ABSTRACT
The issue of what it means to be a “Cherokee,” or moreover what it means to be an “Indian,” is one of the most controversial and pivotal issues that confront Native Americans today.7 It is more than just an academic discussion when people assume Cherokee identity in order to reap the economic advantages of tribal membership, the religious deliverance offered by Native American spirituality, or the artistic merits of being an indigenous artist. In the twentieth century, the issue of “blood politics” has come to dominate discussions of identity and the delineations among blood, color, and race have become hopelessly obfuscated by racial ideology and identity politics. Even the Seminole Nation, which has traditionally embraced persons of African descent, has moved to restrict identity along “blood” lines thereby disenfranchising persons of African/Native descent.8 However, this emphasis upon the ideological construct of “race” as derivative of percent of Cherokee “blood” is a recent phenomenon in the Cherokee Nation.9 Before the nineteenth century, it was hardly even an issue. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it became the issue for the Cherokee Nation.
