The Cherokee want a representative in Congress, taking up a 200-year-old promise
cnn.com
cnn.com
This is going to prevent the representative from being seated. This is why tribes opposed the Indian Citizen Act of 1924 [1] in the first place; they were afraid that giving all Indians citizenship would fundamentally change the nature of their relationship with the US government.
The Cherokee can't have it both ways. They can't have American citizenship—and, thus, representation in Congress in Oklahoma or elsewhere—and an extra delegate of their own. Such exists in New Zealand, but that's explicitly provided for by law, and it's controversial; the New Zealand First Party,[2] which a few years ago held all seven Maori seats,[3] has a policy of wanting to abolish said seats, and no longer runs candidates for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act
This acts to ensure indigenous people always have a voice in parliament, and is seen as fulfillment of the treaty obligations on which this country is founded. This -combined with "mixed member proportional" style voting largely prevents any attempts at racist gerrymandering.
In practice, while the number of seats may not be large, MMP governments frequently are made from coalitions between parties, meaning that both our two largest parties are interested in contesting either the seats themselves or securing an alliance with whichever smaller party might win them, meaning the presence of these seats does translate into actual policy concessions to our indigenous people.
I should note here that at the time of its historical origin in 1867, the seperate Māori roll was compulsory for Māori, and was intended as a way to disenfranchise Māori by proportionally reducing their influence.
If we were to say the intent was to "give Māori voting rights", I think it could be far more fairly characterized as "give Māori some voting rights but systematically ensure that this counts for substantially less than their non-Māori peers".
Winston Peters, the leader of the New Zealand First Party is known to say and do anything to ruffle feathers and make the days front page. If you kept researching, you'd see he back pedaled hard on his Māori seat comments and said it should be voted on by a referendum. Then, in the most recent election he "compromised" even further and dropped the idea completely because he knew labour (coalition partner) wouldn't tolerate that shit.
The Cherokee nation initially inhabited parts of what you now call Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Alabama. If they are in Oklahoma now is due to ethnic cleansing.
The Cherokee have a more legitimate claim to representation than you do. They have been here for thousands of years, you just got here.
If you want to appeal to fairness there are a lot of things that are wrong about your narrative.
The US has made treaties with many Native American nations. "American law is that international accords become part of the body of U.S. federal law." (same Wikipedia page).
It has also broken some of these treaties. Eg, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_Laramie_(1868) :
> The government eventually broke the terms of the treaty following the Black Hills Gold Rush and an expedition into the area by George Armstrong Custer in 1874, and failed to prevent white settlers from moving onto tribal lands. ... The 1868 treaty would be modified three times by the US Congress between 1876 and 1889, each time taking more land originally granted, including unilaterally seizing the Black Hills in 1877.
Thus, if treaties are supposed to be legally binding, and it is broken in order to take more land, then that land is illegally occupied, yes?
Indeed,
> On June 30, 1980, the US Supreme Court ruled that the government had illegally taken land in the Black Hills granted by the 1868 treaty, by unlawfully abrogating article two of the agreement during negotiations in 1876, while failing to achieve the signatures of two-thirds the adult male population required to do so.
Thus, it's also possible to take more than a century for the courts to recognize that the land was taken illegally.
I feel like "universal moral concept" is a different concept. Treaties are also not universal moral concepts either, are they? Yet you see people refer to treaties as being legally binding.
I am guessing that this wasn't conscious and intentional. I'm not suggesting some conspiracy theory to purposely disenfranchise them. But the sorts of issues Indigenous peoples face are not faced by most other Americans and they at least need a voice to begin educating the powers that be about ways in which their reality is overlooked and how this negatively impacts them.
Also, it occurs to me that representation is based on residency. A homeless guy in my city isn't necessarily a resident of exactly one district.
Here, every national has a unique citizen card, but in the US it's stranger, using driver's license since there's no citizen ID...
They aren't designed to be used like ID. They are designed to actively undermine attempts to use them as ID.
The US is a long way off from a national ID.
Not saying that’s explicitly what’s happening here but there’s quite a precedent for such a conspiracy.
At the same time (as reflected in the comments below), people unfairly deride any sort of voter identification requirement as a conscious attempt at disenfranchisement, when in reality U.S. states have some of the laxest voter identification requirements in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_Identification_laws. I voted recently in Maryland, and I was actually quite shocked and a little perturbed how little verification was performed at the polling site. (I didn't have to show ID, just wrote down my address. Anyone could've pretended to be me.)
I'm also quite clear that most of it was not some intentional effort to make my life unnecessarily harder. I certainly ran into genuine prejudice and discrimination, but most problems I wrestled with incidentally happened to be more challenging because my life didn't neatly fit standard assumptions.
I've generally found it helpful in life to not assume malice where ignorance/obliviousness are sufficient explanations.
And if two people claimed to be you, it would raise red flags. Although it would not be possible to annul the earlier vote, the incident would be investigated, and in all likely hood be a widely reported news item.
In my recent memory, reported voter fraud has been in maybe a few broad categories:
Communications intended to dissuade people from voting (a notice claiming the election was moved to another day)
An ineligible person being allowed to register, but later determined ineligible and charged with a crime (a felon voting in a state where that's not permitted)
Someone voting under the name of a dead person, usually absentee, usually a relative of the deceased.
An ID requirement may solve the last one, if the fraud is happening in person, but not if absentee. And it might solve the hypothetical case where people are voting in other people's names. However, it causes real problems for people who have trouble getting a government ID. It might be reasonable to do it in concert with a program to ensure everyone can get an ID issued, but these initiatives have not often been done together. Imagine how hard it would be to get ID if you didn't have it already: if you need to go to a government office, I hope the bus goes there, because you can't drive without ID; if you don't have ID, it may be hard to get an official birth certificate, since a notary may be reluctant to certify they verified your identity; if you need to go to the records office in person, travel without ID is much more difficult; some people may not have had a certified birth, or may not know where thseir certified birth happened, or their birth name. Certainly, these conditions would bring challenges to many aspects of someone's life, but imparing their constitutional right to vote seems a step too far.
I learned this from actual Natives bitching about the problem. Seems like a perfectly fine source of information to me.
I'd assume the exact opposite. We know for a fact that e.g. lawmakers have requested IDs listing classified by frequency of ownership / use, so they would allow and reject IDs based on which group used them most.
This sort of strategy is perfectly in line with what Atwater explained in his infamous '81 interview: abstracted impact and plausible deniability (as long as the emails where you explain why you're doing this don't get leaked, and even then it might go through regardless).
Odds are the Cherokee would appoint a de facto Republican. They're largely conservative and entrepreneurial Oklahomans. The Cherokee Nation runs a bunch of gambling, energy, and defense contracting businesses.
It's beyond amusing to me that Elizabeth Warren tried to claim in to the Cherokee; that tribe had almost no inclination to overlook her stretching.
In the survey at the heart of the paper, "a majority of American Indians voted Republican in the presidential and U.S. House elections." American Indians in Oklahoma are more likely to identify as Democrat than their white counterparts, but a majority still vote Republican. They're social conservatives, but economic interventionists.
Native Americans have had long experience with "help" from Washington, especially on social integration. They understand it isn't all roses.
If the GOP could get a half believable message out there that they're actually, really and honestly, a conservative patriotic free market party for all races and religions, I think they could completely dominate US elections for decades.
But, much like the Democrats, they just can't help being really bad at seeming decent and competent.
Contingent on their collectively desire for such an arrangement of course as agency is important and well -learning from history of nations arising from arbitrary divisions causing problems.
'Wiping the slate clean' is a noble path to peace when both sides have done something wrong; it is a far less noble idea when the injustice was severely one-sided, instead it can actually make the injustice worse.
Suppose someone had -unprovoked- attacked you violently and and taken your home and possessions, and then moved his family into what used to be your home. Then suppose his family, still living in that house and intending to continue doing so, suddenly proposed 'wiping the slate clean'. Would you be right in suspecting their proposal of 'wiping the slate clean' to be in this case completely self-serving?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee
It also begs the question: What are the Romans and the Arabs going to give my country in return for having conquered us 2000 and 1000 years ago, respectively.
White colonists have had the upper hand for a few centuries now. It's undeniable that some indigenous groups are still actively suffering from the colonial occupation in the USA. Any and all attempts to help level the playing field are laudable.
If you feel like you are currently underserved by your state as a result of the Roman / Arabic occupation of your state then I hope you too are seeking to redress the balance.
Chereokee were oppressing the other tribes before the arrival of the Europeans and then fighting along the Europeans in order to dominate other tribes.
(Despite this, they are of course taxed the same as everyone else, creating a weird modern-day case of “taxation without representation”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representa...)
A couple other interesting things related:
1) One East Coast tribe was not defeated militarily. It's lands were gradually nibbled away with lawyering (zoning changes) over a period of decades.
2) During the Western Indian Wars, an equal number of soldiers and warriors died on both sides, about 10,000 each.
It should be noted that Virginia's portion was given back -- retrocession -- in 1847. This is why one option that comes up for providing voting rights is to give the non-federal government portions of DC back to Maryland. This would keep the Federal District separate from any state; but, residents of what is currently DC would have voting representation.
What was Virgina's contribution is Arlington County, VA.