Congress held its first hearing about establishing a non-voting delegate seat for the Cherokee Nation on Wednesday. The historic move is the closest the federal government has gotten toward satisfying a promise it made to the Cherokee Nation nearly 200 years ago.
The federal government never fulfilled a provision made in the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, signed by then-president Andrew Jackson, promising the Cherokee Nation a seat in Congress after forcibly moving them off their ancestral land, an exodus known as the Trail of Tears.
