Cherokee Nation: referendum kicks out the Freedmen
The Tulsa World reports: Cherokee Nation voters overwhelmingly chose to remove freedmen from their tribal rolls in a special election Saturday.
Complete results late Saturday show 77 percent of the voters supported the proposed amendment to the Cherokee Constitution. About 8,700 votes were cast in the tribe's 14-county district.
The question put to voters proposed a constitutional amendment to require that only descendants of "by blood" tribal members on the 1906 Dawes Rolls would remain in the tribe, excluding about 2,770 freedmen descendants, who were affirmed by the tribe's high court as tribal citizens in March 2006. ..
The amendment also removes non-Indian descendants of "intermarried whites," according to the ballot wording.
Members of the Shawnee and Delaware by blood rolls, who also are Cherokee Nation citizens, will remain on the rolls.
The amendment excludes from Cherokee tribal rolls the descendants of freed Cherokee slaves categorized as freedmen.
Freedmen often intermarried with the tribe and lived within the
Cherokee Nation boundaries. -- tulsaworld.com: News