Pursuing longtime promise, Cherokee Nation seeks delegate to Congress

For Native American tribes, treaties with the U.S. government have often led to displacement, removal and outright erasure.

But now, the Cherokee Nation is turning to treaties signed in the 18th and 19th centuries to push for a delegate to Congress for the first time in history. The treaties, the Nation claims, promised them a seat at the table.

“These treaties are sacred. They mean something. There’s no expiration date on them,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., chief of Cherokee Nation, who last week announced he would fulfill a long-standing legal right to appoint a delegate to Congress. “What I’m asking is for the government of the United States to keep its word.”

Dr. Charles Gourd, 70, director of the Cherokee National Historical Society, said he and others had wondered with incredulity why no Cherokee Nation delegate had ever been seated in Congress despite assurances to that effect. Hoskin’s renewed push, weeks after he was sworn in as the new chief, in part reflects how far the Cherokee have come in terms of governance, Gourd said.

“We’ve talked about it, yes, but we hadn’t done anything about it because there were other things that had to be done to get to this point,” said Gourd, who has studied Native American sovereignty. “In a real sense there was not a fully functioning government, and there have been some growing pains. I think this is a measure of the maturity of our tribal government.”

Settled in northeastern Oklahoma after the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Nation today has nearly 400,000 enrolled members, making it the largest of nearly 600 federally recognized Native American tribes. There are also two significantly smaller, independent Cherokee tribes recognized by the federal government that are based in Oklahoma and North Carolina.

Their effort to seat a delegate in Congress — albeit, a nonvoting member — comes amid a broader push for visibility and political representation among Native Americans. In November, Democrats Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) of New Mexico and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk Nation) of Kansas became the first Native American women elected to Congress. Congress now has four Native American members, including Tom Cole (Chickasaw Nation) and Markwayne Mullin (Cherokee Nation), both Republicans of Oklahoma.

The right for the Cherokee to send a “deputy” to represent them in the U.S. Congress was first codified in the Treaty of Hopewell of 1785, which defined Cherokee borders and promised certain protections in return. The right to send a “delegate” specifically to the House of Representatives was affirmed in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota — which is better remembered for being the legal basis for the Trail of Tears, which removed Native Americans from their homelands.

The House of Representatives already has several nonvoting delegates. They represent Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

But there has never been a delegate representing a sovereign Native American government.

It remains to be seen how the plan will be greeted by congressional leaders.

In his role as chief, Hoskin has selected Kimberly Teehee as the delegate; she will be considered by the Nation’s legislative branch this week. He said he expected Teehee to be confirmed easily by the Nation.

“I still have to be confirmed,” Teehee said. “We have to work with Congress on provisions for this to occur and to develop a certain framework to allow a delegate to be seated in Congress. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”

Teehee, the tribe’s vice president of government relations, has deep experience in Washington. She was a senior policy adviser for Native American affairs during the Obama administration and previously was a congressional aide on Native American issues for more than a decade.

In some ways, seating a new delegate may be most important as a symbolic gesture.

Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said there have been other ways for tribes to work with the government, including the committees on Native American affairs in the Senate and House of Representatives. Those, she said, have been crucial vehicles for acting on concerns of native communities. She said the relationship between Congress and native tribes has been “quite collaborative” since at least the mid-20th century.

There is also a strong precedent in recent political history of American presidents receiving native delegations in formal meetings, she said.

But this new effort to send a formal delegate to Congress sends an important signal to the public about the stature of the Cherokee Nation and all native nations, Blackhawk said.

“It’s a testament of the rebuilding of native nations in the 20th and 21st centuries,” she said. “In the last 30 years, what you have are native nations being able to exercise the things that were promised in treaties in the 19th and 18th century. It’s a wonderful showing of good governance and could bring additional power and visibility to native nations.”

Cooperation between the federal government and the nearly 600 federally recognized Native American tribes often relies on informal relationships among tribal leadership, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and members of Congress, Gourd said. “Right now what you have to do is hope there’s a friendly congressperson that has a staffer that knows anything about Indian issues at all,” he said.

Dan Lewerenz (Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska), a staff attorney with the Native American Rights Fund, said seating a Cherokee Nation delegate would be an important step toward more Native American visibility and be celebrated across tribes. But he added that a Cherokee Nation delegate should not be seen by the public as a Native American delegate at large.

“The treaty doesn’t say anything about Cherokee being a stand-in for other tribes,” Lewerenz said. “The treaty affords them a right, and they choose to exercise it, which is great. If my tribe had that in one of our treaties, I would hope we’d send a delegate to Congress too.”

Hoskin said the delegate’s primary mission in Washington would be to represent the Cherokee Nation specifically. But he said the delegate would also carry an important symbolic role for all Native Americans, regardless of tribal affiliation.

“Because this is such a historic and unprecedented action by an Indian nation, I think the delegate will have a broader responsibility to help be a voice for all Indian Country,” he said. “I’ve seen the power of tribes collaborating and standing in solidarity on issues. It is my expectation that Ms. Teehee will be mindful of broader issues in all of Indian Country.”