the Freedmen or their history before the court case. Chief Smith said, "A lot of Cherokee don't know who the Freedmen are," and that he was not familiar with them when growing up. In a June 2007 message to members of United Keetoowah Band Of Cherokee, Principal Chief George Wickliffe expressed his concern about threats to sovereignty because of this case. He said that the Cherokee Nation's refusal to abide by the Treaty of 1866 threatened the government-to-government relationships of other Native American nations, which had struggled to make the US live up to its treaty obligations. One of several issues that have risen from the controversy is the issue of blood lineage and government records in regards to determining tribal membership. Historians have noted that before the Dawes Commission, the Cherokee have included people from previous rolls and people of non-Cherokee descent as members of the nation, from former captives to members by adoption. The Delaware and Shawnee tribes, two non-Cherokee tribes, are members of the Cherokee Nation via the Delaware Agreement of 1867 and the Shawnee Agreement of 1869. Another issue is that of a tribe's breaking a treaty protected by Article Six of the United States Constitution. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., director of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, stated that the Treaty of 1866 granted freedmen their rights as citizens, and the case should not be made into a racial issue. Race is another issue. Taylor Keen, a Cherokee Nation tribal council member, said, Historically, citizenship in the Cherokee Nation has been an inclusive process; it was only at the time of the Dawes Commission there was ever a racial definition of what Cherokee meant. The fact that it was brought back up today certainly tells me that there is a statute of racism. Cherokee Nation citizen Darren Buzzard, one of the circulators of the 2006 petition, wrote a letter to Cherokee Councilwoman Linda O'Leary, with passages which many observers deemed to be racist and bigoted. Circulated widely on the Internet, the letter was quoted in numerous articles related to the Freedmen case. Oglala Lakota journalist Dr. Charles "Chuck" Trimble, principal founder of the American Indian Press Association and former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, criticized the Cherokee Supreme Court's August 2011 ruling and compared it to the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision. In 2021, the Cherokee Nation's