Name David Cornsilk | ||
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Education Northeastern State University | ||
2019 Greenwood Cultural Center Legacy Awards
David Cornsilk (Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians) is a professional genealogist and the managing editor of the Cherokee Observer, an online news website founded in 1992. He is also the founder of the grassroots Cherokee National Party in the 1990s, seeking to create an alternate movement that promoted the Nation as a political entity. Cornsilk has worked for the Nation as a tribal enrollment research analyst and for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a genealogical researcher. He also has his own genealogical firm.
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Cherokee freedmen advocacy
In the longstanding Cherokee freedmen controversy, Cornsilk has promoted inclusion of freedmen descendants in the Nation because they were made citizens in 1866 by treaty with the United States. He believes the Nation needs to stand as a political entity and be large enough to include the people in its jurisdiction and honor its obligation to the freedmen descendants. As he has written,
"Anyone with some micro-thin strain of Cherokee blood should be thanking the Freedmen because they have proven that our citizenship is not based on blood or any anthropological definition of "Indian" but is a legal concept rooted in the right of the Cherokee people to determine who is and who is not a Cherokee."
At the same time, he believes that the Cherokee citizens have the right to determine who shall be citizens.
Cornsilk was among indigenous writers who commented in July 2015 on the controversy over fluctuating claims to Cherokee identity by Andrea Smith (academic), associate professor at University of California, Riverside. He rejected her claim of being able to determine independently that she was Cherokee, saying that citizenship by law and custom was based on recognition and acceptance by other Cherokee, and that the Cherokee are very well-documented people. He noted that he could find no documentation to support her claim of Cherokee ancestry.