Confusion, but mostly grief, soaked into the summer swelter the year Cherokee Freedmen were told they couldn’t vote in that June’s tribal election.  It was 1983 and the political race, like the season itself, was heated.  Recounts were requested. A runoff election took place.  Incumbent for Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Ross Swimmer, and his running mate, Wilma Mankiller, had lost at the polls.  But absentee ballots had eked out their narrow victory — fewer than 500 votes, according to press reports.  Opponents, wary of foul play, ended up suing the tribe.  Eventually, so did the Cherokee Freedmen: 16 descendants of Cherokee-owned Black slaves who claimed a 19th-century treaty upheld their voting rights.

The fight for the Freedmen was led by Baptist minister Reverend R.H. Nero who had been alive longer than Oklahoma had been a state.  He knew intimately the binds that bondage had had on his life.  At 85, he had lived out his days on the original allotment deeded to his grandmother, a freed slave.  Her former master and kin lived just down the road.  The reconstruction treaty that naturalized Nero’s family, along with 2500 other Freedmen relations not only introduced citizenship, but also land, tribal benefits, and dividends.  More importantly, they gained political representation.  By the turn of the 20th century, as many as four Freedmen had been elected to the Cherokee National Council.  In many respects, these treaty rights represented the reparations, “40 acres and a mule,” that never materialized in the war-torn South.

Reverend R.H. Nero, Baltimore Sun, 1983

All that changed upon Oklahoma statehood, a super-charged era driven by white settlement.  The tribe dissolved, but Cherokees and Freedmen stayed in place.  When the Cherokee Nation re-emerged under renewed federal Indian policies, seven decades had passed.  And still, there was never any bickering about Freedmen inclusion — they were in, simple as that— until the Cherokee elections of 1983.

Exactly one year after Wilma Mankiller was sworn in as Deputy Chief, she was called by The Baltimore Sun to respond to Nero’s complaint, specifically about his sudden disenfranchisement without legal reason.  She first expressed shame about the Cherokee Nation’s slave legacy. “I’m not proud at all,” she said.  Then the new politician laid out a statement that would complicate the Freedmen cause for years to come. “I think if the Freedmen need help, we ought to help them.  They should be heard,” she said. “But they should not be given membership in the Cherokee tribe. That is for people with Cherokee blood.”

To read the press accounts at the time, reporters were seemingly convinced that the tribe had enacted a law that required “Cherokee by blood” requirements to vote, to receive judgement funds, or to be admitted to the tribal hospital.  But these were fallacies. For Mankiller, they were blatant biases.  By 1985, she would fill the role as Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation, becoming the first Cherokee woman in history to lead the tribe.  Her helming was an instant draw — a rising icon whose surname alone gave new meaning to 1980s feminism.  Such popularity played out at home, too, where Mankiller surreptitiously signed off on a series of codes that made “Cherokee by blood” the law of the land, no questions asked.  What should have required enactment across the tribe’s three branches of government, by 1992, had become  codified by Mankiller’s secret stroke of the pen, alone.  It effectively eliminated the Cherokee Freedmen.  Two years later, Reverend Nero had died.

Wilma Mankiller being sworn in a Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985.  She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998  Wilma Mankiller Foundation

After the 2-1 court decision, the Cherokee Freedmen were restored their treaty rights, a victory that was short-lived.  It would taken another decade for the Freedmen to see their citizenship restored to pre-statehood standards.  And central to their years-long challenge would be Mankiller’s “by blood” politics.

I was chronicling the Freedmen issue quite intensely in the mid-aughts — in the final years of Mankiller’s life.  She declined every one of my requests for an interview.  I managed to get one question in when Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner visited the Cherokee Nation in 2007.  During the panel discussion, audience members, including members of the press, were asked to write their questions down on index cards.  I directed my question to Mankiller whose health had been failing.  I asked how she wanted to be remembered, and added, in light of current politics involving the Cherokee Freedmen.   The moderator read my question, but left out the part about the Freedmen.

Mankiller died in 2010 never publicly atoning for her actions, or her paper genocide on the Cherokee Freedmen.  It made me wonder how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen would receive such truth, who made final selection of the coins, saying, “Each time we redesign our currency we have the chance to say something about our country — what we value, and how we’ve progressed as a society.”

There is work to do. ♠️

ESSENTIAL LINKS

It’s unfortunate that I’m away from my hard drives.  I have so many archived documents about the Freedmen.  Sadly, this week’s offerings are slim…

• One gem I dug up comes from an old email -- this 1974 letter to the BIA from Ross Swimmer before he became Chief of the Cherokee Nation.  He basically recognizes the Freedmen as a special class of Cherokees, but later joins Mankiller in manifesting their erasure.
• ICYMI: Here’s a recent newsletter from a few months back where I wrote about the Cherokee Freedmen under the current administration
• And then take a listen to this recent podcast from The Atlantic about the Cherokee Freedmen, though I haven’t listened to it.  I’d be curious to know what you think — so chime in.

@dosmundoscreative

“Most people do not know about this history and its consequences, so I really appreciate your reporting on them.”