As Stewards of the Lands and Waters in Arkansas Since Before 1785
© TCNPress.Org
By Line: Fort Smith, Arkansas
December 5, 2025, 9:00 AM
As stewards of the lands and waters here in Arkansas since before 1785, 51 years before statehood, it is our solemn responsibility to uphold our rights guaranteed to us by the God of Nature, the Laws of Nature, Treaties, traded lands, and lands promised to our Tribe by Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe.
From the early 1800s forward, the Indian Agents in Arkansas, Bearley, Lovely, and Meigs, intentionally misidentified our Chiefs and people as Cherokee. Out of ignorance or laziness or both, the Lower Town Chickamauga Chiefs and people were identified as Cherokee because they spoke a dialect of the Cherokee Trade language, not because they were ethnically Cherokee. George Washington, during his 4th annual address to Congress, identified us as Chickamauga. The War Department Records identified us as either Lower Town Cherokee (based upon linguistics) or Lower Town Chickamauga or Chickamauga. There should have been no excuse for misidentifying our Chiefs and people as Cherokee.
We have signed more than 22 Treaties with the United States as Chickamauga Chiefs, Headmen, and Warriors of the Lower Towns. Most of the Treaties signed with the United States were exclusively signed by our Chiefs as the Chiefs of the Cherokee Nation, because there were so many different Cherokee Nations, as the United States knew as exemplified in the 1785 Treaty.
In 1809 Thomas Jefferson promised to trade us lands in Arkansas for lands east of the Mississippi. We were told to find lands where there were no other Indians and we could have the lands. We were encouraged to go North of the Arkansas River, but it is not a required stipulation. We already occupied the St. Francis River to its mouth at the Arkansas. The 1817 treaty gave us the White River, Black River, Buffalo River, Illinois River, Arkansas River, and the lands surrounding them. The War Department Records, Arkansas Territorial Papers, and renowned anthropologists of the early 1800s all identified our lands as being on both sides of the Arkansas River.
On May 6th, 1817, the Cherokee Nation Council represented “fifty-four towns and villages” east of the Mississippi by Lead Chief Path Killer. 3rd Article “the authority and claim of our common property shall cease with the person or persons who shall think proper to remove themselves without the limits of the Cherokee Nation.” 4th Article “The improvements and labors of our people by the mother’s side shall be inviolate during the time of their occupancy.”
Rennard Strickland’s Fire and the Spirits on page 101 states that Laws of the Cherokee Nation (LCN) #57 was intended to exclude “Cherokees” who had migrated to Arkansas from ownership of property in the “old Nation” in Georgia. Again, LCN # 119 and 139 – 140 “if any citizen of this Nation, shall bind themselves by enrollment or otherwise as emigrants to Arkansas shall forfeit . . . all rights and privileges . . . as citizens of this Nation.” On March 14, 1830, The Cherokee Phoenix reported, “the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court ruled that Dark Horse, who had four sons, provided that each should have a part of the large estate that he had accumulated during his lifetime. However, the court refused to honor the will, which provided for equal distribution of land and divided the property between two sons who remained in the eastern lands.” In the March 18, 1829, Cherokee Phoenix, Elias Boudinot was quoted, “Western or Arkansas Cherokees: They are our brothers. But they have left us [and] have rights in their own country. They are citizens of another Nation.”
According to renowned University of Arkansas History Professor Stanley Hoig, in his seminal work, “The Cherokees and Their Chiefs,” on page 139, in 1827, the National Grand Council voted to send a delegation to Washington. The delegation was only empowered to “Arrange and finally adjust with the President of the United States or others all the unsettled matters” concerning the Western Outlet and Lovely’s Purchase. There was no intention by the National Grand Council to authorize the delegation to become involved in treaty matters, which would have allowed them to trade away their Arkansas lands. The delegation was detained at armed gunpoint at a hotel in Washington for over a month and were “cajoled, whiskeyed, and bribed into signing an agreement for exchanging their Arkansas land for Lovely’s Purchase.
As Chickamauga, who have been misidentified as Cherokee, we can prove that we are not ethnically or legally Cherokee according to the Cherokee Nation and by the Full Faith and Credit clause of the United States Constitution. The Cherokee Nation, which voluntarily relocated from Georgia through Arkansas in the fall and winter of 1838–39 as they made their way to Indian Territory, is not ethnically, politically, culturally, or historically the Lower Town Chickamauga, who were known in Arkansas as the Western Cherokee or Old Settler Cherokee.
The Chickamauga Nation, through treaties, promises, and traded lands in Arkansas, still retains jurisdictional rights, mineral, water, timber, grazing, and terrestrial rights, which no Treaty has ever disestablished, in accordance with McGirt v. Oklahoma. We, The Chickamauga Nation, will not allow any person, entity, organization, incorporation, Tribe, or state to interfere with our economic or political integrity as outlined in Montana v. United States. Let this serve as notice that The Chickamauga Nation intends to defend its federally guaranteed Treaty, Constitutional, and Civil Rights.