Wampum

In 1903 William C. Rogers became last elected Cherokee chief for 68 years.

Ms. Diane Watson is an enrolled member of the Democratic Party and represents a quarter of a million residents of Los Angeles county in the lower house of the Federal legislature in Washington City. She an opinion on the issues involved in the March 3rd Special Election of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

She also has a remedy. She wants to to end payments by the United States to the Cherokee Nation.

The likelihood that Representative Watson has an opinion on the causes for, or effects of, the Cherokee Nation not being able to hold elections for almost seven of the ten decades of the 20th century is wicked small, but I'm going to attempt the comic and ask the Congresswoman. Hell, she may not know that something happened in Mittle Europa during the middle decades of the same century. Some people are wicked focused on their own interests and need no partners, no coalition, to obtain their unilateralist, uncomplicated deciderist goals.

There's one like that at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, an enrolled member of the same, to hell with treaties party.

There are issues of Federal oversight of constitutional revisions, under section 16 of the Wheeler-Howard Act (The Indian Reorganization Act, June 18, 1934), and of course, anything really fundamental in Federal Indian Law goes, now that Bill Rehnquist is doing Hispanic voter intimidation in the several precincts of Hell, to Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Clarance Thomas to fabricate out of a whole cloth and call stare decisis et non quieta movere.

I don't advise Chad Smith, or support his quixotic adventure into non-vital issues in a polity that has only three decades of modern election history, and a voter turn-out of one in ten qualified voters, and I don't advise Stacy Leeds, who I support in her race against Chad Smith in next June's election. However, if I had the ear of the prince and Ms. Watson's brain fart managed to catch fire among the other Americans -- to end the existing treaties -- I'd advise that was worth looking into. Setting the clock back to 1822, before Marshall and Johnson formally committed the former British colonies to banditry outside of International Law, or 1789, or 1776, when the British Crown surrendered its claims under the right of Discovery against non-Christian Kings and right of War against Christian Kings (the Dutch and the French) to the Americas south of the Red Line, or even back to de Soto, would be an improvement over the perpetuation of the present.

If Rep. Watson's concern is with the legality of exclusion, rather than the fiction of race, she could look at the Pechenga, an hour's drive from her district office on Wilshire Boulevard, or any of the other California Tribes struggling with membership issues, rather than eastern Oklahoma, where Indians couldn't vote for any Federal office for half of the time between the 1861-1865 Insurrection and the present, and could not vote for any Cherokee governmental office for three quarters of the 20th century.

Unless spin is all.