The Cherokee Nation’s demand for a congressional delegate gets a hearing in the House early two centuries ago, the US government promised the Cherokee people a seat in Congress in exchange for giving up their homelands. So far, it hasn’t delivered.
But that promise came one step closer to being fulfilled on Wednesday after the House Rules Committee held a historic hearing on seating the Cherokee Nation’s delegate – a right that the tribe asserts it was granted in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota.
“It’s time for this body to honor this promise and seat our delegate in the House of Representatives,” Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said in his testimony. “No barrier, constitutional or otherwise, prevents this.”
Under the Treaty of New Echota, brokered between the US government and a minority group of Cherokee leaders who claimed to represent the tribe, the Cherokee were made to give up their ancestral land and relocate west of the Mississippi River. Though a majority of the Cherokee people opposed the treaty, it was ratified in 1836. Thousands of Cherokee citizens are estimated to have died on the resulting journey now known as the Trail of Tears.
The Cherokee Nation has in recent years called on the House to enforce a provision of the treaty stipulating that it “shall be entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.” In 2019, the tribe appointed as its delegate Kimberly Teehee, who previously served as a senior policy adviser for Native American affairs during President Barack Obama’s administration and as a senior adviser to former Democratic Rep. Dale Kildee of Michigan.
During Wednesday’s hearing, members of the House panel heard testimony from Hoskin and legal experts on the Cherokee Nation’s claim to a delegate, what powers the delegate would have and how the process of seating that delegate might work......
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/16/politics/cherokee-nation-delegate-house-committee-hearing-cec/index.html
