Muskogee Phoenix on Freedmen meeting

By Ronn Smith
Assistant City Editor

A series of speakers Saturday urged Cherokee Freedmen to get more active -- not only to assert their own civil rights but to reform the Cherokee Nation.

"If George Bush is re-elected, Ross Swimmer will have the cover he needs to get this (Cherokee Nation) constitution approved, and it'll all be over," said Ed Crittenden of Tahlequah, adding that the proposed constitution would allow the tribe to ignore the federal government and continue to disenfranchise people with African blood even though their ancestors were tribal members.

"We've got some good programs, don't get me wrong, but it's all a lie," Crittenden said. "I believe the Cherokee Nation (of 1975) was set up as a conduit for federal money into this part of the state. It was set up to make a small group of people rich and toss a crumb now and then to the rest of us."

Cherokee activist David Cornsilk told the Freedmen that Cherokees as a people "are still struggling with the effects of slavery."

"We have never acknowledged our role in it, and we have shunned the descendants of the people we held in slavery," he said.

He said that in 1866, the federal government went along with dividing tribal members between the Freedmen roll and the blood roll simply because that's what Cherokee leaders wanted.

No one thought it made much difference at the time, he said, because the purpose of the Dawes Commission and the division of Indian land among individuals was to put an end to the Cherokee Nation as a tribe.

"No one expected that the Cherokee Nation would exist after Oklahoma statehood," Cornsilk said.

He said Freedmen should certainly be tracing their ancestry back to someone listed on the roll, but he said they should not limit their search to the Freedman roll.

"There are several instances where Freedmen were listed on the by-blood roll," he said, adding that the hostility to African blood may have been there from the start but has grown stronger in recent years among the Five Civilized Tribes.

Cherokee linguist and historian George Wycliffe of Kenwood said there has never been a question about whether the Freedmen from this area were Cherokees or not if their ancestors lived here when the Dawes rolls were drawn up.

"All you had to do was be living in the 14 counties in 1866," he said. "The Dawes Commission made a mistake -- they could not (legally) enroll you differently if you lived in the 14 counties."

Today, he said, "All the federal government has to say is that it's in the 14th Amendment (to the U.S. Constitution)."

Wycliffe said he doesn't see much chance for tribal differences to be worked out as long as the tribal leadership is elected by people who have no way of knowing what's happening in Indian Country.

"There is no way we're going to have unity in the Cherokee Nation because absentee voters elect our officials," Wycliffe said.

All three speakers told the Freedmen that they should not even be calling themselves Freedmen but rather Cherokee citizens, as their ancestors were.

"In the Cherokee Nation, we have a class of citizens who are denied the right to vote based on race. That has to stop," he said.

But Cornsilk said his own trip out of racism was not easy, so he tries to be patient with those who still exhibit racism.

"These are intelligent people," he said, referring to Cherokee Nation officials. "We're not dealing with the town idiots over there. I know that they, just as I did, can overcome this and become better human beings."

You can reach Assistant City Editor Ronn Smith at 684-2925 or rdsmith@muskogeephoenix.com.

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Originally published Sunday, June 27, 2004