The Nation That Did Everything Right And Was Removed Anyway

Imagine a people who did everything right. Told that to keep their land they had to become 'civilized,' the Cherokee wrote a constitution modeled on the American one, built schools, and published a newspaper. They even took their case to the Supreme Court of the United States, and won. This is the full Cherokee story: Sequoyah, the silversmith who could not read yet invented a writing system on his own; the 1827 constitution; the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the U.S.; the Georgia gold rush; Worcester v. Georgia (1832); the Treaty of New Echota, signed by a small minority of the nation and ratified by the Senate by a single vote; and the Trail of Tears of 1838–39, in which at least 4,000 Cherokee died. And then the part that rarely gets told: how the nation rebuilt in Indian Territory, and how three federally recognized Cherokee nations carry the language, and the syllabary, forward today. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 A nation that did everything right 01:16 A great southern nation 02:31 The man who invented a language 04:40 Doing everything 'right' 06:03 Gold, and a president who didn't care 08:15 A treaty signed by almost no one 09:55 The Trail of Tears 11:53 Still here 🪶 Native Americas tells the story of every Indigenous nation of the Americas — one at a time. Subscribe, and tell us which nation you want next. 📍 Requests and corrections welcome in the comments — this history belongs to the people who lived it. #NativeAmerican #IndigenousHistory #NativeAmericas #Cherokee