{"id":3476,"date":"2007-06-22T09:06:41","date_gmt":"2007-06-22T16:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/06\/22\/one-day-before-cherokee-election-the-freedmen-issue-looms-large\/"},"modified":"2007-06-22T09:06:41","modified_gmt":"2007-06-22T16:26:29","slug":"one-day-before-cherokee-election-the-freedmen-issue-looms-large","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3476","title":{"rendered":"One Day Before Cherokee Election: The Freedmen Issue Looms Large"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>\u00a0(link is to\u00a0s PDF of the full text)\u00a0to sever federal ties with the Cherokee Nation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bill is the talk of the message board over at Cornsilks<\/a>, and Principal Chief candidate Stacy Leeds has a statement about the bill on her site.<\/a>\u00a0 Time magazine <\/a>is also covering the Freedmen debate, but they didn’t say much at all about the election.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Time had\u00a0a good interview with a professor, Tiya Miles who is a Native American Studies professor at the University of Michigan.\u00a0 I strongly agreed with her assessment of the Native American\/Black relations:<\/p>\n

Perhaps more importantly, they (the Freedmen)\u00a0have 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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article author\u00a0also 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.”\u00a0 I think\u00a0there definitely is a difference in how African\u00a0Americans and Native Americans view their relationships with each other.\u00a0 I have very rarely heard any\u00a0anti-American Indian sentiment from\u00a0Blacks who\u00a0I know.\u00a0 ((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.))\u00a0Most African Americans may be ignorant about\u00a0the 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.))\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The people in this group generally believe\u00a0that American Indians should not base\u00a0tribal and national\u00a0identity only\u00a0on “blood quantum” and race, opposed to culture and history.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 ((If you really want to see this debate play out go read the comments in this thread over at Wampum<\/a>, where MB Williams and The Local Crank take on a commenter named Charlotte.))<\/p>\n

Having followed this very closely, I think it is fair to say that the mainstream media (MSM)\u00a0hasn’t done well at covering the complexities of this election and the Freedmen issue.\u00a0 My first critique would be that many\u00a0MSM outlets\u00a0consistently ignore Native American political issues, so the Cherokee election is completely off the radar for many media outlets.\u00a0 ((One very obvious example of ignoring Native American politics would be the Jack Abramhoff scandal<\/a>.\u00a0 Many of his clients were\u00a0Native American Nations, and\u00a0he\u00a0was caught making many disparaging remarks about his Indian clients and stole millions\u00a0of dollars from them.\u00a0 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.))\u00a0 A few MSM outlets have covered the Freedmen issue, and very few (mostly local Oklahoma papers) have covered the election.\u00a0 What so many\u00a0of the mainstream media articles miss is how Cherokee politics play into these debates.\u00a0 They usually let Chief Smith give his “we are a tribe of Indians” answer, but they don’t talk to\u00a0the council members and the other candidate for Chief.\u00a0 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.))<\/p>\n

With the Freedmen issue at the forefront, the election will be held tomorrow.\u00a0 There has been some preliminary voting<\/a>, and if I have any Cherokee voters reading\u00a0this article<\/a> provides a list of polling places, and a phone number to call for people who are having voting problems.\u00a0 I will probably be back on Monday or Sunday to talk about the election results.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0(link is to\u00a0s PDF of the full text)\u00a0to sever federal ties with the Cherokee Nation. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,54,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections-and-politics","category-media-criticism","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}