The Cherokee Diaspora by Gregory D. Smithers

Author:Gregory D. Smithers [Smithers, Gregory D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 14: Files contained in the offices of the Cherokee Citizenship Commission, Tahlequah, Indian Territory. Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.

The ethnic and racial background of applicants also corresponded with geography. For instance, in the Canadian, Illinois, Snake, and Cooweeskoowee Districts of the Cherokee Nation, the vast majority of the petitions for Cherokee citizenship came from blacks, single white men, and white men married to Cherokee women. Principal Chief Charles Thomson lodged his complaints about the latter two groups with the United States government, writing to Indian Agent S. W. Marston in 1877 that there were

very many white men, believing that residence alone, will give them a title to land in the Nation, in the event of it becoming a U.S. Territory, yet [for] a citizen of the Nation to obtain a permit for them, to labor for a month or so, and may continue by labor for that month, but on the strength of that permit, they remain in the Nation, for several months, doing their own business independently of law, while it is even said, that some of them, pay a bonus for a permit, and do not work at all.77

Thompson gave voice to the concerns of many Cherokees, both those in public office and private citizens, who believed that white men were trying to use the Cherokee legal system to incrementally dispossess Cherokees of their land, and undermine the territorial sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation in the process. This was a strategy that threatened not only the Cherokee diaspora’s homeland, but the Cherokee people’s existence as a “body politic.”

The threat of white “intruders” in the Cherokee Nation became one of the most significant issues in Cherokee politics during the postbellum decades. Cherokee leaders implored federal officials to send military personnel to help them protect their borders from white “intruders.”78 But the Nation’s borders proved much too porous, and the federal government was largely indifferent to Cherokee demands that its sovereignty be protected.79 When the federal government did insert itself into Cherokee politics it was usually because of perceived Cherokee treaty violations in relation to the National Council’s treatment of freedpeople. African Cherokee refugees, and African Americans formerly enslaved by Cherokee masters, returned to the Cherokee Nation in the years after the war, just as other wartime refugees did. Freedmen refugees appear to have been attracted to the Cooweescoowee District, in the north and west of the Nation, since from this district an unusually large number of freedpeople petitioned the CCC for acknowledgement of their Cherokee citizenship (see chapter 7 for a detailed analysis of Cherokee freedpeople).80

That said, the CCC did receive applications from all corners of the Cherokee diaspora, and not always from wartime refugees. Some of the more emotionally fraught cases involved applicants who resided east of the Mississippi and in cis-Mississippi locations considered part of the ancestral homeland of the Cherokee people. In North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, many individuals claimed a Cherokee lineage, insisting that they possessed Cherokee “blood.” Witness testimonials

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