A Treaty Right For Cherokee Representation
On this week's episode of Code Switch, we talk about the relevance of a 200 year old treaty — one that most Americans don't know that much about, but should.
Back when it was signed in 1835, during the Andrew Jackson administration, the Treaty of New Echota granted the Cherokee Nation a delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives. But it's also the same treaty that led directly to the Trail of Tears, and the death of an estimated 4,000 Cherokee. And the document pit Cherokee against Cherokee — more specifically, a few powerful men who reluctantly supported removal from their ancestral home, against a huge majority who were adamantly against making that move.
But the Cherokee nation hadn't always been divided like this. Previous to the treaty's signing, the vast majority wanted to stay on their land in the South, in what's now Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and parts of Alabama. To help us understand what happened in the lead-up to the treaty, we talked to Julie Reed, a historian at Penn State University and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Where would you start the story of the Treaty of New Echota?
Well, that history starts much earlier than 1835. I actually have been increasingly referring to the first decades of the 19th century as the "long removal era." Jackson wasn't the first president to introduce removal, and Jackson was also a part of a lot of other treaties that took place before the removal treaty. But it was Jefferson who first promoted Indian removal — albeit not forcibly. There were 1817 and 1819 treaties with the Cherokee, which both contained removal provisions. It didn't require full-scale community removal, but individual people could opt to move west of the Mississippi. So the story could start there, conceivably.
If we're thinking about the delegate provision in the Treaty of New Echota, we have to go back even earlier, because the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785 actually makes a provision for representation in Congress. The language is not as strong as it is in the Treaty of New Echota, but it's present.
Throughout this period, a young United States is trying to figure out what its moral and legal obligations to Native peoples are. And one of the options on the table, of course. is full inclusion of native peoples into this larger democracy. Albeit, it's not immediate and not necessarily for everyone, but that was one of the possibilities. And then the second possibility of course is, the idea that "We need to remove Native people."