Cherokees eject slave descendants

We ran across this story a few days ago, before the vote was taken, and I had a feeling this is what was going to happen: the Cherokee tribe has voted to eject descendants of slaves from their rolls. We read a longer story in the NY Times before the vote was taken, which gave more details on what, exactly, was planned:

Officially, the election will ask voters whether to amend the Cherokee Nation Constitution. Overriding the 1866 treaty, it would limit citizenship to those who can trace their heritage to "Cherokee by blood" rolls, part of a census known as the Dawes Rolls of 1906. The Freedmen [descendants of slaves] would automatically be denied citizenship because the Dawes Rolls, a census commissioned by Congress to distribute land to tribal members, put the Freedmen on a separate roll that made no mention of Indian blood.

I assume we have much more fun in the courts to come, now that this decision has been made.

I find this very troubling; as I find all matters with regard to blood and blood quantum troubling. Furthermore, I find this "special" kind of racism amongst the Cherokees especially disgusting. And it leaves me to wonder, how does this really, truly help the overarching cause that Native peoples are trying to achieve--or has it all been lost sight of? In some sense, it is reassuring that many tribes don't follow the same path as the Cherokee Nation, but on the other hand--it is the only tribe most are familiar with, and gives the rest of us a bad name.

It really is an interesting decision. It would seem that if a group is small, they would want more people in their group. Amusingly, the problem is the amount of power the group has been given - only because they have their own system of everything do they now want to 'protect' it from outsiders.

I don't think to 'mainstream Americans' the Cherokee are synonymous with 'Native American' - in part because of the recent press for rights people have become, I believe, more aware of their local and regional tribes. But I do think it's very easy for people to see this decision as part of the 'keeping the casino money for themselves' concept that seems to have entered the popular consciousness recently.