This story was initially printed by The nineteenth, an impartial nonprofit newsroom reporting on the intersection of gender, politics, and coverage. Join their every day publication.
TAHLEQUAH, OK — Kim Teehee can hint her ancestors on a scattered tour of the South — in Georgia, up via the Carolinas, and into Tennessee. If a single place can divide a household’s story in two, then for Teehee’s it is perhaps Blythe Ferry, a crossing level for the Tennessee River on the northwest nook of the Cherokees’ ancestral homeland, now Tennessee.
“They moved throughout the water, principally symbolic of claiming goodbye to the homelands eternally,” Teehee stated.
She recalled from her workplace in japanese Oklahoma her ancestors’ brutal and sometimes lethal journey, the tip level of what turned often known as the Path of Tears — ᎠᎩᎵᏱ ᏗᎨᏥᏱᏄᏍᏔᏅᎢ — for 1000’s of Cherokee folks forcibly faraway from their residence.
Flanked by a standard Buffalo grass doll and sipping a Eating regimen Coke, Teehee traces the lengthy thread of US federal motion that formed the subsequent chapter of her story: Federal motion introduced her household to a close-by city that has been marked by poverty and poor well being. A federal program to assimilate Native American kids took her mother and father to a boarding college, and one other sought to urbanize them with work in Chicago. Federal {dollars} would fund the preschool she attended and the hospital the place her mother and father constructed careers.
Cherokee folks and their tribal authorities, Teehee believes, ought to have all the time had a seat on the desk the place these choices have been made: The very treaty that noticed her ancestors compelled off their lands virtually 200 years in the past additionally promised Cherokee folks a non-voting delegate seat within the US Home. Now, the Cherokee Nation and Teehee — who was appointed to the job by the tribe’s leaders — are mounting an aggressive marketing campaign to see that promise fulfilled.
The Cherokee Nation’s efforts to sit down Teehee within the Home have bipartisan help, however it’s not instantly clear when or how congressional leaders will take up the problem in earnest. If she will get this seat, with spots on key panels and the ability to talk on the Home flooring, Teehee hopes to assist form the subsequent chapter of federal coverage to learn tribal governments and the folks they serve. That features addressing the epidemic of violence in opposition to Native girls, saving the Cherokee language from extinction, and defending funding for well being care and housing.
“As a foundational matter in my life story, it’s necessary to understand that a lot of federal Indian regulation and coverage on this nation has so instantly impacted my household, private story, and my journey,” Teehee stated. “I didn’t see it as a younger woman, however a lot later I might respect all of it.”
The Cherokee Nation is the nation’s most populous tribe, with 450,000 residents. Teehee’s seat in Congress would mark the start of a brand new sort of relationship between the federal authorities and the Cherokee Nation, together with the tribal governments of the 573 different federally acknowledged tribes. That the primary delegate from the Cherokee Nation can be a girl in a men-dominated chamber would additionally ship a public message in regards to the tribe’s values.
“We’re matrilineal folks. It informs loads about how we look after our households and empower all generations of girls to steer,” Taralee Montgomery, a senior coverage adviser for the Cherokee Nation instructed The nineteenth. “The truth that the primary delegate to be seated is a girl — that’s apparent to Cherokee tradition.”
Montgomery, 31, has labored alongside Teehee for six years and described her as an “absolute pressure.” Montgomery had simply unveiled a brand new room designed to accommodate breastfeeding mother and father who work on the Cherokee Nation’s places of work within the tribe’s capital of Tahlequah or go to the constructing for presidency providers, a part of the tribe’s efforts to make its authorities extra family-friendly. She credited Teehee with empowering her to pursue the challenge. “She means a lot to younger folks like me,” Montgomery added.
Montgomery stated that till lately, many Cherokee folks didn’t know in regards to the provision of the 1835 Treaty of New Echota promising a Cherokee delegate. For the reason that marketing campaign to seat Teehee kicked off final fall, curiosity in seeing the treaty fulfilled has been constructing amongst Cherokee folks.
“The factor about Kim Teehee is that she’s going to by no means meet a problem that she gained’t tackle and conquer,” Montgomery stated. “That tells you numerous about her position as a delegate.”
The Durbin Feeling Language Heart, which opened final yr, is housed in what was once an previous on line casino on the southern finish of Tahlequah. The immersive area, used to show the Cherokee language to kids and adults, exudes pleasure, but in addition urgency. In 2019, Cherokee folks declared their language to be below a state of emergency, headed for extinction.
Of about 400,000 Cherokee folks residing in the USA, a survey discovered that simply over 2,000 can communicate Cherokee fluently. Most of these audio system are over the age of 40, and yearly, there are fewer. Simply 50 households are estimated to talk Cherokee at residence.
Teehee doesn’t communicate a lot Cherokee, although her mother and father each grew up talking it virtually solely at residence within the land allotments assigned to their households by the federal authorities close to Stilwell, Oklahoma, about half-hour outdoors Tahlequah. On the grounds of the Salem Baptist Church in Stilwell, rows of headstones mark the graves of Teehee’s relations.
Why Teehee isn’t fluent in Cherokee might be traced again to federal coverage — extra particularly, a program that sought to urbanize Native People with the promise of labor alternatives removed from their reservations. The federal {dollars} that helped fund the Durbin Feeling Language Heart are the start of the hassle to restore the harms from that coverage, and it’s private for Teehee.
Teehee’s mother and father met at Sequoia Excessive College, which on the time was a US Bureau of Indian Training boarding college. They weren’t prohibited from talking Cherokee — a rule at many such faculties — however it wasn’t helpful in speaking with college students who hailed from totally different tribes from throughout the area.
Teehee’s dad finally dropped out to enroll in a federal work relocation program that took him to Chicago, the place Teehee was born and spent the primary decade of her life.
“The thought was to relocate you to seek out new alternatives. Its intent, although, from Congress, was to assimilate you into mainstream society,” Teehee stated. “There’s a saying that has its origins within the Indian boarding college period, which is, ‘Kill the Indian, save the person.’”
Chicago turned one of many largest hubs of relocated Indigenous People in the USA. Teehee grew up understanding she was Cherokee, however the alternative for work in Chicago afforded to her mother and father meant the lack of adolescence in her personal Cherokee group. Via his job, Teehee’s dad was in a position to full his highschool diploma, which helped pave the way in which for a commerce job again residence in Oklahoma, the place the household yearned to be.
Lots of these on the Durbin Feeling Language Heart have comparable household tales: They didn’t develop up talking the language at residence however need to study now; they need their very own kids to develop up fluent.
Kristen Thomas, who leads a program that pairs native Cherokee audio system with hopeful college students, notes that the constructing itself is an immersive expertise within the Cherokee language. Each signal and each ebook contained in the 52,000-square-foot facility — from the label on the fireplace extinguisher to a storybook in regards to the photo voltaic system — is written in Cherokee to serve its preschool via eighth grade language immersion college and its grownup apprentice program. When its day care heart opens later this yr, the infants too will hear solely Cherokee.
The college’s foremost goal is to create new Cherokee audio system, however it’s also a hub to foster delight in Cherokee tradition. Inside the varsity’s health club, there’s a stack of wood sticks with loops on one finish used to play stickball, a sport performed by a number of North American Indigenous tribes that was the precursor to lacrosse. One other area holds an illustration kitchen to protect conventional Cherokee recipes, like ᏒᎩ & ᏧᏪᏥ, a dish made up of untamed onions ready with eggs and animal fats.
The middle was made doable by a mixture of Cherokee Nation funds and federal Covid-19 reduction {dollars}. Earlier this yr, President Joe Biden signed a regulation that funds a federal survey of each Native language use and the funding wants of language revitalization efforts. It shares its namesake with the middle: Durbin Feeling was the Cherokee linguist who helped add the Cherokee syllabary to word-processing know-how.
Thomas stated that federal help for Cherokee language revitalization efforts is essential, provided that language is “the lens via which we view the world.” She described Teehee as an apparent option to signify Cherokee folks in Congress and urged Home lawmakers to take motion.
“There’s that we deserve it, and that we’ve been promised this,” Thomas stated. “However even with out that, that is such an apparent placement and solution to strengthen the partnership with Indian nation.”
Teehee stated the hassle to guard Native American languages can be considered one of her priorities because the seated Cherokee delegate to Congress. The Cherokee Nation believes that federal help to guard the language would assist instantly handle its personal injury to Native American language and tradition.
“I all the time say I’m a product of federal Indian coverage and relocation, getting us to a different state the place acculturation was the objective,” Teehee stated. “However I’m additionally a product of its failure as a result of this system extremely underestimated the attachments that Indians have towards their communities and our households.”
Whereas in school, Teehee joined the Cherokee Nation’s authorities workplace to work as an intern below Wilma Mankiller, the primary lady elected as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Mankiller, who died in 2010, turned Teehee’s longtime mentor. Teehee described Mankiller as an exacting boss who however taught her to be affected person when listening to folks’s struggles and to welcome them with empathy.
In 1985, Mankiller had develop into simply the third chief elected to the position since Cherokee folks regained the ability to elect their very own chiefs within the Seventies. Throughout her tenure, Mankiller reshaped the tribe’s relationship with the federal authorities to guard its sovereignty, and targeted on well being care and ladies’s management.
Mankiller, in a speech at Emory College, instructed a narrative about an encounter between Cherokee folks and a United States treaty negotiation crew. The US cadre was made up of males, prompting the Cherokees to ask, “The place are your girls?”
Teehee had been set on going to medical college, however Mankiller urged her to attend regulation college. Afterward, Teehee felt pulled to a profession advocating for the ability and sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation and its folks. She determined Washington, DC, was the place to do it after listening to one of many tribe’s lobbyists describe quashing what they thought of anti-Indian laws in Congress.
In 2009, after a decade engaged on Native American points in DC, Teehee can be tapped for her highest-profile job to this point because the nation’s first-ever senior coverage adviser for Native American affairs below the administration of President Barack Obama. In that position, she pushed for laws that might strengthen accountability for individuals who commit crimes in opposition to Native American girls.
Greater than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native girls — 84.3 p.c — have skilled violence of their lifetime; greater than half have skilled sexual violence, in keeping with a 2016 federal research. Homicide is the third main explanation for loss of life for Native American girls.
Advocates have lengthy criticized federal and state regulation enforcement businesses for not doing sufficient to answer lacking individual reviews and reviews of violence associated to Native American girls and ladies.
The Nationwide Indigenous Girls’s Useful resource Heart blames the excessive incidence of violence in opposition to Indigenous girls on the erosion of tribal sovereignty and a sophisticated justice system going through victims and their households that has allowed perpetrators to maneuver on with out going through accountability.
“Within the Seventies and ’80s, as tribes are beginning to develop extra economically, and creating extra jobs, and creating resorts and casinos, and motels and golf programs, that’s inviting extra non-Indians on the reservation. Whenever you don’t have prison jurisdiction over that non-Indian, that’s an unlimited hole,” Teehee stated.
“After which while you mix that with the truth that, you realize, most likely about half of Native American girls are married to non-native spouses, you allow an surroundings that’s susceptible for the charges that we now have of home violence in Indian nation.”
A software to fight these astounding charges of violence was included within the 2013 reauthorization of the Violence In opposition to Girls Act. It gave tribal governments energy to prosecute non-Indigenous individuals who commit home violence or relationship violence in opposition to Indigenous girls in Indian nation.
Teehee stated the measure discovered a receptive ear in Congress partially due to her years of relationship-building and training on Native American points with lawmakers and congressional workers.
After a stint on the Democratic Nationwide Committee serving to the occasion navigate its relationship with Native American tribes and advocacy teams, Teehee pivoted to Congress in 1998, turning into a senior adviser and the only staffer for the primary Native American Caucus within the Home.
The caucus labored to coach members on Indian points, “in addition to attempt to kill anti-Indian proposals,” Teehee stated. Typically, positions that weren’t favorable to Native American tribes got here from lack of understanding about how proposals would affect them.
“I felt that that was my job to fill gaps,” Teehee stated. “In the event you don’t have time to get to know a difficulty, you possibly can’t write about it in your boss, I’ll do it. And I don’t want credit score for it. I’ll offer you a letter. I’ll offer you a memo. I’ll arrange conferences for you. I’ll offer you backgrounders.”
When the time got here for negotiations surrounding the Violence In opposition to Girls Act and the provisions coping with tribal jurisdiction in 2012, Teehee stated, the administration had a Congress that was actually knowledgeable and supportive of points impacting Native American folks.
“If we don’t do it now, we’re going to lose that studying curve,” Teehee instructed the administration on the time.
Whereas she’s not a seated delegate in Congress, Teehee has continued advocating on behalf of the Cherokee Nation in Congress and earlier than the White Home. Final yr, Biden signed a reauthorization of the identical regulation that expanded the listing of crimes over which tribal governments have jurisdiction to incorporate sexual violence, intercourse trafficking, and stalking.
It’s ongoing work. Teehee stated that the listing of points impacting tribal governments is lengthy and the listing of champions in Congress is ever-fluctuating. The following battle for tribal governments will probably be to safe funding for his or her most elementary operations. About 90 p.c of all federal funding that flows to tribal governments is discretionary and topic to fixed reauthorization. Teehee has been advocating for that funding to develop into a everlasting expenditure out of attain of politicking or a authorities shutdown.
“That’s training, that’s housing, that’s meals,” Teehee stated.
Set again from a busy industrial road by a lush inexperienced garden within the coronary heart of Tahlequah sits an ornate two-story brick constructing. This construction changed a wood one which burned down in the course of the Civil Battle and was completed in 1869 — 40 years after the compelled relocation of Cherokee folks to this land — and have become the Capitol of the Cherokee Nation. Within the 1900s, when Oklahoma turned a state and the federal authorities sought to dissolve the tribal governments, the Cherokee legislative physique misplaced its energy and the constructing turned the property of the native county authorities. Cherokee folks wouldn’t elect their very own chief for an additional 70 years.
One query that comes up usually in discussions about seating a Cherokee Nation delegate in Congress is why it took practically 200 years for the tribal authorities to call somebody to the put up and transfer to formally seat them in Washington.
“After we get to our new homeland, we’re merely making an attempt to outlive and rebuild an amazing society,” stated Chuck Hoskin, the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. Just like the previous Capitol, now the Cherokee historical past museum, Cherokee folks would undergo durations of destruction and disempowerment for the subsequent 150 years.
Within the Seventies, when Cherokee folks elected their first principal chief and the federal authorities gave the tribe extra monetary autonomy, Hoskin stated a interval of rebuilding started that led to the second the tribe finds itself in now — the place it has the political connections and sources to demand its seat in Congress.
Hoskin, who was reelected to the job this yr, oversees the tribe’s authorities.
These efforts appeared on the point of success on the finish of final yr, following a months-long public marketing campaign to strain the USA to meet its treaty obligation, together with intense lobbying of congressional leaders and dozens of interviews with the press. The marketing campaign gained momentum from a congressional listening to in November, the place lawmakers of each events acknowledged the treaty and expressed help for exploring totally different avenues to seat Teehee. Help rose to the very best ranks when then-Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi dedicated to discovering a “path” to welcome a Cherokee Nation delegate into the Home.
Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who now chairs the panel dealing with this situation, the Guidelines Committee, referred to as Teehee “an excellent good friend” in the course of the listening to. Cole’s workplace didn’t reply to a request for remark about when his committee could take up the problem once more.
An aide to Rep. Jim McGovern, the highest-ranking Democrat on the panel, who spearheaded the November listening to, stated McGovern continues to imagine {that a} Cherokee Nation delegate must be seated within the Home and reaffirmed the lawmaker’s dedication to advocating for the problem.
The aide stated McGovern was pissed off that the problem didn’t advance within the 117th Congress.
Into December, Teehee and the Cherokee Nation’s leaders held onto hope that Democratic leaders would act on the problem earlier than their time within the majority ran out. They didn’t.
The Home’s new GOP majority meant the Cherokee Nation’s delegate marketing campaign needed to begin over within the work of teaching lawmakers. In addition they wanted to handle excellent issues, which boil right down to 4 essential questions.
The primary and most consequential is whether or not seating the Cherokee delegate might be executed with a easy Home decision, or if the method would require approval from the Senate and the president — a lengthier and extra politically concerned course of.
Second, some lawmakers have questioned whether or not Congress ought to have a delegate who’s appointed. The Home’s delegates representing US territories are elected, however Teehee was appointed by the Cherokee Nation’s tribal authorities. (The Cherokee Nation says it’s inside its sovereign rights to resolve the way it picks its personal consultant.)
The third is whether or not sitting Teehee would give double illustration in Congress to Cherokee folks, who’re already technically represented by whoever their native consultant is.
Lastly, Congress would additionally have to resolve methods to deal with the claims made by different Cherokee bands to the delegate seat. On the aspect of Tahlequah’s foremost artery, a big advert on a brilliant digital billboard exhibits a Cherokee lady alongside a plea to Congress to seat a Cherokee delegate. However the lady isn’t Kim Teehee — it’s Tori Holland of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma, which has its personal treaty declare to a delegate seat in Congress. There could also be one other.
All are questions that Cherokee Nation legal professionals and Congress’s analysis arm have studied.
“It’s an unlimited endeavor to coach once more,” Teehee stated. “I really feel like I’m again at being that staffer that used to analysis, write memos, write letters, write colloquies, work out methods to message to D’s and to R’s. You understand, I’m again in that area once more. ”
Simply outdoors the garden of the Cherokee Historical past Museum in a busy a part of Tahlequah is a sitting space and artwork set up lush with lavender and decorative grass. Tall murals function the work of Traci Rabbit, a Cherokee artist who says her work tries to seize the essence of the Native American lady: “From the proud elevate of her chin to the strands of hair caught within the wind, she seems to climate all storms.”
It’s sunny, the intense colours of the murals are popping, and the ladies in them appear to drift above the bottom. The mural behind the place Teehee sits for our interview is named “Cherokee Traditions” and exhibits a girl sporting a standard feather cape; solely a handful of Cherokee artists who could make them are left.
If her bid to be seated because the delegate from the Cherokee Nation to Congress involves fruition, Teehee stated, the second will probably be bittersweet: The associated fee was the house, lives, and tears of her ancestors. Tons of of 1000’s of Cherokees by no means noticed the promise fulfilled.
“I really feel it now simply speaking about it — you realize, how proud I’m to signify my nation. However then I can’t assist however take into consideration what we misplaced within the course of, too,” Teehee stated.
If she will get to take the oath of workplace, Teehee will place her hand on her personal Bible, written within the Cherokee language. Her first alternative would have been considered one of her grandfather’s previous Cherokee Bibles, however so lots of the household’s paperwork and books burned to ash in a 2016 home fireplace — together with slightly inexperienced Cherokee hymn ebook cherished by her dad. The sound of Cherokee hymns reminds Teehee of touring to her mother and father’ residence for household funerals.
Her mother and father are actually of their late 70s and affected by severe diseases. Teehee stated they proceed to be a key supply of motivation for her work.
“I consider how proud I’d be for my mother and father to have the ability to be there with me and to be alive to see it as Cherokee audio system. I simply hope it does occur of their lifetime.”
Mel Leonor Barclay is a political reporter for The nineteenth. She has a decade of expertise masking authorities and elections, from tiny South Florida localities to Congress. Most lately, Mel was a Virginia politics reporter on the Richmond Occasions-Dispatch, and beforehand coated federal coverage at Politico. Mel is an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and a local Spanish speaker.
