Cherokee Freedmen

The Cherokee Freedmen are individuals, formerly enslaved in the Cherokee Nation and freed in 1863, and their descendants. They have African ancestry, and many also have Cherokee ancestry. Today, descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen on the Dawes Rolls are eligible for citizenship within the Cherokee Nation.

During the early 19th century, some Cherokee and other Southeast Native American nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes held African-American slaves as property. Slavery was an important part of the Cherokee economy and culture; by 1860, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves, largely taken from the Southeast thirty years before. This slave labor contributed to the redevelopment of Cherokee infrastructure. After the American Civil War, the Cherokee Freedmen were emancipated and allowed to become citizens of the Cherokee Nation in accordance with a reconstruction treaty made with the United States in 1866.

In the early 1980s, the Cherokee Nation administration amended citizenship rules to require direct descent from an ancestor listed on the "Cherokee By Blood" section of the Dawes Rolls. The change stripped descendants of the Cherokee Freedmen of citizenship and voting rights unless they satisfied this new criterion. As a result, there were several legal proceedings between the two parties from the late 20th century to August 2017.

On August 30, 2017, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Freedmen descendants and the U.S. Department of the Interior, granting the Freedmen descendants full rights to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. After Justice Shawna Baker of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court published the opinion, Effect of Cherokee Nation v. Nash & Vann v. Zinke, CNSC-2017-07 in 2021, the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court ruled to remove the words "by blood" from its constitution and other legal doctrines.