Traditional
Cherokee Stomp Dance demonstration
A
History of the Cherokee People
The early Cherokee farmed and hunted in what is now North
Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. In the middle of the 1700's they fought
the colonists that tried to settle on their lands. The sided with the
British during the Revolutionary War.
in the early years of the 19th century, the Cherokee began to
adopt the political and economic structure of the white settlers. Some
Cherokees owned plantations and kept slaves while most had modest farms. The tribe established a democratic form of
government and called it the Cherokee Nation. Sequoya introduced a
system of writing for their language in 1821. They published a newspaper
called the Cherokee Phoenix. (Sequoya's house is available for
visitation North of Sallisaw, OK.)
During this time white settlers demanded that the government move all the Indians in the
Southeastern United States to somewhere west of the Mississippi River.
In 1835 some of the members signed a treaty with the government and agreed to move
west. (Their original court house can be visited at Gore, OK.)
Most of the Cherokees, led by Chief John Ross, opposed the
treaty. Darning the winter of 1838-1839, the U. S. Army forced
from13,000 to 17,000 Cherokees to move to Indian Territory in Eastern Oklahoma. Thousands of the tribal
members died on this forced march. It became known as the Trail of Tears.
The Cherokee went on to re-establish the Cherokee Nation in
Indian Territory. (Their capital building and jail are available for
visitation in Tahlequah, OK.) The Cherokees set up their own college,
schools and churches.
In
1898 the U. S. Congress passed the Curtis Act that abolished all tribal
governments. In 1905, the government acting in accordance with the Dawes
Act broke up the Cherokee reservation and allotted parcels to each tribal member. Indian territory
was assimilated into the State of Oklahoma in 1907.
Some
resisted allotment. They revived a secret society called the Ketowahs under Red Bird Smith and retreated to
the Cookson Hills. Many of their descendants are served today by the Cookson
Hills Mission.
An insight into the Cherokee Nation can be acquired when
visiting their Heritage Center near Tahlequah, OK. You can also tour the
Tsa-La-Gi ancient village which features replicas of their homes and meeting
houses before
removal from the Southeastern United States. Craftsmen in traditional
buckskin attire demonstrate their work.
A
National Disgrace’
Half a
millennium after Columbus misnamed them, American Indians are the poorest
people in the United States.
The country’s 2.1 million Indians have the highest rates of
poverty, unemployment and disease of any ethnic group in America. That might
surprise Americans who have consumed countless cheery feature stories about the Indians making big bucks on
casino gambling. Some tribes – like the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut,
who own Foxwoods, the country’s largest casino – have indeed gotten very rich.
But less than a quarter
of America’s 557 Indian tribes own casinos and only 48 tribes earn more than
$10 million a year on gambling. Far more typical than Foxwoods is Prairie
Wind, the casino on the Pine Ridge reservation – a gambling hall made of three trailers,
located far away from any urban market, earning barely $1 million a year for
the Oglala Sioux.
It is impossible to generalize about 2 million people who
belong to more than 500 different tribes, each with its own history, each
living in different circumstances, as varied as the Navajo of the Southwestern
desert and
the Lummi of Puget Sound. But all Indian tribes do share one thing: a
relationship with the United States government that is unique. They are
"domestic dependent nations," as Chief Justice John Marshall termed them in a landmark Supreme Court
decision in 1832 -- "distinct independent political communities retaining
their original natural rights as the undisputed possessors of the soil."
As such, they constitute the only minority group in America that has
signed peace Treaties with the U. S. government. The only ethnic group with a
government agency -- the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- specifically devoted to
its well-being.
Of course, this special relationship has seldom worked out
well for the Indians. Over the last 150 years, the government has tried a
series of conflicting ways of dealing with the natives of this continent --
making war on them, making treaties with them, breaking treaties with
them, sending them to Oklahoma, forcing them onto reservations, forcing them
off reservations, permitting them to own land collectively, forcing them to divide the land into individual plots,
dispatching their children to boarding schools hundreds of miles from home,
closing the boarding schools and sending children home, outlawing the practice
of their religion, legalizing practice of those religions, discriminating
against them in employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, discriminating
in favor of them in employment with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, permitting
them to run
gambling operations under certain circumstances, increasing funding for the
BIA and, in fiscal 1996, cutting funding for the BIA by $160 million, or 9
percent.
Now Native Americans remain at the bottom in almost every
measurable economic category. Indians earn only a little more than half as
much money as the average American -- less money per capita than whites, blacks, Asian Americans and Hispanics.
Nearly a third of Native Americans live in poverty, which is more than twice
the rate for Americans in general. And Indians are far more liable to succumb
to diseases associated with the poor -- four times as likely to die of alcoholism,
three times as likely to die of tuberculosis, nearly twice as likely to die of
diabetes.
"It's a national disgrace," says Senator John
McCain, the Arizona Republican the past Chairperson of the Senate Committee on
Indian Affairs. "Any observer would say that our treatment of Native
Americans is a national
disgrace."
Over the years, the government's policies have come and gone
like fads, each billed as humanitarian reform, each accompanied by its own
buzzwords -- "removal," "allotment,"
"termination," "relocation," "assimilation." Today the
buzzword is "self-determination." Everyone -- tribal leaders, BIA
officials, members of Congress -- talks about the need for an increased
emphasis on decision making by Native Americans through enhanced
"self-determination." For tribes this is translated as greater
personal control of Indian country, less dependence on the BIA. Now in Indian
Country and on Capital Hill, the debate is over exactly what "self-determination" is and
what it could mean.
All the problems of urban ghettos are found in Indian
Country, drug abuse, alcoholism, dropouts, suicide, teenage pregnancy.
"Some of the kids have such low self-esteem that the only thing they
think they can succeed
at is having babies. There's a huge population explosion among the young kids.
In Indian Country, as elsewhere, teenage parenthood and a
lack of jobs combine to create a cycle of welfare dependency. Indians don't
want to be dependent, but when it's either that or starve, the choice is
clear. "Most
Indian people are very, very proud people. But they can't go back to the old
way. It's gone. The buffalo are gone"
