The descendants of former slaves owned by Cherokees say they'll fight in court for membership in the tribe.
The Cherokee Freedmen were voted out of the tribe Saturday, when 77% of Cherokee voters approved an amendment to the tribe's constitution to limit citizenship to those who are Indian "by blood."

There are about 2,700 Freedmen in the 270,000-member Cherokee Nation, tribe spokesman Mike Miller says.

"Certainly we are not giving up," says Marilyn Vann, a Freedman who says she is Cherokee, Chickasaw and black. Vann, an engineer in Oklahoma City, stands to lose her Cherokee citizenship. She called the election a "travesty of justice" because many Freedmen have Cherokee as well as black ancestry.

Ousted members will lose their vote as well as access to such tribal benefits as health care. The tribe does not pay gambling profits to members.

I would not take a million dollars to give up my treaty rights and legal rights to citizenship," Vann says.

After the Civil War, the Cherokees signed a treaty with the U.S. government granting Freedmen and their descendants tribal citizenship. But the tribe, which ratified a new constitution in 1976, has denied them citizenship for much of the past three decades.

After the tribe's highest court ruled last March that Freedmen could obtain citizenship, Cherokee citizens circulated a petition to bring the issue to a vote.

The amendment approved Saturday limits Cherokee citizenship to Indians "by blood," determined from membership rolls created in the early 20th century. Those whose ancestors were on a separate Freedmen roll are not eligible.

"The overwhelming majority of the Cherokee people said we want to be an Indian tribe made up of Indians, just like any other Indian tribe in the country," Principal Chief Chad Smith says. "It's not race-based. We have lots of folks who are racially black, Hispanic or white."

Challenges to the election through the tribal process must be brought by March 12.

Jon Velie, an attorney who represents Vann and other Freedmen, says he plans to proceed with a lawsuit pending in federal court. The lawsuit says the Cherokees' treatment of the Freedmen violates the postwar treaty and the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery.

Velie says precedent is on the Freedmen's side. The Seminole Nation voted Freedmen out of its tribe in 2000. After the U.S. government cut off funds to the tribe and a lawsuit in federal court validated the treaty, Velie says, the Seminoles took the Freedmen back.

"We lost the battle," he says, "but we think we can win the war."