About Cherokee Nation v. George 1831???

Question

can you tell me a alittle about that case, what is it mainily about, who was involved? please and thank you ^-^

Answer 1

The little I recall is that the Cherokees sued for protection from illegal land seizures.  They claimed they were citizens.  The courts didn't see it that way.  Later, they were forced to move west of the Mississippi on the "Trail of Tears," and resettled in Oklahoma Territory.  Their rich farmland was stolen from them and in return they were placed on oil rich land that no one knew was valuable until later.

Answer 2

This is actually "The Cherokee Nation VS Georgia" . Georgia wanted the Cherokee gone. The federal government wasn't moving fast enough for them, so the made laws to take away the rights of the Cherokee. Chief John Ross in 1829 went to Washington and appealed directly to congress, knowing that it wouldn't do any good to appeal to President Andrew Jackson. People like Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster and Henry Clay supported his efforts. It didn't do any good because Jackson supported Georgia's efforts, so Ross took it to the Supreme Court in 1831 claiming the Cherokee Nation was the same as a foreign nation and not subject to Georgia's law. He lost because the Supreme Court ruled the Cherokee were a denominated domestic dependent nation.

In the final opinion, the court said:

"A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed necessary to their comfortable subsistence."

"The counsel have shown conclusively that they are not a state of the union, and have insisted that individually they are aliens, not owing allegiance to the United States. An aggregate of aliens composing a state must, they say, be a foreign state. Each individual being foreign, the whole must be foreign."

"Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; yet it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile, they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian."

".......the majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States."