Willadine Johnson has long been proud of being a black member of the Cherokee tribe.
An ancestor was one of the slaves owned by Cherokee Indians, freed after the Civil War and promised tribal citizenship along with all his descendents by an 1866 treaty with Washington.
And now she’s furious.
After 145 years, the Cherokee Nation, the second largest tribe in America, has stripped that citizenship from the 2,800 descendents of those black slaves, dubbed Freedmen.
“This is a slap in the face,” said Johnson, who along with family members is seeking an injunction to fight the Cherokee Nation’s actions. A court ruling is expected Tuesday, four days before a Cherokee Nation special election for a new principal chief.
Earlier this week, the U.S. government told the Cherokee Nation to restore citizenship to the African Americans or risk having the election results nullified and losing more than $30 million in housing money that’s being withheld.
“We are not begging them for anything,” Johnson said. “We are not asking them to give us this. This is our heritage. This is our right. Who do they think they are?”
At stake is not only the black Cherokees’ identity, but federal benefits available to American Indian tribes. Those include scholarships, medical care, food stipends and low-income homeowners’ assistance.
But for Cherokee Nation leaders, the issue is bloodlines.
“Cherokees say this: We don’t care what you look like, as long as you’ve got Cherokee blood,” Chad Smith, a three-term principal chief, has said. “It’s about identity and self-governance.”
In the 1830s, when the Cherokees were forced from their lands in the southeastern United States, many brought their slaves to Oklahoma. When the Civil War broke out decades later, many Cherokees fought for the Confederacy.
To restore their relationship with the U.S. government after the conflict, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty freeing slaves and granting them and their descendents full Cherokee citizenship and all the rights to benefits received by Cherokee people.
So for descendants of the Freedmen, the tribe’s recent action stings.
“I feel hurt and betrayed by my own people,” said Patricia Kinchen, 29, of Kansas City, who said her slave ancestor walked the “Trail of Tears” to Oklahoma with her owners so long ago.
“For them to tell me I’m not a citizen denies who I am and denies my children their heritage, their culture.”
Tribal politics form the backdrop to the controversy.
Efforts to exclude the Freedmen began in the 1980s, but the Cherokee Supreme Court reaffirmed their rights in 2006.
Then, Smith and others pushed though a tribal constitutional amendment, which stripped the African Americans of citizenship and benefits.
It passed overwhelmingly in a 2007 vote among only about 8,700 of the roughly 300,000 tribe members.
The dispute has simmered since then, but the upcoming election has brought it to a boil. Officially, fewer than 3,000 Freedmen descendants are on the tribal rolls, but there potentially could be thousands more.
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