- History & Culture
- Explainer
In 1835, the Cherokee were promised a seat in Congress. They're still waiting.
Tribal leaders have renewed calls for a place in the U.S. House of Representatives, a unique provision of the landmark Treaty of New Echota. Here's how it came to be.
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.
Now, the Cherokee Nation is calling on the U.S. government to make good on that promise by seating the nation’s first-ever Cherokee delegate: Kim Teehee, the tribe’s director of government relations and a former Native policy advisor for President
