The Cherokee nation is often at the political, legal, and symbolic center of the history of U.S.-Indigenous relations. This is not about any nation being better, more important, or politically active than any other, but rather about the manner in which, especially in the nineteenth century, one can tell a lot of the tale of the complicated and fraught relationship of the United States with Indigenous peoples through the Cherokee story. One need only take note of the early nineteenth-century Supreme Court cases—in particular Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), written by Chief Justice John Marshall—that shaped significant elements of the legal framework of U.S.-Indigenous relations. These decisions came about in the midst of the genocidal removal policy under President Andrew Jackson that would lead to the Trail of Tears forced march that cost thousands of Indigenous lives, including at least four thousand Cherokee citizens. Then, decades later, along with the United States, the issue of slavery and political power rent asunder the Cherokee nation between their National and Southern parties. As Reed makes clear, the lesson here is that accommodation to U.S. practices and Euro-American norms by being a “Civilized Tribe” did not make the Cherokee an exception to rule of oppressive U.S. Indian policy. If there was any doubt, this was evident not too long after the passage of the IAA. As Reed states: “The net effect of the IAA was to usher in a legislative era that over time sought to erode and disregard the sovereign rights of all tribes, whether classified as civilized or not, with treaties in place or without. These jurisdictional intrusions required constant legislative vigilance on the part of Cherokee leaders as they forestalled attempts to circumvent their sovereignty.”

Thus, as Reed sets out, for the Cherokee nation the IAA of 1871 and its aftermath marked the need for a more direct political, judicial, and public effort to resist and refuse, rather than trying to accommodate to, U.S. policy measures such as land allotment, federal judicial oversight, settler paternalism, and the predatory invasion of resource industries. The attack on Indigenous sovereignty by the United States reached another level during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once again, the Cherokee Nation’s story of efforts to assert and defend their sovereignty helps tell the tale of the political challenges and struggle of Indigenous peoples of this period. These efforts were ambitious and creative, such as proposing along with the other Five Tribes the creation of the State of Sequoyah of what is now the eastern half of Oklahoma. Clearly, this did not succeed, but the overall theme one extracts is that of the Cherokee Nation being among the many Indigenous nations during this time that sought to defend their sovereignty by practicing their sovereignty. In the face of a reunified and expansionary post-Civil War white settler nation that sought to break up Indigenous territorial landholdings and assimilate or violently eliminate Indigenous peoples, these efforts faced an even steeper uphill climb. But, as Reed notes by concluding with reference to the McGirt decision concerning the Creek Nation and legal jurisdiction of the eastern half of Oklahoma (the State of Sequoya in a parallel frame), the resonances of these practices remain, not to provide simplistic or false hope but to refuse the erasure of Indigenous political activism, sovereignty, and the commitment to defending life and land in resistance to settler colonial hegemony.