Peter N. Herndon
Today, the remains of New Echota, near Atlanta, Georgia, give testimony to one attempt to establish an Indian civilization based on white men's rules. New Echota used to be the thriving capital of the Cherokee nation, where in the early 1820's, shoppers could buy sugar from St. Croix, indigo from New Orleans, or porcelain from China. By 1826, only a decade after it was founded, the town boasted eighteen schools, over 700 looms, 2400 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, almost 3,000 plows, 31 gristmills and 10 sawmills. Cherokee farmers cultivated apple and peach orchards using Euro-American farming methods. Others owned plantations that exploited the labor of black slaves. The town boasted Cherokee-operated taverns, blacksmith shops and toll roads. It was an orderly, neat and well-run place, where the town printing press, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed a weekly newspaper and thousands of Bibles, hymnals, novels and broadsheets. (Bordewich, page 40)
____
The Cherokee nation's constitution of 1827 modeled itself after the one in Washington, D.C. It had an elected congress made up of a lower and upper house, who then chose three members of the executive branch: the Principal Chief, his assistant and a treasurer. The independent judicial branch was made up of eight district courts and an appeals court. There was a bill of rights, taxation laws and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. Their representatives created a preamble that emulated the original: "We the Representatives of the people of the Cherokee Nation, in Convention assembled, in order to establish justice, ensure tranquillity, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty . . ." (Bordewich, page 41)
Elias Boudinot, the Cherokee Phoenix editor, was the man most responsible for westernized leadership of New Echota. He was born as Kilikeena, a full-blooded Cherokee in 1804, and later took on the name of his white benefactor. He was formally educated in Connecticut at the school of the American Board of Foreign Missions and even corresponded with Jedidiah Morse, who taught astronomy at Yale. After graduation, he married a white woman, then returned to Georgia, as pressure steadily increased to open Cherokee lands to white settlement.
Boudinot's vision for the Cherokees was inseparably tied to a future for the United States where both would benefit. He was convinced that the survival of the Cherokee nation depended on their leaving behind the old ways in order to avoid extinction. Under Boudinot's leadership the Cherokees had adopted democratic ways and private enterprise, and pointed the way to peaceful change, a model for other tribes in partnership with the United States government. He realized how important the Cherokee model was to the future of such experiments nationwide. If it should succeed, other tribes would certainly follow suit and there would be great expectations of an enlightened solution to the age-old Indian question. If it should fail, Boudinot said, "then all hopes are blasted, and falls the fabric of Indian civilization." (Bordewich, page 43) His vision was a remarkable one. In 1826, Boudinot went throughout the United States on a speaking tour to create support for the Cherokees. His speech, "An Address to the Whites," was later published as a pamphlet. In it, he appealed to logic and spiritual reasoning:
'…The world should know what we have done in the past few years (in Georgia) to foresee what yet we may do with the assistance of our white brethren, and that of the Common Parent of us all. In times of peace she will plead the common liberties of America. In times of war her intrepid sons will sacrifice their lives in your defense. And because she will be useful to you in coming time, she asks you to assist her in her present struggles. She asks not for greatness; she seeks not wealth; she pleads only for assistance to become respectable as a nation, to enlighten and ennoble her sons, and to ornament her daughters with modesty and virtue.' (Quoted in Bordewich page 43)
As those who have studied our nation's history know, despite successful appeals to the United States Supreme Court, Boudinot's worst fears were realized when, in January of 1830, Georgia declared Cherokee laws null and void and prohibited Cherokees from testifying in cases involving whites. Several months later, Congress passed President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal bill, which resulted in the state of Georgia auctioning off Cherokee lands without any consultation with the Indians. Several thousand U.S. army troops arrived in New Echota and herded the native inhabitants into stockades where some two thousand died even before the forced march began. Then, in the fall of 1838, the Cherokees started their grueling "Trail of Tears" to Oklahoma, which resulted in the death of another four thousand Cherokees from exposure and sickness. The fate of the Cherokee nation as a self-governing body was sealed.
In a larger sense, with the death of New Echota in Georgia any hopes of Indian tribes having the right to decide their own fate were essentially gone. Still to come were the Plains Wars of the 1870s, the closing of the frontier, and the creation of reservations. Essentially, once the Cherokee decision was made, there would be no turning back. Independent tribal life was doomed and the Indian voice was silenced.
Not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s did American Indians begin to raise their voices publicly and appeal to the wider American conscience. Under increasing pressure, in 1960 the U.S. government decided to stop their decade-old policy of termination of Indian rights on reservations. (Hazen-Hammond, p. 258) At various locations throughout the United States Native Americans held "fish-ins" to highlight the refusal of the government to honor tribal fishing rights, public school boycotts and sit-ins. In 1969, Native Americans invaded and occupied the old prison buildings on Alcatraz Island as a way of protesting government policies toward Indians. (Ibid., p. 268) Organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians, the American Indian Movement and the American Indian Historical Society were formed. Cultural museums were founded. Important books were written such as N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. In the same year, Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, which challenged whites to look at Native Americans and Native American history from the Indian perspective. (Ibid., p. 270)
Congress and the courts began to pay attention in the l970s. Tribal members began to get compensation and reparations payments to make up for past wrongdoings done to them by the government. For example in 1971, Alaska Natives collected $962 million under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. (Hazen-Hammond, p. 275) Other states followed suit; in 1980, the Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act was passed. (Ibid., p. 295) Many unrecognized tribes, such as the Mohegans of Connecticut (in 1994) received federal recognition and reestablished their legal right to exist on tribal lands. (Ibid., p. 310)
Today, the future looks bright for American Indians. Since the late 1970's Indians have made many gains. In 1978, the Supreme Court declared that the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 gives tribes sovereign power to rule within their borders. (Hazen-Hammond, p. 290) In the same year, Congress authorized funding to set up tribally controlled community colleges within their borders. In the decade of the 1980's many tribes gained the right to manage hunting, fishing and natural resources within their territories. Millions of dollars in government compensation payments have been made to tribes such as the $100 million granted the Sioux Indians in payment for the illegal government seizure of the Black Hills in the 1880s. Also, $29 million in compensation for unsound federal accounting practices have been awarded to tribes such as the Blackfeet. Tribes now have a major say in the development of energy resources on their lands and have received the right to tax mining operations, as a result of a 1982 Supreme Court decision. (Ibid., p. 296) In 1985, the Supreme Court permitted tribes to levy business and property taxes on their lands, without any interference from the Department of the Interior. (Ibid., p. 300) Then in 1987, the Court opened the door for casino gambling on Indian reservations (California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians), when it allowed tribes to negotiate with states in setting up casino operations. (Ibid., p. 302) Pro-gambling and anti-gambling factions are split on the benefits and drawbacks of gambling.
In terms of Indian culture and history, in 1990 Congress declared that all museums in the U.S. are required to make an inventory of Indian human remains, sacred artifacts and cultural objects. (Hazen-Hammond, p. 305) Important items would then be turned over to tribes that claimed them. Museums such as the Peabody in New Haven have been required to return objects "permanently borrowed" from Indians. For example, the Omaha Indians of Nebraska, in 1991, reclaimed and reburied ancestral remains on their lands, and received back the Sacred White Buffalo Hide from the Museum of the American Indian. The number of cultural festivals and powwows are on the rise. Native American culture is being celebrated widely and freely. Indians in some states, supported by activists in the Native American Church, have won the right to use and transport the traditional hallucinogenic drug peyote on tribal lands. (Ibid., p. 306)
Among the San Carlos Apaches, medicine people predict the "Anasazi Indians will return from their home in the Big Dipper and create a renaissance of Native American beliefs and life." (Quoted in Hazen-Hammond, page 314) I recently visited the state-of-the-art Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Ledyard, Connecticut. I could not help wondering if this prophecy was in partial fulfillment, at least in our local area. Are more and more Americans taking more of a genuine interest in who Indians are and why their history is so unique as "first Americans?" Hopefully this teaching unit will spark interest in both teachers and their students to put away a romanticized notion of who Indians were and begin to inquire into who they are and why their history and culture is of such significance in our pursuit of who we are: Americans all.
I close with a quotation by Chief Blackfoot, the Mountain Crow leader who spoke at a peace council in Montana in 1873:
____
'We always give the Great Spirit something. I think that is good. We see the sun, we give him something; and the moon and the earth, we give them something. We beg them to take pity on us. The sun and moon look at us, and the ground gives us food. You come and see us, and that is why we give you something. We are men like each other; our religion is different from yours.' (Quoted in Hazen-Hammond, page 168)