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I am speaking of Cherokee Indians, because I have Indian in me from down the line. Cherokee Indians colonized to the United States. They are residents of the United States in the southeast region, such places as Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, but most of them were forced to move to Oklahoma in the 1800s. Cherokee Indians engaged the discriminatory policies so that the African Natives could not receive the tribal benefits and so that they wouldn’t have the right to vote in the tribal elections.
Cherokee Indians enslaved prisoners of war as commodities to be traded for other things they needed. As a result of all of this, warfare escalated and enslavement was viewed very differently and slaves became free labor. After this happened the Cherokee started engaging in African slaves and had them working in the fields. George Washington convinced the Cherokee to grow cotton and flax to help with the economic problems. George Washington had his agents to send out the material and items needed to grow the cotton and flax.
There was two ways that the Cherokee enforced the slave code. Those two ways were, “laws offered incentives to the prosecutor to seek out offenders and bring them to justice by providing that one-half the fines collected accrued to the official, and corporal punishment administered by patrollers of the settlement” (Unknown, 2003). Indian women who cohabited with a slave suffered fourteen fewer stripes than a male Indian did if he had done the same thing.
The treaty in 1866was the cause of the abolishment of the slavery in the Indian territories and the adoption of slaves. The Indian Reorganization Act of June 18, 1934 gave native Indians certain rights, which include the reversal of the Dawes Act’s privatization of the common holdings of the American Indians and a return to local self-government on a tribal basis. This act also gave the native Indians the right to manage their own land and this included provisions that were intended to create a sound economic foundation for the inhabitants of Indian reservations.
This act would not allow the Cherokee to adopt a constitution, but if the tribe decided to do it, then the constitution had to, first, allow the tribal council to employ legal cause, then prohibit the tribal council from engaging any land transitions without majority approval of the tribe, and last they had to authorize the tribal council to negotiate with the Federal, State, and local governments, but then some of those restrictions were by eliminated by the Native American Technical Correction Act of 2003. The Cherokee system was based more on responsibility for wrongful actions than on the notion of “justice” in the western sense of the word. Rather than justice, the Cherokee system was ideal for keeping balance and harmony in spiritual and social worlds. ” (Ken Martin, 1997) The Cherokee got a prayer song from a black rattlesnake, that told a man of the Cherokee tribe that if he sang the song they would not bite him, but if by chance he should get bit that he should have the song sang over him and he will recover, so the Cherokee people kept this song.
The Cherokee believed in being honest and not doing wrong, because it would create imbalance and if that happened then they would have to pay the cost to balance things back out. “The creation of imbalance was tied to the Cherokee religion. It was believed that the murdered “soul” or ghost would be forced to wander the earth, unable to go to the next world. This created the imbalance.
The acceptance of responsibility and the death of the killer or one of his clansmen restored balance by freeing the innocent ghost, allowing him to go to the next world. That is why it did not matter who paid the cost for the depict of the wrongful killing. Any death from the responsible clan would suffice to free the innocent man’s ghost from this world. An enemy scalp might suffice as well. ” (Ken Martin, 1997) I culturally identify more with the American group than I do with the Cherokee Indian.