Bozeman, Mont. — Just as citizens suspected of conspiring with foreign governments should be investigated and prosecuted in the present, those who committed treason in the past need not be glorified. What could be more logical than taxpayers’ patriotic plea that their federal, state and municipal governments consider removing, from public property, tributes to traitors loyal to the Confederate States of America who took up arms against the United States to perpetuate the institution of slavery?

I have no qualms about tearing down bronze Confederates on government land. And I descend from one of those men. My paternal great-great-grandfather Stephen Nila Carlile served as a private in the Confederate States Army. His regiment, the First Cherokee Mounted Rifles, was formed in 1861 when the Cherokee Nation, residing in Indian Territory (in what is now eastern Oklahoma), signed a treaty of alliance with the Confederacy. The Cherokee had an understandable grudge against the United States government for removing them to the West in the 1830s.

And before that, as one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast, they had been pressured to cede their hunting lands and trade in their traditional matrilineal system for Christianity, male dominance and commercial agriculture as practiced in the 19th-century South. Which is to say, they owned slaves. So when they traipsed the Trail of Tears, their slaves marched with them.

As far as I know, Private Carlile, an illiterate, did not own slaves. But he would marry into a fancier Cherokee family that did. His future brother-in-law Pleasant Napoleon Blackstone fought for the Confederates in the Battle of Honey Springs in 1863. It was the largest battle fought in Indian Territory. White soldiers made up a minority of combatants. Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw Confederates fought a Union coalition of the Indian Home Guard (including Delaware, Seneca and Shawnee, plus some rogue pro-Lincoln Cherokees) as well as the First Kansas Colored Infantry, one of the first black units in the war to engage in combat. Uncle Pleasant was wounded but commended for killing one of these heroes.