II – The Cherokee Nation in the Golden Age
a) Employment opportunity The statistics show that the Cherokees were truly entering a “Golden Age” of economic and social development in the 1900’s. As evidence, many positive factors may be cited like employment opportunity, housing and construction, educational and cultural activities, and social welfare. About the first one, the Cherokees created the prideful Tsa-La-Gi Cultural Center which gave seasonal jobs to some 150 people each year, of whom eighty per cent were Cherokees. In the same way, the Neighborhood Youth Corps program has provided jobs for more than 3,000 young Cherokees. Cherokee Nation Industries has also had phenomenal growth and success. This company employed approximately 180 …show more content…
The Cherokees were afraid that if railroad corporations built the roads, the Cherokee would lose their lands. But the Cherokees had decided to make one more effort to go into the railroad business for themselves, in so far as there was still no railway within sixty miles of Cherokee Territory. The plan was to allow the Indians to build their own road and own it. The railroad had to be financed with monies from the respective trust funds that the federal government held for the nation. However, when they were built, Cherokee fears were realized. Indeed, the treaties had no sooner been negotiated than Congress gave franchises to two railroads companies to build roads across the territory from the east and from the north. The MKT was the first road to complete a track to the border of the Cherokee Nation. The second railroad to enter Cherokee Nation, which claimed the single east-west right-of-way, was the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. Neither of these railroads made large profits, but they were self-sufficient. But the Cherokees never found the railroads of much help to their economy. The first impact of the railroad invasion was the great number of white intruders who came into the nation with the railroads or following after them. The second was the havoc the buildings of the railroads wrought as track were laid across …show more content…
As the number of intruders grew dramatically, the Cherokees received increasingly less cooperation from the government in removing them from Cherokee lands. When the United States took its first census of the Indian Territory in 1890, people were recorded according to their physical appearance. The census takers listed 29,166 whites and 22,015 Indians in the Cherokee Nation. Of course, some of the whites were citizens of the Nation, and many of the Cherokees were of such mixed-blood that they appeared white. Nevertheless, thousands of the whites were not citizens, and the Cherokees thus had no legal jurisdiction over them. Their presence in the Cherokee Nation made a strong argument for those who wished the Indian title extinguished. The Cherokees were engaged in a creative process of adaptation that established ethnic and cultural boundaries that preserved an Indian identity in a white-dominated world. The increasing numbers of settlers in the Cherokee country resulted in an increase in violence and crime and there was constant conflict between the Cherokee Nation and the United-States over judicial