Waiting 187 Years for Representation

Over the years, I’ve come across these children’s books by writers from the Cherokee Nation:

Mary and the Trail of Tears: A Cherokee Removal Story by Andrea L. Rogers

The Reluctant Storyteller by Art Coulson with Traci Sorell

And of course Traci Sorell’s many lovely books.

I thought of these writers and their books and of stories yet to be written when I spotted this article from National Geographic, a publication that now seems committed at last to making up for its own many past wrongs.

Excerpt:

Nearly 200 years ago, the United States signed a treaty with the Cherokee people, bartering away the tribe’s ancestral homelands for a far-off reservation and putting the forced migration now known as the Trail of Tears into motion.

Even though the 1835 Treaty of New Echota was just one of the 375 acknowledged agreements between the U.S. and Tribal governments, it contained a unique provision: a line that promised the Cherokee people a delegate to the House of Representatives.

Then the Indian Removal Act came along and like reconstruction for Black Americans, hopes for representation, equality, justice, were sort of shoved aside and stayed mostly forgotten. I found a coherent account in this Smithsonian article on the tribe’s efforts to wrangle a settlement with the administration of Andrew Jackson.

But here and now, in our time (2019, to be precise) the Cherokee Nation, it turns out, nominated Kimberly Teehee to serve as the tribe’s delegate to Congress. The position of delegate was promised in the 1835 Treaty of New Echota, but the process has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now what? Who knows? The treaty apparently is still on the books.

Come on, Universe. A little historical justice? And what a story! One day, however it ends, it ought to find a place in the pages of a children’s book.