Doing the Right Thing

As I wrote last week, Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday…and precisely because it is rooted in a notion of peaceful coexistence between settlers and natives in this place that, if not quite historical, still means that—even at the very beginning of European settlement in North America—at least some of the settlers had in their hearts the notion of living side by side with the indigenes and together forging a new destiny in what was for some a new place and others, a very old one.

Needless to say, that’s not what happened. Slowly but surely, it became clear that there was not going to be any real partnership with the native peoples of North America. Of this tragic part of our American reality, there are a million examples. But none is as horrific as the forced removal of Indians from lands in Georgia, Florida, and other southeastern states they had tilled and occupied since time immemorial so that white people could settle on that land in those places and make believe they owned the property their own government had basically stolen from its actual owners. It is, to say the least, a depressing, shameful part of our past.

Some of my readers may remember my story, published a few years ago as part of our lead-up to the High Holidays, called “To Speak the Truth.” (That story later became the title story in my collection of short stories called To Speak the Truth: Stories 2011-2021. To buy the book, click here.) It concerned a rabbi, Aaron Klass, who, on one Shabbat afternoon read the letter written by Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren in response to the administration’s decision forcibly to remove the native peoples of the Southeastern States, most of whom lived in Georgia, from their homes and their lands and to march them on foot to what is now the State of Oklahoma. The numbers were staggering: upwards of 16,000 people from a number of different tribes were uprooted from something like 25 million acres of property, then subsequent forced to march carrying their possessions in their arms across over 1000 miles of mostly hostile terrain to their new “home.” Most were barefoot. Thousands died along the way of malnutrition, exposure to the cold, and disease. Rabbi Klass, seeing the disaster about to befall the native peoples of the Southeast, decides to act and publicly to confront the general sent to organize the expulsion. He does that successfully, then ends up in jail for his efforts and is subsequently put on trial. That trial is the centerpiece of my story and I hope you all enjoyed or will enjoy reading about it.

At the center of the trial, however, is the question of a single treaty, the Treaty of New Echota, signed in New Echota, Georgia, on December 19, 1835, by officials of the federal government and a small group of Cherokees who claimed to represent their entire tribe, which they clearly did not. The treaty was not signed by the Cherokees’ chief, John Ross. It was not approved by the Cherokee National Council. But for the Van Buren administration an Indian was an Indian and the fact that it was signed by a group of actual Cherokees was more than good enough. Chief Ross and the Cherokee National Council implored the Senate not to ratify the treaty, since it had not been negotiated with the legal representatives of the tribe. No one cared and the treaty was ratified in the Senate in March of 1835 by a majority of one single vote. The Cherokees produced a petition signed by more than 16,000, nearly as many Cherokee as lived in the State of Georgia, but Congress was not impressed. And because no one cared about anything except making it “feel” legal to expel these poor people from their land, the forced expulsion of the Cherokees westward along what came to be known as the Trail of Tears began almost immediately. More than 4000 people died on the trail. To say this was not our nation’s finest hour is really to say the very least.

To readers who want to know more about this whole horrific story, I can recommend three books I read as I prepared to write my story: The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green; The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle; and The Trail of Tears: The Story of the American Indian Removal 1813–1855 by Gloria Jahoda.

For Jewish Americans, this nightmarish story will be resonant in almost too many different ways to count. People dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Property owned for generations nationalized and seized without being purchased even fraudulently. The rule of law applied only to other people and not to oppressed people the most in need of its protection. Internment in camps thousands of miles away from home with the openly expressed expectation that most of the people sent there would not survive. And, of course, the death marches themselves. I personally knew and know people who were sent on the infamous death marches from Auschwitz west as the Red Army approached the camp in 1945. The terrible irony—if that is the right word—of people who somehow survived in Auschwitz dying on a journey away from the camp just weeks before the war would end is unbearable. And yet the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that as many as 15,000 prisoners died on those marches. So for me to read about the Trail of Tears and not be fully identified with the misery, the degradation, and the humiliation of the Cherokees would not be possible. Nor should it be for any decent person at all, Jewish or not.

And now the Treaty of New Echota is back in the news. Who ever heard of it? Who has read it through in the last 180 years? The Cherokees themselves, that’s who! And buried deep in its impenetrable legalese prose (click here to read if you’re curious what I mean) is the detail that that Cherokees, supposing any survived, were henceforth to be entitled “to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for same.”  And when exactly did Congress make provision for the fulfillment of that clause of the treaty? Never is when! Assuming correctly that no one would care (or at least that no one who voted in national elections would care), they simply ignored their own freely-undertaken obligation. (Native Indians were not even considered American citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. And even then it was left to individual states to grant Indian citizens the right to vote. Native Americans could only vote in all fifty states as of 1962, when Utah became the last state in the union to enfranchise them.)

And now the Cherokee are back in the news. A major effort has been undertaken to grant Kim Teehee, a Cherokee Nation official, a non-voting seat in the House of Representatives. (The “non-voting” part also rankles. But at least native Americans are represented by the congresspeople and senators who represent the states in which they live.) Lots of people are in favor. But there are also those opposed, mostly on the grounds that seating a Cherokee representative would open the door to other tribes asking for similar treatment because the federal government signed similar treaties with their ancestors. (The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek that the federal government signed with the Choctaw Nation in 1830 would be a good example of a similar treaty featuring a similar promise of representation in the halls of government. And there are others too.)

Refusing to seat Ms. Teehee would be a truly grotesque repudiation of the most basic American values. Our government, eager to exile the Cherokees and trying to dress up their barbarism as “normal” treaty-making, granted the Cherokee the right to send a representative to Congress. We are almost 200 years too late to debate if that was a good idea or not. Nor should it matter if the government made other, similar commitments to other tribes or native nations. At the end of the day, we are either a nation that lives under the law or we are merely acting the part without truly meaning it. In the theater, no one expects the actor playing Hamlet really to think that he’s a Danish prince. But in the real world, we Americans are not supposed to be playing the role of honorable people on the global stage, but actually to be honorable. And just. We’re coming up on two centuries too late to be prompt. But we can still do the right thing.