Give the Cherokee Nation a Seat in Congress

Those promises never came to be. American settlers in the Ohio Territory, sometimes backed by force and violence, pushed the tribe further west until their descendants settled in Ohio. Removal policies would characterize much of national policy toward the tribes in the nineteenth century, with the Trail of Tears perhaps the most well-known and infamous example. The federal government used the Treaty of New Echowa as the legal basis to forcibly relocate almost all of the Cherokee, along with other tribes in the Deep South, from their ancestral lands to the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma.

While the treaty led to one of the darkest chapters in American westward expansion, it also continued to put forward the idea of a tribal voice in Congress. Among its provisions was one that “stipulated that [the Cherokee] shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” The treaty justified that promise by claiming the tribe had “already made great progress in civilization” and stated that “every proper and laudable inducement should be offered” to the tribe to relocate. It also praised, somewhat ironically, “the liberal and enlarged policy of the government of the United States towards the Indians.”

That provision lay dormant for more than 180 years. Neither Congress nor the Cherokee Nation, the largest of the federally recognized Cherokee tribes, appears to have taken steps to seat a delegate in the intervening time. Only in 2019 did the tribe push in earnest to have a delegate seated, with Hoskin and the Cherokee’s executive committee naming Kimberly Teehee to the seat that year. While the seat is assigned to the Cherokee, Teehee indicated she would represent tribal voices in general in the House.