Guest: Making the legal case for seating the Cherokee Nation’s delegate in Congress
In the Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835 by the Cherokee Nation and the United States, the Cherokee Nation bargained for and received a right to have a delegate seated in Congress. The nation paid a high price for its treaty — the forced removal of our ancestors from our aboriginal home in the southeastern United States, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of our people on the infamous Trail of Tears. Now, we are asking Congress to uphold its end of the bargain and make this treaty promise real.
But other tribes, such as the United Keetoowah Band of Oklahoma (UKB), continue to make claims to our treaty right. I would like to set the record straight.
The treaty-mandated right to a delegate belongs to the Cherokee Nation, and the Cherokee Nation alone. The United States and the Cherokee Nation were the only parties to the Treaty of New Echota. No other tribe shares this treaty right.
Just as Article 1 of the treaty uses “Cherokee Nation” when describing the ceding of our aboriginal lands, Article 7 uses “Cherokee Nation” when providing the delegate right. The term “Cherokee Nation” is used throughout the treaty, and clearly refers to the body politic — the one and only Cherokee Nation — that predated the United States and first entered into treaties with it beginning in 1785.
The UKB, on the other hand, did not even exist as a federally recognized tribe until 1950 — almost 100 years after the ratification of the last treaty between the Cherokee Nation and the United States. No matter how attractive it may be, the UKB cannot claim the delegate right as its own. The Cherokee Nation and the UKB — their respective histories and attendant legal rights — are entirely separate and distinct.
UKB claims the Cherokee Nation was “terminated” in the early 20th century and that a “successor” to it was subsequently organized in 1950, but under the name UKB. This claim is wrong as a matter of history and law.
There is abundant evidence in the legal and historical record showing the continuity of the Cherokee Nation from treaty times to present. Congress summed it up in 2002, in Public Law 107-331, finding that the Cherokee Nation of today is the same Cherokee Nation that “has maintained a continuous government-to-government relationship with the United States since the earliest years of the Union.”
The courts also have been clear on this issue, holding that the Cherokee Nation, and only the Cherokee Nation, is the sovereign entity that entered into and is bound today by the treaties it signed with the United States. See, e.g., Cherokee Nation v. Nash (2017).
No one — including the UKB and its representatives — is entitled to rewrite and distort the history of the Cherokee Nation in an attempt to appropriate our legal rights and sovereign powers. As with all Native American nations, our history is the very foundation of our legal existence and, as such, should be respected. And the legal and historical record on this subject is clear: The delegate right under the Treaty of New Echota is held only by the Cherokee Nation.
Congress should fulfill its promise and seat the Cherokee Nation’s delegate in Congress.
Sara Hill is the attorney general of the Cherokee Nation.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Congress should fulfill its promise, seat the Cherokee Nation delegate
