By Rennard Strickland
This booklet strains the emergency of the Cherokee method of legislation from the traditional spirit decrees to the fusion of tribal legislations methods with Anglo-American law.The Cherokees enacted their first written legislations in 1808 in Georgia. In succeeding years the leaders and tribal councils of the southeastern and Oklahoma teams wrote a structure, verified courts, and enacted legislation that have been in accord with the previous tribal values yet mirrored and accommodated to the whites’ criminal method. due to the nice reward of Sequoyah-his syllabary-the Cherokees have been good versed of their legislation, capable of learn and interpret them from a truly early time. The process served the folk good. It continued until eventually 1898, while the government abolished the tribal government.The writer offers a short overview of Cherokee heritage and explains the situations surrounding the levels of improvement of the criminal procedure. Excerpts from editorials within the Cherokee Phoenix and the Cherokee recommend, letters, and tribal files supply additional perception into the issues the Cherokees confronted and their efforts to unravel them. Of specific curiosity is a sequence of charts explaining the advanced Cherokee spirit method of crimes (or "deviations") and the punishments meted out for them.
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Example text
Thompson, "An Address Delivered Before the First Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma State Bar Association in 1910," Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 2 (1924), 67. "2 The Cherokees are generally assumed to be a case study of the situation Fuller hypothesized. Yet the Cherokees did not, as is commonly believed, break all threads of continuity with Cherokee tradition. In 1808 the tribe did draft the first written law, but this act should not be taken as evidence that all native aspects of tribal law were purged.
The issues of sustaining a sound government were reaching a crisis stage at the beginning of the American Civil War. 5. American Civil War and Reconstruction (1861 to 1867). After a short period of neutrality the Cherokees formally joined the Confederacy in the spring of 1861. For more than four years the lands of the Cherokees were the center of border skirmishes and guerrilla activity. The land was made desolate by the war. The primary task of Cherokee government during this period was to feed and protect its citizens.
The issues which the Cherokee legal system faced varied considerably from period to period. The seven periods of history are: 1. Frontier contact, 1540 to 1785 2. White ascendancy, 1786 to 1828 3. Tribal dislocation, 1829 to 1846 4. Struggle for self-government, 1847 to 1860 2 For a historical overview see the Cherokee Legal History Chronology, 15401907, page 193. Page 5 5. American Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860 to 1866 6. Establishment of the Cherokee Nation, 1867 to 1887 7. Termination and Statehood, 1887 to 1906 1.