by Frank Vann in 1887, Jerry Alberty in 1889, Joseph "Stick" Ross in 1893, and the election of Ned Irons and Samuel Stidham in 1895. The most known of the councilmen was Joseph "Stick" Ross, who was born into slavery and owned by Principal Chief John Ross before his family's emancipation. Stick Ross became a civic leader with several companies and landmarks named after him, including Stick Ross Mountain in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Leslie Ross, Stick's great-grandson, says, He knew sign language and spoke Cherokee and Seminole. He was a trapper and a farmer and a rancher. And he was sheriff at one time, too. He was pretty renowned in Tahlequah. The civic position for Freedmen increased by the time of the Dawes Commission, which convinced the Cherokee and the other Five Civilized Tribes to break up tribal land in Indian Territory into individual allotments for households. The Cherokee Freedmen were among the three groups listed on the Dawes Rolls, records created by the Dawes Commission to list citizens in Indian Territory. With the abolition of tribal government by the Curtis Act of 1898, the Freedmen as well as other Cherokee citizens were counted as US citizens and Oklahoma was granted statehood in 1907. After the Cherokee Nation reorganized and re-established its government via passage of the Principal Chiefs Act in 1970, the Freedmen participated in the 1971 tribal elections held for the office of principal chief. The election was the first held by the Cherokee since the passage of the Curtis Act. Several Cherokee Freedmen descendants have continued to embrace this historical connection. Others, after having been excluded from the tribe for two decades in the late twentieth century and subject to a continuing citizenship struggle, have become ambivalent about their ties. They no longer think identifying as Cherokee is necessary to their personal identity. History Slavery among the Cherokee Slavery was a component of Cherokee society prior to European colonization, as they frequently enslaved enemy captives taken during times of conflict with other indigenous tribes. By their oral tradition, the Cherokee viewed slavery as the result of an individual's failure in warfare and as a temporary status, pending release or the slave's adoption into the tribe. During the colonial era, Carolinian settlers purchased or impressed Cherokees as slaves during the late 17th and early 18th century. From the late 1700s to the 1860s, the Five Civilized Tribes in the