Kill a Bill

US House Committee on Resources,
Mr. George W. Bush, President of the United States of America,
Madams and Gentlemen of the Houses of the U.S.


STOP THIS PREPOSED RAPE; once again of the Cherokee people.

We, the undersigned, Cherokee and other tribal citizens, other ethnicities of the Cherokee Nation, other Native Nations, and many more, by their electronic signature have determined H.R. 3534 is in Conflict with laws and culture of the Cherokee people, in that it strips them of their most culturally prize possession, and rights by treaty and court ruling of the supreme court of the United States, land, and our sovereignty with respect to this land.

By the signing of this petition we Cherokee, and others show solidarity against this act, we call on the people of the world not to forget very important facts, in regards to laws of the land, Treaty's between the U.S. and the Cherokee, and many other Indian Nations also.

By supposition of Title: H.R.3534 To provide for the settlement of certain land claims of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Nations to the Arkansas Riverbed in Oklahoma. When in actuality it is a call for the Nations to cede land to the U.S. via a thinly veiled guise of settlement as damages, because the Nations have owned the land since suit was decided in 1966, and the supposed damages are years of improvements on the land by trespassers, and the Nations have received no compensation from their ownership. In even more guile, written in H.R.3534 is call for disclaiming, and or relinquishing all claim to the dry land of the 100 year flood plain. The actual land in question 7,500 acres, in 1977, then, Senator Bellmon had appraised it at $170,000,000, and the offer today is $41,000,000. Does land, as it is improved depreciate?

Also in support of the 1966 ruling In addition to the proprietary interest of the Arkansas River, and other navigable rivers like it remaining with the Cherokee Nation, the riverbeds of navigable rivers are jurisdictionally Indian country. In Indian Country, U.S.A. v Oklahoma Tax Commission, 829 F.2d 967 (10th Cir. 1987), the Tenth Circuit held that unalloted tract of land adjacent to the Arkansas River in Tulsa on which the Creek Bingo Hall was located was Indian country and outside the criminal or regulatory jurisdiction of the State of Oklahoma. The Tenth Circuit upheld the Northern District which ruled the unalloted riverbed and riverside tract was the "purest form" of Indian country having never left tribal ownership and federal supervision. Finally, it must be remembered that the United States accompanied its grants to of land with the promise that "no part of the land granted to them shall ever be embraced in any Territory or State." In light of this promise, it is only by the purest of legal fiction that there can be found even a semblance of an understanding this land does not belong to the Cherokee Choctaw and Chickasaw people, the dry lands of the Arkansas River bed. We the undersigned Cherokee have no desire to relinquish or disclaim title to this land.

Culturally, the Cherokee have held land as an asset of all, and so stringently so, that there was Cherokee law that executed those that would dispose of land. After the Cherokee were forcibly removed from the east and their land taken, in trade for what is now Oklahoma, via more taking I might add. The Cherokee re-wrote their Constitution, it reads, Sec. 2. The lands owned by, held in trust for, or otherwise under the superintendence of the Cherokee Nation shall remain common property; but the improvements made thereon, and in the possession of the citizens respectively who made, or may rightfully be in possession of them: Provided, that the citizens of the Nation possessing exclusive and indefeasible right to their improvements, as expressed in this article, shall possess no right or power to dispose of their improvements, in any manner whatever, to the United States, individual States, or to individual citizens thereof.

Therefore again we the undersigned believe, Mr. President, Honorable Madams and Gentlemen of the U.S. legislature, should kill H.R.3534 post haste.