Half the Land in Oklahoma Could Be Returned to Native Americans. It Should Be.
A Supreme Court case about jurisdiction in an obscure murder has huge implications for tribes
By Rebecca Nagle
On the morning of June 22, 1839, the Cherokee leader John Ridge was pulled from his bed, dragged into his front yard and stabbed 84 times while his family watched. He was assassinated for signing the Cherokee Nation’s removal treaty, a document that — in exchange for the tribe’s homelands — promised uninterrupted sovereignty over a third of the land in present-day Oklahoma. That promise was not kept.
Sixty-seven years later, federal agents questioned John’s grandson, William D. Polson. They needed to add him to a list of every Cherokee living in Indian Territory to start the process of land allotments. Through allotment, all land belonging to the Cherokee Nation — the land John had signed his life for — would be split up between individual citizens and then opened up for white settlement. And by this grand act of bureaucratic theft, Oklahoma became a state.
Today, on the same plot of earth where my great-great-great grandfather John Ridge still lies, is a small cemetery holding five other generations of my family. When I am buried, I will be the seventh. While the…
