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TAHLEQUAH, OK — Kim Teehee can trace her ancestors on a scattered tour of the South — in Georgia, up through the Carolinas, and into Tennessee. If a single place can divide a family’s story in two, then for Teehee’s it might be Blythe Ferry, a crossing point for the Tennessee River at the northwest corner of the Cherokees’ ancestral homeland, now Tennessee.
“They moved across the water, basically symbolic of saying goodbye to the homelands forever,” Teehee said.
She recalled from her office in eastern Oklahoma her ancestors’ brutal and often deadly journey, the end point of what became known as the Trail of Tears — ᎠᎩᎵᏱ ᏗᎨᏥᏱᏄᏍᏔᏅᎢ — for thousands of Cherokee people forcibly removed from their home.
Flanked by a traditional Buffalo grass doll and sipping a Diet Coke, Teehee traces the long thread of US federal action that shaped the next chapter of her story: Federal action brought her family to a nearby town that has been marked by poverty and poor health. A federal program to assimilate Native American children took her parents to a boarding school, and another sought to urbanize them with work in Chicago. Federal dollars would fund the preschool she attended and the hospital where her parents built careers.
Cherokee people and their tribal government, Teehee believes, should have always had a seat at the table where these decisions were made: The very treaty that saw her ancestors forced off their lands almost 200 years ago also promised Cherokee people a non-voting delegate seat in the US House. Now, the Cherokee Nation and Teehee — who was appointed to the job by the tribe’s leaders — are mounting an aggressive campaign to see that promise fulfilled.
The Cherokee Nation’s efforts to sit Teehee in the House have…
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