In Chapter 1 of The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty author Jill Norgren traces the history of the Cherokee Nation from prehistory to mid-19th century America.  From pre-history through the 16th century the Cherokee people had flourished, diversified and spread across what is now the Southeastern United States including the States of Georgia and Tennessee.  By the time Europeans reached the shores of the North American continent the Cherokee and millions of other indigenous peoples had formed complex societies all across North America, just like the advanced chiefdoms of the Southeast, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaws and many others.  This was a transformative event for the Cherokee people.  A huge portion of the Cherokee population died almost immediately from disease spread by the Europeans, and two centuries of inward expansion by the settlers ravaged the land, resources, and extensive community networks across the vast geographical region the Tribe inhabited. 

From first contact around the year 1514 into the mid-18th century the Cherokee people transformed from a hunter-gatherer society to a pre-industrial society that mirrored in many ways the English colonist that had so heavily impacted their lives.  Later in the chapter Norgren observes that “Farming and animal husbandry replaced fur trading as the most important economic activities.  A mixed-blood elite emerged that profited from owing slaves and developed commercial ventures such as mills, trading stores, taverns, ferry services, and turnpikes.”  Political leadership of the Cherokee people even became a hybrid of the mixed-blood elites and traditional tribal chieftains (Norgren 2004:33).

In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act.  Between 1832 and 1845 most eastern tribes including the Cherokee “negotiated” their own relocation west of the Mississippi in what is now the Midwestern United States, including Oklahoma where the 1915 sculpture The End of the Trail stands at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City in memorial to the 15,000 Cherokee that died of exposure and starvation along the way (Pevar 2002:7-8).  For the Cherokee that stayed behind in Georgia, a time of reckoning was at hand.  Abandoning traditions and donning European clothes and customs, these mixed-blood Cherokee people integrated with the early American pioneers and settlers in an effort to save their lives, their property and the people they loved.

One extraordinary tale of such Cherokees is the story of brothers Samuel H. and Joel S. Mayes.  The Mayes brothers lived in Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia from the 1840’s until the late 1920’s.  Both brothers grew up in Texas and eventually joined the Confederate army before becoming Chiefs of the Cherokee when their political lives began in the 1870’s.  By the time Samuel Mayes was in a position to act against government policies of the late 19th century that included stripping the Cherokee Nation of land and allotting small plots to individual Indians under the Dawes Commission recommendations “the duties of (the) office became rather perfunctory (and) he was being relieved of his executive powers by the officers of the government.” (Meserve 1973:62-65) Samuel Mayes died in Pryor, Oklahoma in 1927. (Meserve 1973:66)

The Indigenous peoples of America saw their entire world transformed in the 18th-19th centuries. And as the famed author, historian and activist Standing Rock Sioux Vine Deloria Jr. observed, “the overarching question for Native peoples in the twenty-first century is:  will we surive?” (Echo-Hawk 2010:15) As the mixed-blood Cherokee that persevered through the Trail of Tears and decades more of harsh treatment at the hands of early American settlers have shown, people are extraordinarily resilient.  While there has been marked improvement since the 1960’s in government to government relationships between Tribes and the U.S. Federal Government, there is a need for Indigenous people all over the world to homogenize laws that impact their sovereign and immutable status as First Nations.  Author and attorney Pawnee Walter Echo-Hawk argues in his writings that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a good start in undoing the many years of transformative work by the U.S. Congress and Executive Branch “to relegate (Tribes) to purely domestic law.” (Echo-Hawk 2010:27) And new paradigms of justice are being implemented by indigenous peoples that allow for more healing and a more broadly defined sovereignty that can help undo some of the past transformations that have impacted these cultures since contact.  The Navajo have revitalized what Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Robert Yazzie refers to as the “horizontal” justice system practiced by his ancestors since the beginning of time.  The system involves a type of court where all affected members have equal say in determining causes as well as remedies, and so works “circular” manner among the Tribal community as both a method of resolving legal disputes and a method of healing the wounds caused by these disputes. (Yazzie 1994:179-180)

From the perspectives of Norgren in her detailed early history of the Southeastern Cherokee, to the fiery and authoritative demands of the intellectual Pawnee Robert Echo-Hawk, and among the revival of a traditional justice system for the Navajo Nation so powerfully illuminated by Navajo Robert Yazzie, First Nation peoples and their allies all over the United States are coming together to take back Native lands, rights, traditions, and culture.  They are acting in coordination to change the laws and policies at the Federal level to carve out the definitions of modern sovereignty, having great success in gaming, private business, and land reacquisition (Trudell 2:00-2:11).  They are carefully navigating a hostile and antiquated colonial-era legal system like their mixed-blood ancestors were forced to do during assimilation.  And by carefully examining and wielding their history and traditional lifeways in a new push to redefine sovereignty for indigenous people in America, they are even reaching out to indigenous peoples and setting a model for a new era in international law for the rest of the world.

References

Echo-Hawk, Walter R. In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. Golden, Colorado. Fulcrum Publishers. 2010.

Meserve, John Bartlett. "Chronicles of Oklahoma: The Mayes." Chronicles of Oklahoma. Oklahoma State University. n.d.

Norgren, Jill. The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2004.

Pevar, Stephen L. The Rights of Indians and Tribes: The Authoritative ACLU Guide to Indian and Tribal Rights. New York, New York. 2004.

Trudell, Richard "Indian Culture and Tribal Sovereignty." C-span.org. American Indian Resource Institute.

Yazzie, Robert “Life Comes from It.” Navajo Justice Concepts, Vol. 24. New Mexico. 1994.