On July 14, 1905, Native Americans, forcibly evicted by the US authorities to the so-called Indian Territory, announced the creation of a new state of Sequoia. They completed all the procedures required by law, but official Washington did not support the project. As a result, this territory became part of the state of Oklahoma. About the history of the expulsion of Indian peoples from their native places.
By the time the white colonizers came to North America, the Indian peoples living there were at different levels of social and technical development: some lived in a tribal system and were engaged in gathering, while others created powerful pre-state associations, mastered agriculture and erected huge structures.
One of the most powerful and warlike peoples were the Cherokee. At first they confronted the British (on their own and together with the French), and then, in alliance with the British, they fought with the Americans. In the 1790s, they won a number of victories over the United States, but after the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, they lost the support of European powers and made peace with the Americans, losing Tennessee and Kentucky to them, but retaining other vast territories in the modern southeastern United States.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the United States acquired Louisiana from France, which formally included the territory of modern Oklahoma - the wild lands west of the Mississippi. The US authorities had the idea to expel there "uncivilized" Indians who refuse to lead a sedentary lifestyle and accept European culture.
Sequoia is the chief of the Cherokee tribe who invented the alphabet.
However, the so-called Five Civilized Tribes - Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Shouts and Seminoles - found themselves in a special position. They were recognized as "sovereign nations" with the broadest rights. Their representatives massively adopted Christianity, were engaged in farming and gave school education to their children. One of the leaders of the Cherokee - Sequoia - even developed an alphabet for his people. The wealthy representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes kept black slaves and gradually turned into prosperous planters.
Road of tears
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But white settlers became more and more, and they began to irritate the neighborhood with the Indians, even if "civilized". The strength to effectively resist the Americans, as at the end of the 18th century, the Indians of the southeast no longer had - there were now too many white neighbors.
In disputes between landlords and white colonialists, the US Supreme Court began to make decisions one after another, guided by the medieval "Doctrine of Discovery", according to which the lands on which the white settlers arrived belonged to the "discoverers", and the territories inhabited by Indians were considered by default "Drawn". American judges argued that Providence would not have led the Anglo-Saxons to the shores of North America if the continent were not supposed to belong to them.
Battle of Little Bighorn.
Already in 1830, the promises that Washington made to the "civilized tribes" were completely forgotten.
President Andrew Jackson cynically declared: "I am delighted to announce to Congress that the government's generous policy, unswervingly pursued for nearly 30 years with regard to Indian resettlement, is coming to a happy conclusion."
On May 28, 1830, the Indian Resettlement Act passed by Congress and signed by the President came into effect. He promised to give the indigenous people, who would agree to exchange the "eastern" land plots for the "western" plots of equal area, as well as financial compensation for the inconvenience.
In practice, everything looked very different. The law became a cover for brutal forced deportation. Indians who wanted to preserve their tribal structure were simply not allowed to live on the fertile and developed lands in the eastern part of the continent.
In the north, attempts to resettle the so-called uncivilized Indians, in particular the Sauks and Foxes, beyond the Mississippi, resulted in wars, as a result of which the legitimate owners of American land were defeated and forced to agree to resettlement.
Cherokee Indians.
As for the "civilized" tribes, the Seminoles showed the most active resistance to the invaders. From 1814 to 1858, they fought three full-scale wars with the US Army. Ultimately, most of the Indians were forced to agree to move to Oklahoma, but several hundred retreated into the impassable swamps of central Florida and fought a guerrilla war there until Washington realized that fighting them was much more expensive than leaving them alone. After the end of World War II, most of the Florida Seminoles established contacts with the federal government.
Although the Cherokee did not begin active hostilities, they refused to move voluntarily. Then in 1835, the US authorities drew up a fictitious agreement with a group of Indians who had no right to speak on behalf of the Cherokee people. In response, the tribe collected 13,000 signatures on a petition condemning the falsification and sent it to Washington. However, the US President still ratified the fake, and sent troops to the Cherokee. The Indians were herded into concentration camps and then forced to retreat to the plains west of the Mississippi.
The shouts attempted to take up arms, but were quickly overwhelmed by the American army and forced to relocate. Choctaw and Chickasaw considered the resistance hopeless and submitted to Washington's will.
During deportation, the Indians were not even allowed to pack their things properly. They covered most of the way on foot and died en masse from cold and disease. So, out of 20 thousand Choctaw during the resettlement, about four thousand died, out of 23 thousand shouts - about three and a half thousand. Of the 22 thousand Cherokee, according to some sources, up to eight thousand people died. The very process of forcible deportation of representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes to the west of the Mississippi was called the Road of Tears in the historical literature.
Initially, the Indians were assigned almost the entire territory of modern Oklahoma (the name itself was proposed in 1866 by representatives of the Choctaw tribe and meant "red people"). But during the Civil War, most of the Indians supported the Confederation (7,860 men became its soldiers and officers), and after the end of the war they were punished for their position: a significant part of the territory was torn away from them. From 1889 to 1895, the authorities held a series of "land races" on the former Indian lands, when the previously assigned Native American territories were captured by the one of the whites who managed to get to them first by horse or cart.
Originally, the boundaries of Indian lands as the "unorganized territory of the United States" were established in 1834. After the very first "land races" in 1890, a separate incorporated organized territory of Oklahoma was officially created.
Failed state
In 1902, the inhabitants of the rest of the Indian Territory, wanting to acquire rights equal to those of the United States, set out to create a new state. The idea was officially supported by a convention of representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes. It was decided to name the new state Sequoia after the creator of the Cherokee writing system.
On July 14, 1905, the creation of the state was officially announced. On August 21 of the same year, a constitutional convention took place, which elected the leadership and developed the Constitution, which was then approved by a referendum on November 7. In addition, the Indians prepared an official plan of government, divided the state into districts and sent a petition to Washington.
However, the federal authorities did not even want to listen to the initiators of the creation of the state of Sequoia. President Theodore Roosevelt said that the Indian Territory can become a full-fledged part of the United States only as part of a unified state of Oklahoma - which, in fact, happened in 1907.
“The Americans believed that if the Indians were made full-fledged masters of at least part of their historical lands, they would eventually want to regain everything,” American political scientist Sergei Sudakov, a corresponding member of the Academy of Military Sciences, said in an interview with RT.
According to him, nominally, the Americans were guided by the principle of free conglomeration when creating the United States, but this principle did not apply to everyone. “There were double standards, the Indians were superfluous people for them. They were given a place on the reservations. American nation genesis did not imply their participation as a separate entity,”the expert noted.
Valery Korovin, director of the international non-profit foundation Center for Geopolitical Expertise, connects the position of the American authorities on the creation of the state of Sequoia with the civilizational features of the West as such.
“The Anglo-Saxons did not consider the Indians as full-fledged people, equal to themselves. Of course, the twentieth century was already in the yard by this time, the Indian wars were over. But this did not prevent segregation from flourishing in the United States and human zoos working, the last of which closed after the war. The very doctrine of the discovery implied that the Americans treated the Indians not as people, but simply as creatures of living nature. Therefore, there could be no question of any right to an independent state,”the expert concluded.
Svyatoslav Knyazev