WASHINGTON — A House committee on Wednesday weighed a proposal to seat a delegate from the Cherokee Nation in Congress, holding a historic hearing that grappled with how to uphold a promise made in a nearly 200-year-old treaty that has yet to be fulfilled.
The hearing, held by the House Rules Committee, was part of a push to allow Kim Teehee, a veteran policy aide and a longtime Cherokee Nation official, to be seated in the coming months as a nonvoting delegate in the House, which would add the first delegate from a tribal nation ever to serve there.
The effort has prompted members of Congress to publicly confront some of the darkest moments in American history and the string of broken promises to Indigenous people across the nation.
If it granted the position to Teehee, 54, the House would fulfill a once-overlooked stipulation in the Treaty of New Echota, which forced the nation to relinquish its ancestral lands in the South. The treaty led the U.S. government to force 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation on the Trail of Tears, a deadly trek to land in what is now Oklahoma. A quarter of those forced to leave — about 4,000 — died before they arrived, as a result of harsh conditions, starvation and disease.
But the treaty, ratified by just a single vote in the Senate and signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836, also declared that the Cherokee Nation would be “entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”
Congress has never done so.
Teehee, whose ancestors survived that treacherous march, was on hand in the committee room Wednesday to listen to a series of questions about the complexity of establishing another delegate position.
“It can be pretty overwhelming to think about, when I think about what was what was bargained for and what was lost as a result of that particular treaty right,” Teehee said in an interview before the hearing. “I think about my family’s history — the poverty, the loss of life, all the struggles that occurred as a result of that forced removal.”
“The final outcome being the seating of the actual delegate in the House would give some small measure of justice for those, including my own ancestors, who lost their lives during that forced march,” she added.
Delayed by the pandemic and mindful that a new Congress in January may force them to restart the process, tribal leaders have accelerated their campaign to have a vote on the House floor to approve her seat. Indigenous people across the United States have emerged as an increasingly powerful voting bloc with notable influence, with representatives in the highest levels of the federal government, and lawmakers on Wednesday were receptive to taking up legislation in the coming weeks.