The Cherokee Freedmen
Freedmen is one of the terms given to emancipated slaves and their descendants after slavery was abolished in the United States following the American Civil War. In this context, "Cherokee Freedmen" refers to the African-American men and women who were formerly slaves of the Cherokee before and after removal to Indian Territory. It includes the descendants of the former slaves, as well as those born in unions between formerly enslaved or enslaved African Americans and Cherokee tribal members.
After their emancipation and subsequent citizenship, the Cherokee Freedmen and their descendants had to struggle to be accepted as a legitimate part of the Cherokee Nation. Some Freedmen have been active in the tribe, voted in elections, ran businesses, attended Cherokee stomp dances, knew Cherokee traditions and folklore, knew the Cherokee language, and served on the tribal council, with several holding district seats. Joseph Brown was elected as the first Cherokee Freedman councilman in 1875, followed by Frank Vann in 1887, and Jerry Alberty in 1889. Joseph "Stick" Ross was elected to the council in 1893. Born into slavery and owned by Principal Chief John Ross before his family's emancipation, Stick Ross became a civic leader. Several companies and landmarks were named after him, including Stick Ross Mountain in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Leslie Ross, Stick's great-grandson, says,
"He knew sign language and spoke Cherokee and Seminole. He was a trapper and a farmer and a rancher. And he was sheriff at one time, too. He was pretty renowned in Tahlequah."
The civic position for Freedmen increased by the time of the Dawes Commission in 1906, which broke up tribal land into allotments and created the Dawes Rolls to list Cherokee citizens. With the extinction of tribal government by the Curtis Act of 1898, the Freedmen as well as other Cherokee citizens were counted as US citizens. After the Cherokee Nation reorganized and re-established its government via passage of the Principal Chiefs Act, the Freedmen participated in the 1971 tribal elections held for the office of principal chief, the first election held since the passage of the Curtis Act and before Oklahoma statehood in 1907.
Several Cherokee Freedmen descendants have continued to embrace this historical connection. Others, after having been excluded from the tribe for two decades in the twentieth century and given the continuing citizenship struggle, have become ambivalent about their ties and no longer consider identifying as Cherokee as necessary to their personal identity.
Read more about this topic: Cherokee Freedmen Controversy
Famous quotes containing the words cherokee and/or freedmen:
“Long accustomed to the use of European manufactures, [the Cherokee Indians] are as incapable of returning to their habits of skins and furs as we are, and find their wants the less tolerable as they are occasioned by a war [the American Revolution] the event of which is scarcely interesting to them.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)