The Cherokee Nation is a role model of self-sufficiency among Native American tribes. The Cherokee, recognized as a sovereign nation by the United States government, number about 175,000 full- and mixed-blood individuals, with the majority located in northeastern Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Cherokee successfully administer their own affairs. Programs such as Head Start, Job Corps, public housing, and substance abuse clinics have been supervised by the Cherokee Nation since the 1970s. In Cherokee-run schools, the basic curriculum is supplemented by instruction in tribal history, language, and culture. The Cherokee are attempting to obliterate the devastating effects of decades of federal government Indian education policy, which emphasized the assimilation of Native Americans into the dominant white culture.
A watershed event in the federal government's involvement in Cherokee affairs was the infamous Trail of Tears. The Cherokee were one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. Although white Americans generally admired their skills in adopting European customs, white settlers, avaricious for the farmland that the Civilized Tribes occupied, soon demanded their relocation. The federal government acquiesced and, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson, signed the Indian Removal Act, which required that the Civilized Tribes and other Indian nations located east of the Mississippi river be relocated from their ancestral lands. A minority faction in the Cherokee tribe signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 agreeing to the voluntary emigration of the entire Cherokee Nation.
A large, dissident faction of Cherokees resisted the proposed emigration. They declared their independence from the United States because they had adopted their own constitution in 1827. In the words of one Cherokee spokesman, "Stand on your own two feet and insist that you are a nation and that your land is your territory" (McLoughlin, 1993, p. xiii). ...