Career
Cornsilk has worked for the Cherokee 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. David Cornsilk served as managing editor of the Cherokee Observer, an online news website and former print newspaper that his father John Cornsilk and David founded in 1992.
In the longstanding, 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.
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.
