State of Sequoyah a success?

What if President Roosevelt approved of the Sequoyah constitutonal convention in 1905 and a bill was moved through congress creating a state named Sequoyah in the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma. Would it be successful, with Native Americans from all over the country arriving to this new homeland?

Here's a map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sequoyah_map.jpg
 
What if President Roosevelt approved of the Sequoyah constitutonal convention in 1905 and a bill was moved through congress creating a state named Sequoyah in the eastern half of what is now Oklahoma. Would it be successful, with Native Americans from all over the country arriving to this new homeland?

Here's a map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sequoyah_map.jpg

I don't know much of the political side of things during the 1900s, so I'll address the issue as if Sequoyah was voted in as a state.

For one, I can't see the states and citizens around this new Indian homeland liking its existence all that much--Oklahoma's legislature and its citizens will be angry for sure. I can see people from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and some parts of Missouri coming down and making life hell for the arriving Native Americans. Furthermore, IIRC the early 1900s was the KKK's heyday, and I bet they'd having something to say about this. I'm imagining something like the 1960s, where there were movements across the States to promote (or demote) black enfranchisement, only with something like this there would be no television to make people in the North aware of how badly it really was.

When we just move to a normal state of affairs for Sequoyah, I wonder how effective it would be as a state. The idea is good, excellent even, but in practice I'm not sure if there would be anything preventing it from turning into another cesspool. What would keep Sequoyah from turning into merely a big reservation? How would having a "state" improve things for the Indians? IIRC there are some reservations in South Dakota where the average life expectancy is something like 45. Albeit cynically, I am wondering if Sequoyah would implode under its external stressors.

Also, I'm wondering about what would happen to the state during the Great Depression. I can't see its neighbors being all that willing to help it out if/when it gets into trouble, and the US government would have it low on a prioritized list.

Basically what I'm saying is that while the Sequoyah idea is excellent in theory, I doubt it could ever effectively happen. I think that the early 1900s and any time before that is too early for a Native American state due to racism and prejudice, but the farther along you go into the 20th century the less chances you have of something like this happening.
 
I don't know much of the political side of things during the 1900s, so I'll address the issue as if Sequoyah was voted in as a state.

For one, I can't see the states and citizens around this new Indian homeland liking its existence all that much--Oklahoma's legislature and its citizens will be angry for sure. I can see people from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and some parts of Missouri coming down and making life hell for the arriving Native Americans. Furthermore, IIRC the early 1900s was the KKK's heyday, and I bet they'd having something to say about this. I'm imagining something like the 1960s, where there were movements across the States to promote (or demote) black enfranchisement, only with something like this there would be no television to make people in the North aware of how badly it really was.

When we just move to a normal state of affairs for Sequoyah, I wonder how effective it would be as a state. The idea is good, excellent even, but in practice I'm not sure if there would be anything preventing it from turning into another cesspool. What would keep Sequoyah from turning into merely a big reservation? How would having a "state" improve things for the Indians? IIRC there are some reservations in South Dakota where the average life expectancy is something like 45. Albeit cynically, I am wondering if Sequoyah would implode under its external stressors.

Also, I'm wondering about what would happen to the state during the Great Depression. I can't see its neighbors being all that willing to help it out if/when it gets into trouble, and the US government would have it low on a prioritized list.

Basically what I'm saying is that while the Sequoyah idea is excellent in theory, I doubt it could ever effectively happen. I think that the early 1900s and any time before that is too early for a Native American state due to racism and prejudice, but the farther along you go into the 20th century the less chances you have of something like this happening.

The KKK wasn't revived until 1915, and was pretty much a phenomenon around Atlanta and environs before an advertising genius :rolleyes: named Edward Y. Clarke teamed up with William Joseph Simmons, and made the Klan a more widespread phenomenon. Thus, it would have been a non-factor here.

I'm inclined to agree that it would be treated as a special case by the federal government (can't imagine Woodrow Wilson having much good to say about it, given his "enlightened" views on race). I could also see it as attracting minorities from elsewhere (e.g., blacks from the deep south), assuming they'd not suffer from discrimination at the hands of Native Americans. In short, Sequoyah would be almost a ghetto on a statewide basis: probably it would supplant Mississippi or Arkansas (the two vied for the bottom slot) as the poorest state, a dubious distinction it would probably still hold today.
 
The other, cruder side of a successful Sequoyah would be that it would almost certainly "fail" as a state and become a basket case so that the American political class could point to it and say that non-whites just couldn't govern themselves. It would become a Liberia in the USA.
 
These comments betray a lack of understanding regarding how sophisticated the "5 civilized tribes" comprising the bulk of Sequoyah were. Their goal was not to create an "an Indian homeland" for tribes from other parts of the nation, but mainly to preserve some of their own cultural independence within the framework of statehood. It would not have become a reservation, nor would it "fail" as a state, any more than Arkansas or Louisiana can be called failures. Culturally, Sequoyah would have been an extension of Arkansas, southern in outlook, but with a large number (perhaps not even a majority) of its citizens being of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Seminole extraction. Resident whites and acculturated mixed bloods would have been dominant from the get-go. Like the rest of the south (which the five nations largely allied with during the American civil war), it would be very resistant to granting civil rights to its black residents who may have been excluded from citizenship in Sequoyah. Oklahoma Territory would have become a state at roughly the same time. Without its eastern half, Oklahoma would be much more like Kansas, west Texas, and even Colorado. Less southern, more midwestern or southwestern. There is no reason to believe that Oklahoma territory, which was formed separately out of the western 1/2 of Indian Territory and never had political control over what would have become Sequoyah, would have resented the parallel existence of Sequoyah. Same for Texas and Arkansas.

The main reason TR vetoed the Sequoyah statehood bill was because he suspected it would be a staunchly democratic southern state, while a larger state combining Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory might be less likely to fall reliably into the democratic camp (he was wrong, though). From the beginning, the southern attitudes of the more populous eastern half of the state dominated,
 
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Incidentally, a lot of the ideas behind Sequoyah were revised and implemented in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Though that later measure doesn't include anywhere near the political independence of the Sequoyah plan, it does do much more than the reservation system does in the Lower 49.
 
I don't see why people are assuming the "State of Sequoyah" would have preserved more political independence for Native Americans than which currently exists in Alaska, Hawaii, or within the large western Reservations. By adopting the Sequoyah constitution (which incidentally formed the model for the later Oklahoma constitution) the five nations were essentially giving up their individual tribal sovereignity and subsuming it within a fairly standard US state structure, with subdivisions being counties rather than tribal nations. The only difference was that the tribes would have been giving up sovereignity more on their terms, rather than as dictated by an unsympathetic federal government. They would have had significant influence in the politics and policies of Sequoyah, but only becuase of their large population, not because their dominance was in anyway legally protected. Obviosuly, the State of Sequoyah would have been bound to and protected by the US constitution in the same way other states are.

It might be reasonably suspected that, today, the State of Sequoyah might be facing the kinds of issues Hawaii is, with activist segments of its large native population bringing into question how the state was founded and seeking greater independence from the USA.
 
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Actually, I think the best possible comparison to Sequoyah might be Utah. To become a State, Utah's majority LDS inhabitants had to formally abandon an explicit role for the LDS church in its government, abandon certain beliefs and practices (at least officially), and adopt laws conforming to the expectations and norms of the US constitution and other states. Today, the Mormon Church has no official role in governing Utah, but the values of individual Mormons are reflected in many of its laws, regulations, and unofficial culture.

The same would probably exist in Sequoyah. Although there would be no official role for the tribal governments in the State, they would function politically like powerful voluntary associations of like-minded members. Legislators from Cherokee areas would reflect the values and priorities of their large Cherokee populations, for example. Thus tribal leaders would initially have a significant unofficial role in how Sequoyah was governed. And just as in Utah, as increasing numbers of non-natives moved into the state, Sequoyah would slowly lose its identity as a "Indian" state. It would become just another, conservative southern state like Arkansas or Mississippi which just happened to have a lot of people of Native American descent in it. This would not be a "failed" state, just one northeastern liberals and native american activists might not approve of.
 
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