1. What’s Capitalism Got to Do With It?:
Race, the Dawes Act, and the Cherokee Freedmen

2. Who are the Cherokee Freedmen?
The Argument
Since the 19th century, state-sponsored hierarchies of race and gender have coupled with capitalist economic exploitation to marginalize the Cherokee of Oklahoma right alongside other minorities. In this paper, I focus on current Cherokee membership practices and, especially, on recent attempts to disenroll descendants of the "Cherokee Freedmen," the former African-American slaves held and liberated by the Cherokee, to suggest that internalized racism serves as a tool of economic exploitation that ultimately ensures the survival of white supremacist capitalism.
Who are the Cherokee Freedmen?

3. The Cherokee Dawes Rolls
Compiled between 1901and 1907
In the form of 3 separate lists
Cherokee By Blood
Includes Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, and mixed-race white/Indians
Intermarried Whites
Includes the spouses married to Cherokees prior to 1877
Freedmen
Includes former Cherokee slaves and mixed-race black/Indians adopted as a requirement of an 1866 treaty

4. Economic Consequences of the Dawes Act
Capitalist Exploitation
Allocation of tribal lands robbed Cherokees in order to transfer land to owners who would generate profits.
Racialized conditions of enrollment of Freedmen on the Dawes Rolls has resulted in risk of loss of citizenship and benefits earned through years of unpaid labor.
Descendants of Cherokee Freedmen protesting in Tulsa, OK, May 2007.

5. The Connection Between Racism and Capitalism:
Conclusion
The Connection Between Racism and Capitalism:
Obscured mechanisms of economic exploitation
Implications:
Exploited people must resist imposed categorization through finding like cause and crossing boundaries, forming alliances in order to resist economic exploitation.