This little Indian ...

Who decides who is an Indian or not?



Cherokee Indians: We are free to oust blacks


US government wants second-largest Indian tribe to recognize as citizens 2,800 descendants of slaves that were held by Cherokees


Reuters / MSNBC
updated 9/14/2011 9:00:20 AM ET

OKLAHOMA CITY — The nation's second-largest Indian tribe said on Tuesday that it would not be dictated to by the U.S. government over its move to banish 2,800 African Americans from its citizenship rolls.

"The Cherokee Nation will not be governed by the BIA," Joe Crittenden, the tribe's acting principal chief, said in a statement responding to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Crittenden, who leads the tribe until a new principal chief is elected, went on to complain about unnamed congressmen meddling in the tribe's self-governance.

The reaction follows a letter the tribe received on Monday from BIA Assistant Secretary Larry Echo Hawk, who warned that the results of the September 24 Cherokee election for principal chief will not be recognized by the U.S. government if the ousted members, known to some as "Cherokee Freedmen," are not allowed to vote.

The dispute stems from the fact that some wealthy Cherokee owned black slaves who worked on their plantations in the South. By the 1830s, most of the tribe was forced to relocate to present-day Oklahoma, and many took their slaves with them. The so-called Freedmen are descendants of those slaves.

After the Civil War, in which the Cherokee fought for the South, a treaty was signed in 1866 guaranteeing tribal citizenship for the freed slaves.

The U.S. government said that the 1866 treaty between the Cherokee tribe and the U.S. government guaranteed that the slaves were tribal citizens, whether or not they had a Cherokee blood relation.

The African Americans lost their citizenship last month when the Cherokee Supreme Court voted to support the right of tribal members to change the tribe's constitution on citizenship matters.

The change meant that Cherokee Freedmen who could not prove they have a Cherokee blood relation were no longer citizens, making them ineligible to vote in tribal elections or receive benefits.

Besides pressure from the BIA to accept the 1866 Treaty as the law of the land, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is withholding a $33 million disbursement to the tribe over the Freedmen controversy.

Attorneys in a federal lawsuit in Washington are asking a judge to restore voting rights for the ousted Cherokee Freedmen in time for the September 24 tribal election for Principal Chief.





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
indians

Indians: Pay them for the Irregularities

U.S. To Pay $3.4 Billion to Settle Native American Suit




December 9, 2009

By Ashby Jones
Wall Street Journal




Federal Indian law — or the law pertaining to the land and other holdings owned by Native Americans — isn’t a typical area of coverage for us. But when a lawsuit between Native American and the U.S. government settles for $3.4 billion, well, we sit up and take serious notice.

The federal government announced on Tuesday that it intends to pay that sum to settle claims that it has mismanaged the revenue in American Indian trust funds. According to the NYT’s account, the settlement could end one of the largest and most complicated class-action lawsuits ever brought against the United States.

According to the NYT story, the Interior Department manages about 56 million acres of Indian trust land scattered across the country. The government handles leases on the land for mining, livestock grazing, timber harvesting and drilling for oil and gas. It then distributes the revenue raised by those leases to the American Indians. In the 2009 fiscal year, it collected about $298 million for more than 384,000 individual Indian accounts.

The lawsuit accuses the federal government of mismanaging that money. As a result, the Indians contend that they are owed far more than what they have been paid.

Under the settlement, the government would pay to compensate the Indians for their claims of historical accounting irregularities and any accusation that federal officials mismanaged the administration of the land itself over the years.

The lawsuit may not have been this long-running, but it did span three presidencies, generate 22 published judicial opinions, and went before a federal appeals court 10 times.

Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff who filed the class-action lawsuit in 1996, said she believed that the Indians were owed more, but that it was better to reach an agreement that could help impoverished trust holders than to spend more years in court. She said she had originally expected the litigation to last only two or three years.

“We are compelled to settle by the sobering realization that our class grows smaller each day as our elders die and are forever prevented from receiving just compensation,“ Cobell said.

Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday said: “The United States could have continued to litigate this case, at great expense to the taxpayers. It could have let all of these claims linger, and could even have let the problem of fractionated land continue to grow with each generation. But with this settlement, we are erasing these past liabilities and getting on track to eliminate them going forward.”

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
indians