All true Ed and thank you. There is more to the
story that made this such a divisive issue. The issue
that the writer and poet William Payne went to write
an article about in the Cherokee Nation. He found a
community of what now is acknowledged to have
contained around 22,000 individuals made up of
the same social stratas as the White community
around it with three distinct classes.
The City of New Echota in
Georgia, like the wealthy community of Nichol's
Hills in Oklahoma City and the Grammercy area
of Manhattan was filled with new beautiful homes
and government buildings. These were not burned
and are still extant and although tremendously
"run down" at one point are now a part of Georgia's
push for tourists after the completed renovation.
Park Hill, outside of Tahlequah, Oklahoma was the
new home equivalent of New Echota but, due to
the new Cherokee brick factory, were largely built
from the more permanent brick. The Cherokee
middle class absorbed the best of the farming methods
of the Europeans and added it to their already formidable
skills. The one important tool they got from the
European farmer was the spinning wheel which made
it easier to work with wool and flax which they had
begun to use and the cotton which was developed
here. The spinning wheel reduced their use of the
fine tanning, but difficult to do, processes with leather.
The inner skin of the deer is more fine than any cloth
except silk and is amazing. It is still done in some
places for personal use as well as in Canada. There
used to be a huge market for this clothing in trade.
The Cherokees were not socially divided in the same
way that economic classes were in the Whites but
the most wealthy group were the 10% who were
Christians.
There was extensive trade in farm goods. The Cherokees
had huge orchards. Many more than the 22,000 individuals
who developed them . The Cherokees developed writing
for the Cherokee language which was useful as code for
the Cherokee businessmen and since the provinciality of
the local non-Indians included the racist belief in their
superiority over non-Whites, this inability constituted both
a block to learning, since the language is complicated,
and the lack of a strategic tool in doing business. Not
guaranteed to make "friends." But most of all it
was
the fact that the Cherokees used a mirror image of the
Washington government to stress the independence and
sovereignty over their own lives that was the problem. It
was for the Southerners their first taste of the issue of
State's rights and 22 years later they would go to war
using the same arguments against the North that the
Cherokees had skillfully used in Congress and the Supreme
Court, against them.
Also mention is not made that Marshall's dictate was not
stopped by Jackson's seditious statement which was
probably never said by Jackson, although it was certainly
his position. What stopped Marshall was that the local
non-Cherokee Christians convinced Worchester and
the other missionaries to not push their suit to the next
step. The reason given was that it could destroy the Union.
So 1. the Cherokees were as divided as the Jews of
Germany with three classes. 2. their overall wealth
was superior to the states around them. 3. They
functioned both culturally and linguistically as the
French in Canada who refuse to give up and speak
only English. 4. Economically they were the doors
to trade between four different states and as such
fed the herds of livestock that had to travel through
the nation, as well as charging tolls for the use of
the nation's roads and ferries. 5. Gold was more of
a glamour issue but it constituted the final straw in
the minds of the ignorant Georgians.
REH
Ed Weick wrote:
Over the
years, I've collected quite a lot of material while working on issues affecting
Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis. I used some of this in a recent
posting on Canadian Indian claims. The following excerpt on the eastern
US may give you a better idea of what Ray Evans Harrell is talking about
in some of his postings to the list. It is based on John Collier's Indians
of the Americas, first published in 1947. Collier was US Commissioner
of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945. Ed
Weick
1830s-1840s - Trail of
Tears and United States (Marshall) concept of Indian Nationhood: Five Civilized
Tribes removed beyond the Mississippi. Collier (Mentor edition,
1948) focuses on the Cherokee, an Iroquoian people, and the largest of
the "civilized tribes". Prior to the American Revolution, the British
had repeatedly prevented incursions into Cherokee lands by "borderers"
and the Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the revolution.
They continued to fight the Americans until 1794, when the signed a treaty
with the US Government. This was breached in the letter and spirit
repeatedly by the US Government in the subsequent years. In 1828
Andrew Jackson, who had been a famous Indian fighter and borderer and who
had beaten the British in the battle for New Orleans, was elected President.
Almost immediately, he persuaded Congress to pass the Indian Removal
Act, 1830, which enabled him to remove all Indian tribes to west of
the Mississippi (the Mississippi had become the new line between the colonized
lands and Indian Territory, replacing the Appalachians of the Royal Proclamation).
At about the same time, gold was discovered in the remaining Cherokee country,
and the Georgia legislature passed an act confiscating all Cherokee land
within the state, declaring all laws of the Cherokee Nation null and void,
and forbidding Indians to testify in any state court against white men.
The Cherokee lands were to be distributed to whites through a lottery system.
An appeal from John Ross, the Cherokee
Chief, to President Jackson got nowhere. An appeal to the Supreme
Court also failed, as the court refused to take jurisdiction on grounds
that the tribe was not a foreign nation (and therefore within the legal
jurisdiction of Georgia?). Two years later, the arrest of some missionaries
who refused to swear allegiance to Georgia while resident in Cherokee territory
brought about the famous (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) John Marshall
decision that:
The Cherokee nation, then,
is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately
described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the
citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the
Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with acts of Congress.
(Collier, p.123)
This decision was based on Marshall's
concept that Indian tribes or nations
...had always been considered
as distinct, independent, political communities, retaining their original
natural rights...and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is, that
a weaker power does not surrender its independence -- its right of self-government
-- by associating with a stronger, and taking its protection. (ibid.)
Jackson reacted with contempt: "John
Marshall has rendered his decision; now let him enforce it." (ibid.)
The destructive policies toward the Cherokees continued. A "fictional
treaty" which assigned the remaining 7 million acres of land still held
by the Cherokees to the US government for $4.5 million which was to be
deposited in the US Treasury to the credit of the Cherokees was signed
at a set-up meeting. Three years later, US troops and "a non-military
rabble of followers", invaded the Cherokee lands and removed the Cherokees
to concentration camps. "Livestock, household goods, farm implements,
everything went to the white camp-followers; the homes were usually burned."
(Collier, p124) 14,000 were forced to trek to Arkansas. Of these,
4,000 reportedly died on the way. A great lie was woven around the
exodus: In addressing Congress on December 3, 1838, President Van Buren
said:
The measures [for Cherokee
removal] authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest
effects...The Cherokees have emigrated without any apparent reluctance.
(Quoted in Collier, p.124)
Like the Cherokees, the
others of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and
Seminoles were also removed to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma.
|
