Cherokee Citizenship Battle

This one is tricky- and I have to dig a little more to find out about it, but the gist of it is this: the Cherokee Nation has decided to strike 2,800 African-American descendants of slaves held by the Cherokee from their citizenship rolls.

The government is warning that the results of the upcoming elections for Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation will not be recognized unless the 2,800 Freedmen (as they're called) are restored to the citizenship roles. The Cherokee say, not unreasonably, that they have a right to define what constitutes citizenship for their tribe (a move backed by the Tribe's Supreme Court.) The Federal Government, in a somewhat ironic turnaround is pointing out that citizenship rights for the Freedmen were guaranteed under an 1866 treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the Federal Government and accuse the tribe (again, this just drips with historical irony, doesn't it?) of breaking the treaty.

In short, the whole thing is a mess.

The timing smells a little funny to me, first off. A month before an important election and you suddenly lose 2,800 voters? That's not an insignifcant amount- especially if it could swing the election one way or the other- but again, you'd have to look at the internal politics of the Cherokee to get a feel for that one way or the other.

Second of all, being a naturalized citizen, this makes me a little uncomfortable. Granted, Native American concepts of citizenship would undoubtedly revolve around birth and tribal identity- those are complex issues which I know absolutely nothing about. But the idea that someone can, with a stroke of a pen, take away anyone's citizenship bugs me a little bit. After all, I wasn't born here. I'm not part of the 'tribe' so to speak, so what's to stop an American government from doing the same thing? It sets an ugly precedent in my opinion.

But- all of this, to me, underlines a startlingly large gap in my own education: I know next to nothing about the political arrangements or structures that govern the Native American tribes. I know that given the history, it probably wouldn't surprise me if a lot of them were fundamentally unfair, but tribal politics just don't seem to make the news a lot- probably because we don't have a large Native American presence in Iowa. But even in Minnesota, you didn't hear a lot either- and that particular chapter of American history, strangely enough tends to get glossed over when you're in a school.