NativeStudyRefocused.com is a partner website of NativeStudy.com

Refocusing on
Cherokee Chief Lewis Downing
Soldier, Chaplain, Politician, post-Civil War Reconstructionist and much more

   With this 'Milestone' of Cherokee documentation and achieving the fourteenth volume it was felt the future covers and images within this series should receive a pause or intermission so to speak and consider a history of one of the Cherokee leaders from times past.

     Chief Lewis Downing was chosen as the highlight of NativeStudyRefocused.com by offering a glimpse into who he was, some of his history and his actions involved in while representing his people and a new book cover possessing his image and hoping to show a little intermittent change amongst these wonderful documents.

     Here is a link to the seven original pages found in the Library of Congress that involved Lewis Downing and other tribal members seeking to keep treaty agreements with the U.S. government through documentation and testimony with Congress who were forever trying to withdraw from the legal and binding agreements they made with all tribes. So to speak there was never a treaty the government couldn't break. "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land and they took it." Chief Red Cloud (1822–1909) a prominent Oglala Lakota Chief.

    Memorial of the principal chief and delegates of the Cherokee Nation of Indians, remonstrating against a territorial form of government, legislative jurisdiction of Congress, the abrogation of existing treaties and the burden of government taxation without representation, and in favor of the payment by the United States of all just obligations to said nation. March 14, 1870.

   This is to show it wasn’t just the people in need of proving who they were, but, also tribal (entities) disputes with the government to prevent Congress then from trying go back on the agreements or contracts or promises made with the Native people when they, the government wanted their land.