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Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
The Cherokee Freedmen is a term that refers to people who were formerly enslaved by the Cherokee people and their descendants. They were of African and mixed African and Cherokee ancestry. Under a treaty the Cherokee signed with the U.S. government after the Civil War, people formerly enslaved by the Cherokee were given the same rights as other Cherokee, including Cherokee citizenship and voting rights. A substantial number of Cherokee have not been happy to have Freedmen included in the Cherokee Nation and have brought a number of cases to the Cherokee Supreme Court to challenge the regulation.
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Cherokee Freedmen Term Timeline in The Inconvenient Indian
The timeline below shows where the term Cherokee Freedmen appears in The Inconvenient Indian. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7. Forget about It
...choice to be objective, though, addressing “Native failings,” such as the racist treatment of the Cherokee Freedmen . Since the 1800s, Cherokee have been involved in a debate about who is Cherokee...
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A lot of Cherokee disagreed with the ruling that Cherokee Freedmen had access to the same rights as other Cherokee. In the 1970s, Ross Swimmer, Principal...
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