Open Letter to the Cherokee Chief Chadwick Smith

Two black Oklahoma lawmakers from Tulsa have written what they call an “open letter to Chad Smith, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation” that criticizes the Cherokee leader for his stand on the issue of granting citizenship to descendants of former slaves.

But Smith defends the right of Cherokee citizens to decide what criteria the tribe should use for membership, and says he wishes the two lawmakers had talked to him about the case, and not the media.

The Cherokee's highest court recently ruled that the tribe must bestow full rights on the group, dubbed the “Cherokee Freedmen.” State Senator Judy Eason McIntyre and Representative Jabar Shumate, both Democrats, charge in the letter that discussion about changing the tribe's constitution to prevent the freedmen from becoming members of the tribe “has caused a great deal of concern among those of our constituency who will be directly impacted should the amendment succeed, as well as those whose sense of fairness has been offended…the amendment to the Cherokee Constitution which you have proposed is no less racist-based than the cultural dichotomy created by the actions of the Dawes Commission which for too long divided the people of the Cherokee Nation.”

The two lawmakers also write: “Cherokee people-your people-were one culture-one society, until those with any identifiable Black genetic heritage were relegated to second-class status by being listed on the Freedmen Rolls. All of the Cherokee people, those who were phonotypically Black, as well as those of you with mixed genetic heritage but of fairer complexion-were denied the lands and rights promised to all by treaty. Only the former were denied their birthright.”

Smith said he has worked with McIntyre and Shumate in the past, and would have preferred that they discuss the issue with him personally.

“I’d like to think that they could bring any issue that is on their minds directly to me, rather than through the media, but that has not been the case in this instance,” the Cherokee leader said in a statement. “It is likely that their letter to me was based on sensational media coverage of my State of the Nation speech at the March Cherokee Nation Tribal Council Meeting, in which I outlined a spectrum of feelings expressed by the Cherokee people in regard to our highest court’s ruling that radically changed the interpretation of our Constitution on the issue of citizenship.”

He urged McIntyre and Shumate to go to the tribe’s website and “watch the speech themselves,” adding: “I only proposed that the Cherokee people may want to take advantage of that same right and vote on the basic issue of citizenship requirements.”

In March the tribe’s Judicial Appeals Tribunal ruled 2-1 that the freedmen, descendants of African slaves owned by Cherokees before the tribe abolished slavery, should be allowed to become members of the tribe if they could trace lineage to the Dawes Rolls of the Five Civilized Tribes. The Cherokees long maintained that the tribe’s 1975 constitution only allowed for people that could show they possessed Indian blood. The court disagreed, saying the constitution makes no mention of blood quantum.

"The words 'by blood' or 'Cherokee by blood' do not appear,” wrote justice Stacy Leeds.