Summary: This is installment six of the history of the relationships between the Cherokee Nation and the UKB. In this installment we will begin to bring the story of the UKB and the Cherokee Nation to the present, including the many court challenges over the past 25 years which have all affirmed the Cherokee Nation’s exclusive jurisdiction in the region. Interested? Read on… To watch/listen to this installment go to youtu.be/pogbbHmpIK8 As the Cherokee Nation began to recover its sovereign powers in the 1970s after having being squelched for most of the twentieth century by the “bureaucratic imperialism” of the BIA as the judge in the Harjo case described it, the UKB was dwindling. As the Cherokee Nation elected its first Chief since statehood, developed a superseding Constitution, reinstated its citizens, reconstituted its Tribal Council (also a result of the Harjo case), established Cherokee Nation Industries and investigated other economic development enterprises, the UKB receded and was basically defunct by the end of the 1970s. But in 1979, there was a particularly nasty runoff in the Principal Chief’s race between incumbent Ross Swimmer and his opponent, Jim Gordon. Swimmer defeated Gordon, and Gordon reacted by resurrecting the UKB in the 1980s. My colleague on the Tribal Council, Jack Baker, has shared with me that a good friend of his (who was a relative of Gordon’s) told him many times that Gordon had jump started the UKB specifically to compete with the Cherokee Nation. Whether that is just hearsay or not, who knows? But certainly that was the way things played out in the 1980s as Jim Gordon became chief of the UKB and began to assert for the first time that the UKB was not a corporate entity within the Cherokee Nation, but was a separate government that held the same territory and jurisdiction as the Cherokee Nation within what had been the Cherokee Nation’s historic boundaries as established by treaty in 1828. Unfortunately, the personal enmity of Gordon for Swimmer seems to have been the basis for the emerging competition in that decade between the UKB and the Cherokee Nation, but that is certainly open to interpretation.
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 02:05:07 +0000
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