Harvard law professor, Cherokee chief Chad Smith differ on freedmen issue

A Harvard law professor said Thursday that tribal citizenship rights for descendants of former slaves once owned by Cherokees is a moral issue, while the Cherokee Nation's chief insisted it is a question for the courts.

"Does everyone lose when we start to narrowly define citizenship?" professor Charles Ogletree Jr. said during a panel discussion at the Federal Bar Association's annual meeting and convention. "There's a moral issue here. Is there room for us to be a community?"

Cherokee Nation Chief Chad Smith, however, said whether non-American Indians can be tribe members is a legal issue. Smith said he does not see a moral dilemma in a tribe of Indians deciding the tribe should be comprised of Indians. He said the Cherokee Nation has 250,000 citizens and that another 500,000 people claim ancestry in the Oklahoma-based tribe but cannot prove it.

Smith noted that three lawsuits are pending in federal courts, including one filed by the tribe in February that asks a judge to decide whether descendants of the tribe's former black slaves, known as freedmen, have a federal right to tribal citizenship.

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