With the Freedmen issue at the forefront, the election will be held tomorrow. There has been some preliminary voting, and if I have any Cherokee voters reading this article provides a list of polling places, and a phone number to call for people who are having voting problems. I will probably be back on Monday or Sunday to talk about the election results.
Can the Freedmen get organized and petition the Federal government to recognize them as a native group in their own right?
Probably not. They could try it, but as The Local Crank laid out in this post on Wampum
It would be an uphill battle. Plus, the Freedmen having been living with the tribe for a long time. We are not talking about people who want to join, but people who are already there, and are being kicked out. So they are part of the Cherokee Nation. When they did this to the Seminole Freedmen, the tribe ended up reinstating the Freedmen because they had funding cut (I think it was funding cuts or some other sort of punishment.).
I think another reason african americans feel special kinship with native americans is because native americans are the only other ethnic group who have eperienced similar levels of victimization. Both communities continue to suffer from the historical crimes committed against them while having to navigate a society that continues to come up with new ways to screw us over. Yet we are still here. So I always regarded native americans with special respect because they are fellow survivors. Even when I learned that some tribes held black slaves, my opinion of native americans did not change much. A few bad apples don’t spoil the bunch.
In the end, I guess I can not be too surprised that some tribes want to disassociate themselves from african americans. It has been my experience that every one looks down on black people, not just whites but other communities of color as well, including african immigrants. My assumptions about the attitudes of native americans may have been silly, but they are a bit a foolishness I am sad to have to let go of.
I can tell you personally that there is indeed an anti indian sentiment among some black people.
Oh and romantisizing us is absolutely no different than white people who view us “noble” icons. Its not better because they have a positive stereotype. It still turns us into something other than people.
pheeno said, “I can tell you personally that there is indeed an anti indian sentiment among some black people.”
I just want to make it clear that I am not saying there is no prejudice or no negative attitudes, but in terms of negative attitudes, I am arguing that if you compared all racial groups in the US, Black Americans would have the most favorable attitudes towards Native Americans. Of course, I also need to qualify this by noting that I really don’t know of any random sample studies that examine the attitudes of the two groups towards each other. Unfortunately, many researchers don’t see fit to study the relationships between racial and ethnic minority groups in the US (with the exception of Blacks and Jews) probably because it would be doubly hard to make a career out of that.
pheeno, I agree with you that romanticization is a problem, and it is usually based on a stereotype.
“When they did this to the Seminole Freedmen, the tribe ended up reinstating the Freedmen because they had funding cut (I think it was funding cuts or some other sort of punishment.)”
That is precisely what happened. The Oklahoma Seminole kicked out their Freedmen, including two members of their tribal council. The BIA regarded this as a breach of the treaty and terminated funding, which brought the entire tribal government to a screeching halt. In the end, the Seminole were forced to re-enroll their Freedmen. I am afraid that something similar will happen to the Cherokee unless the current chief, who has cozied up to a relatively small and virulently anti-Freedmen faction, is voted out of office tomorrow.
According to a letter from the BIA posted on the Cherokee Nation website , the BIA has decided that it will not cut off funding to the CN (unless ordered by the courts or Congress to do so). (The website is at http://www.cherokee.org, in case my first attempt at linked text is a flop).