Wampum

Leaving Monterey after visiting my mom and taking the kids swimming I spotted Tjatjakiymatchan (coyote in Rumsien Ohlone) working the field across from Olmstead Road and the airport. I pulled the truck over and we watched tatjakiymatchan hunt for mice and gophers.

Diane Watson blogs at HuffPo, she's written a half-dozen pieces since she started, and her latest is Jim Crow in Indian Country. It is an interesting piece.

Imagine yourself as an African American and resident of the State of Alabama in 1964, the year that President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act. And again imagine in 1964 that Alabama Governor George Wallace, in an act of defiance that not even he considered, introduced legislation to expel all African Americans from Alabama.

This is an error. First, the actual territorial jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is quite unlike that enjoyed by the state of Alabama. Second, most of the Cherokee Freedmen don't reside within the actual territorial jurisdiction of the CNO. The better analogy would be the loss of voting rights, of standing to bring suit, of eligibility for medicare/medicaide, of in-state tuition status and so on. Public rights and benefits, not the state's severance of all private property and tenancy rights and deportation to the closest adjacent state.

Now fast forward to the year 2007, over four decades later, when the citizens of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma voted last March to expel their black citizens in a manner that equaled if not surpassed the most vitriolic attacks against African Americans in the once segregated South.

A better stopping point for the fast forward would be when former CNO Principal Chief (and now Special Trustee, see the Cobell litigation) Ross Swimmer introduced the blood quantum, re-affirmed by former CNO Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller, rejected by former CNO Principal Chief Joe Byrd, and by former Justice Stacy Leeds, my candidate for Principal Chief. Better too would be a paragraph on low voter turn out in CNO elections, special or general, and how Chad Smith set up his June '07 re-elect, getting out his base, the thin-blood cracker vote and the low-information vote, "heroically defending tribal sovereignty" -- the results of the March special election. An alternative stopping point is the front door of the BIA, which eventually capitulated on oversight of elections for Principal Chiefs -- the core of the Abramoff-Smith strategic consult. Yet another stopping point is the front door of the DOJ, as only half of the Abramoff-Smith pair has been indicted.

Many Americans do not realize that some Native American tribes owned slaves of African descent. As an independently recognized nation in the 19th Century, the Cherokee Nation embraced and promoted African slavery, a position it maintained after removal to Indian Territory (present day Oklahoma) in the 1830s.

During the Civil War, the Cherokee Nation fought on the side of the Confederacy in order to preserve its southern slaveholding tradition of trafficking in the ownership and sale of black slaves. In fact, Stand Waite, the last Confederate General to surrender to the Union Army, was Cherokee.

The Cherokee Nation emancipated all its slaves in 1863. In 1866, the Cherokee Nation signed a new treaty with the United States Government that formally ended the practice of slavery and made the former slaves citizens of the Cherokee Nation. The Treaty of 1866 resulted in an amendment to the Cherokee constitution that same year, which read in part: "All native born Cherokees, all Indians, and whites legally members of the nation by adoption, and all freedmen (the term used for freed slaves of African descendants of the Cherokee Nation) shall be taken and deemed to be citizens of the Cherokee Nation."

Toward the end of the 19th Century, a distinction, a product of the new Jim Crow South and later codified in practice by the U.S. Government, had emerged between black freedmen Cherokees and those who were categorized as Cherokee by blood. The distinction is used today by the current Cherokee leadership that claims it is primarily concerned about preserving the Cherokee Nation's heritage for those who can prove that they have Cherokee blood lineage.

But such claims, as Professor Robert Warrior of the University of Oklahoma elegantly makes the case, "fail to rise to the level of those earlier Cherokees who understood that the tragic absurdity of reconciling a nation to its history of slavery requires wisdom and compassion, not insulting and ridiculous appeals to faulty membership requirements and the poses of victim-hood."

Today, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma receives roughly $300 million a year in federal taxpayer dollars. The Cherokee Nation is also the beneficiary of a federal gaming franchise that is estimated to yield it another $300 million yearly. This is not an insignificant amount of money.

If the Cherokee Nation is allowed to pursue its current policy of expelling black descendants of the Cherokee Nation, black descendants obviously will not be able to receive federal assistance from the Cherokee Nation in the form of health, education, and housing assistance.

Modulo the misleading, and eagerly exploited by Chad and Joe and all who sail with them on the CNO Tribal Council, substitution of "black descendants" for "Cherokee Freeman descendants", the first six paragraphs could be cut, leaving the core issue here, and unencumbered by partial histories and simplifications that beg for, and obtain, distracting "clarification" in the earned and paid MSM.

I do not believe that your or my taxpayer dollars should go to any group that practices discrimination. First and foremost, it is against the law. That is why I have introduced legislation, H.R. 2824, that cuts off all U.S. government relations with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma until it agrees to accept the black descendants of the Cherokees as full participating citizens of the Cherokee Nation.

I respect the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma as a sovereign entity. But no sovereign nation, particularly one within the confines of the United States, should be given a free pass to exercise its sovereign rights to expel its citizens on the basis of ethnicity, class, or race. And when a nation violates its treaty obligations with the United States, Congress is obliged to take action.

These final two paras are what piqued my interest, I've seen the prior copy several times, it has errors of fact and errors of politics, but so what. But no sovereign nation, particularly one within the confines of the United States, should be given a free pass to exercise its sovereign rights to expel its citizens on the basis of ethnicity, class, or race. Is Diane going for the brass ring?

Is she generalizing from the CNO to all tribes, including some California Tribes which have disenfranchised as much as a third of their citizens? Does she mean to take on the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians? The Narragansett Tribe of Rhode Island? Any or all of the tribes between LA and LI? What are the rights of persons disenfranchised from Indian Nations? Does Santa Clara mean there is no procedural minimum for Tribal Governments contemplating or conducting mass disenfranchisements? Are the obligations of the Treaty of 1866 controlling or is that treaty to be discarded for some work of historical fiction from the last, or the next Rehnquist, controlling?

Is she generalizing from access to the ballot and the per-capita payments, the political enfranchise to access to the courts, the civil franchise? Does she mean to end the legal incompetency of Tribal Courts to hear claims against non-citizens, an incompetency based without nuance on "ethnicity, class, or race", for felony cases in the Major Crimes Act 1885, and reaffirmed in PL 280, and for civil and non-felony cases in Oliphant, reaffirmed in Laura and Duro right up to the present moment?

It is hard to imagine a single Indian standing behind, or in front, of Chad Smith, if those issues are being considered seriously by Rep. Watson.

By the bye, Robert Allen Warrior is worth reading for other reasons in addition to his recent contribution on this particular political controversy. Tribal Secrets is wicked good, good enough for a government reader, and far too good for Stanford.