Slave descendants seek equal rights

Rico's friend Kema forwards this long piece of history (go to the website to read the rest of it) from Salon by Marcos Barbery:

On an oppressively hot evening in May of 2014, David Cornsilk addressed a room of so-called “black Indians” at Gilcrease Hills Baptist Church in northwest Tulsa, Oklahoma. He wore a leather-braided bolo tie clasped by an emerald quartz. Though Cornsilk never formally studied law, his voice bellowed with the rhetorical ire of a white-shoed seasoned litigator. “By a show of hands, how many folks here tonight are Freedmen?” Cornsilk asked into the microphone. Each raised an arm. Visibly dismayed, Cornsilk shook his head. It was a trick question. “No,” Cornsilk said. “The Freedmen died a long time ago. You are not Freedmen. You are Cherokee, and it is time that you begin to recognize who you are.”
Cornsilk is Cherokee, and a self-taught civil rights advocate and genealogist. He traces his slave-owning ancestors back to their aboriginal lands of Georgia and Tennessee, to a period before the Trail of Tears. Cornsilk is not a Cherokee Freedmen descendant. For nearly two decades, however, Cornsilk fought for the citizenship rights of Freedmen descendants: blacks who descend from slaves once owned by Cherokee and other tribes.
While working full-time as a clerk at Petsmart, Cornsilk took on America’s second-largest Indian tribe, the Cherokee Nation, in what led to a landmark tribal decision. Cornsilk served as a lay advocate, which permits non-lawyers to try cases before the Cherokee Nation’s highest court. When Cornsilk was not unloading dog food from truck beds and stocking shelves under the sounds of chirping parakeets, he composed legal briefs on the rights of Freedmen descendants, made oral arguments in court, and responded to a flurry of technical motions submitted by his opponents.
The legal advocacy would come at a personal cost for Cornsilk. Not long after his talk at Gilcrease Hills, he was unable to maintain two full-time jobs. So he sacrificed one. Quickly, Cornsilk failed to make rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Tulsa. He broke the lease and moved into his Honda Civic while seeking new employment. He began showering at the YMCA.
Outmatched and outspent by a team of Cherokee Nation lawyers, few considered Cornsilk a threat, and certainly not someone who could ignite debate on race and tribal power, but he did, and that debate would end up costing the Cherokee Nation millions of dollars in attorney’s fees, lobbyists, and public relations campaigns.
The ongoing battle for tribal equal rights for Freedmen descendants has grown increasingly urgent. With other American Indian tribes across Oklahoma closely watching the impending US court cases to signal the fate of their own Freedmen descendants and the extent of their sovereignty, Cornsilk believes that the present stakes could not be higher.
Not surprisingly, Cornsilk has grown more polemical. At the Baptist church Cornsilk said that if you do not think these folks in this room “have Cherokee ancestry and you have not done the research to find out, then you’re a racist.” Part of what helps make him so compelling is that on the surface— like Cherokee Principal Chief Bill John Baker and members of the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council— Cornsilk looks white.

Rico says it's a very long article, but worth reading...