Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Wall Street Journal Discovers Native America: Cherokee Tribe Fights With Slave's KIN

Well, I guess better late than never and they are ten years late.  The NYT is only six months ahead.  YES, the Cherokee had slaves.  The real Cherokee, not the fake Elizabeth Warren kind.

Subscription required to view the whole article: An old dispute about whether the descendants of slaves freed by the Cherokee Nation more than a century ago qualify as members of the tribe is heating up again in a federal court.

The Cherokee Nation abolished slavery in 1863, and three years later it signed a treaty with the U.S. granting tribal rights to the Cherokee's freed slaves, or "Freedmen," many of whom had migrated with the tribe decades earlier to present-day Oklahoma. But the Oklahoma-based Cherokee tribe, which has more than 310,000 members, later narrowed its citizenship criteria, excluding many descendants of the Freedmen and rendering them ineligible

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577519000907248734.html

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