Controversy
Smith's administration is not without controversy. The Cherokee Nation admitted to hiring the lobbyist Jack Abramoff after the Smith administration vehemently denied it. Records show that CNE paid Abramoff a total of $120,000.
In 2006, Smith was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI due to his dealings with GEG through Cherokee Nation Enterprises. Allegations included the misuse of federal loan monies, and backdating of loan documents.
Smith has supported the exclusion of descendants of Cherokee Freedmen as citizens from the Cherokee Nation, despite their having been part of the Nation for 200 years. In 2006, the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled that descendants of Freedmen, as well as of Intermarried Whites listed on the Dawes Rolls (where both groups were listed in separate categories), should be allowed to enroll in the Cherokee Nation. Jodie Fishinghawk and former Deputy Chief John Ketcher petitioned the government for a special election to determine whether or not to include the Freedman. The federal government intervened and the Freedman are currently part of the tribe.
Smith appealed this injunction, citing sovereign immunity. The Appeals Court ruled that the Cherokee Nation could not be sued, but that officers of the Cherokee Nation, including Smith, could be sued for working outside the boundaries of their office by violating the treaty of 1866, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The case was in Federal District Court as of July 2008.
Smith filed a similar case in federal court in Denver against individual Freedmen descendants in March 2009. The Freedmen's attorney accused Smith of "venue shopping" while the Vann court case is still ongoing, as another similar case was filed in Cherokee Nation court.
Read more about this topic: Chad "Corntassel" Smith
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)