Will Congress finally fulfill a 200-year-old promise to the Cherokee people?
Kimberly Teehee could become the Cherokee Nation’s first delegate to Congress – if Washington lets her
The 1835 Treaty of New Echota precipitated tens of thousands of Cherokee joining the infamous Trail of Tears – giving up their ancestral homes in the south-east, to trek to what is now Oklahoma.
In a minor concession to the Cherokee people, buried within the treaty was a promise that the nation could appoint a delegate to the House of Representatives, to have at least some sort of say in the government that had forced them for their land.