In the News
Two views of disparate cultures: Fletcher Fellows Jones and Leeds lecture on their forthcoming books
Publication date: May 21, 2009
Source: Harvard University Gazette
Author: Corydon Ireland
The Harvard University Gazette quoted Stacy Leeds, professor of law and director of the Tribal Law & Government Center, in a story about her Fletcher Fellowship Lecture at Harvard University.
The Gazette wrote:
Her book, also out next year, is "Sovereignty and Consequences: Cherokee Legal History and Freedmen." Leeds is sifting through a little-known corner of her tribe’s history — the legal fate of the slaves once owned by the Cherokees and the legal standing of their descendants.
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Confounding the issue, said Leeds, were attempts by the federal government — starting in the 1880s — to suppress Cherokee tribal governance. By the turn of the century, federal law forced tribes to cede their communal land and redistribute it based on a tribal census, the so-called Dawes Rolls.
The land allotment had one ironic consequence, said Leeds. "There really was a place in the United States where freed slaves received 40 — or more — acres of land." ("Forty acres and a mule" — the great federal promise to blacks in the reconstruction-era South — never materialized.)
