Contention is brewing between the federal government and Cherokee nation over the citizenship status of about 2,800 individuals, descendants of freed slaves who belonged to some of the tribe’s members. The slaves, freed after the Civil War, were granted citizenship and all the rights of native Cherokees in an 1866 treaty between the tribe and the federal government. Now the Cherokee nation has revoked tribal membership to those freedmen, not allowing them to vote in a hotly contested tribal election.
The federal government said that the expulsion of freedmen from the tribe was a violation of the 1866 treaty. Cherokee leaders said the decision had to do with the right of governments to determine its citizens, not racial exclusion.
