The Earliest Native American President of the US

so with any POD after Washington's election when is the Earliest that a Native American become President? my thought is Charles Curtis, but I'm putting this here just because it'd be to have a Indian President in the 1830s
 
If you follow the course of history, I don't think it could happen until the Indian Wars of the 1880's were firmly behind us. Even then, bigotry was still very prominent in American politics. Remember that Alfred Smith lost the election of 1928 because he was Catholic and there were fears that he would be controlled by the Pope. Imagine what they could come up with for an Indian man? An Indian president may be more likely in the 60's than a black one, but that still doesn't say much. So, following OTL, you may have to wait until very recent history for that to be viable.

However, if you could prevent the Trail of Tears and all of the later relocations, the chances of an Indian president skyrocket. A good first step would be to get rid of Jackson. Even then, the white male voting class is very unlikely to elect, heck, to even nominate someone from an entirely different race from themselves for a very long time. I just cannot see that happening in the 1830's.
 
If the Iroquios (sp?) Confederacy throws in with the Colonials against Britain, they might end up being incorporated in their entirety as a U.S. state.

(There might have been talk of doing this, but I don't know how substantial it was. It might just have been AH.com gossip.)

If Jackson doesn't become president and the people who thought violating the treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes would have been an abominable sin (Schama's book showed there were many), perhaps they could turned into U.S. states as well?

It wouldn't have been that hard--they had written constitutions and all.

Entire Indian tribal states converted into U.S. states means, by law, Indian representatives and senators.

Also, someone theorized if Judah Benjamin ever became president of the CSA, he would be relatively weak because of him being Jewish and would have to be rather even more deferential to the planter elite than a Christian C.S. would have been.

In my scenario, one party or another might nominate a Native American, thinking that he'd owe his rise to the party bosses even more than a white candiate would, due to his race.

(It'd be hilarious if he took the bull by the horns, so to speak.)
 
Native Americans were not held to be citizens until the SCOTUS ruled so in the 1880s; it would be impossible for such a ruling to come down before the passing of the 14th Amendment. So to get a native President, you have to go back very far and make major changes, getting a nation only somewhat like OTL's USA.

Without early and radical change, your best bet is probably the Nighthorse Campbells of Colorado. Making Alex MacGillivray a reasonable man somehow during Washington's tenure, or preventing Jackson's Indian Removal, might do the job earlier, but the butterflies would be big.
 
How about Andrew Jackson's adopted son Lyncoya Jackson. He died in 1828 of Tuberculosis but Jackson was planning on him going to West Point if he lived and with Jackson and his peoples backing after words would have been in a position latter on down the line to run for President. He would have graduated from West Point about 1834 or so. Might have been a Mexican War hero so in the 1850's could have been a candidate for president.

I am sure that there would be a way around the citizenship thing considering Jackson's influence.
 
If you mean pure blooded Native American that's much more difficult that someone with enough Indian ancestry to qualify as Indian today. There were plently of people knocking around who were white enough to be citizens but had an Indian Grandma. Not being a student of US history one of them might have been President in OTL for all I know.
 
Yelnoc said:
A good first step would be to get rid of Jackson.

I think that's true as a general rule. No matter what your project is, getting rid of Andrew Jackson is a good way to start.

Aracnid said:
If you mean pure blooded Native American that's much more difficult that someone with enough Indian ancestry to qualify as Indian today. There were plently of people knocking around who were white enough to be citizens but had an Indian Grandma.

This is what I was going to ask. How "Indian" does one have to be to qualify? I'm sure somebody keeps records on this kind of thing, but I would imagine that several of our presidents have had at least some Native ancestry, simply by virtue of the fact that most Americans have some Native ancestry. But they don't count as "Natives". I myself am one-eighth Cherokee, but since the other seven eighths of me are White, I don't think the Cherokee would really count it as a victory if I were somehow made president.

So what percentage Native ancestry would someone have to be to count? Three-fourths would probably be fine. Half would probably do it for most people. (Obama is half white, but everyone's perfectly content to call him "the first black president".) What if someone had enough Native ancestry to qualify for membership in their ancestral tribe, but was still mostly white, looked white, and was raised white? Even if they played up their Native blood, would anybody really count them as "Native"?
 
If you mean pure blooded Native American that's much more difficult that someone with enough Indian ancestry to qualify as Indian today. There were plently of people knocking around who were white enough to be citizens but had an Indian Grandma. Not being a student of US history one of them might have been President in OTL for all I know.

at lest as Indian as Charles Curtis, one Indian Parent with time among the Indians as a child.
 
However, if you could prevent the Trail of Tears and all of the later relocations, the chances of an Indian president skyrocket. A good first step would be to get rid of Jackson. Even then, the white male voting class is very unlikely to elect, heck, to even nominate someone from an entirely different race from themselves for a very long time. I just cannot see that happening in the 1830's.

This.

I actually used this in one of the TL's I'm working on.

In it a Native American (Florida 'Cherokee') is elected in the 1930's, he's actually meant to be somewhat analogous to FDR, he even had a similar initials, SDR (Samuel D. Ross).
 
To be less frivolous on the Jackson point, albeit still without adding anything substantial to the discussion, I would say that preventing the Trail of Tears would be a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition to making this happen. It would still be an uphill battle; after all, it's taken us until the 21st century to elect any president who could be called "not white". But the Supreme Court had already agreed that the government didn't have the right to relocate the Cherokee, and I think that would have been a very important precedent in future Native relations if it hadn't been for Jackson's unilateral disregard for Constitutional law.

I am intrigued by the concept, mentioned above, of the Iroquois supporting the Revolution and being given their own state in return. But how plausible is it? Even if they had supported the Revolution, wouldn't a sovereign nation for them be a more likely result than being admitted to the Union as a fourteenth state?
 
I would consider that if you took a straight forward definition of 'Native American' than basically anybody after Washington (and a lot before) would qualify. Within the scope of their time they would be Native Americans, since the various indian tribes are, in some instances, considered nations.
 
I don't think getting rid Jackson will make things any better. Whites will be still moving into Cherokee lands causing the latter to rebel prompting some other president to force them out anyway.

Maybe if Custard wins the Battle of Little Big Horn then the public might see it as the government massacuring helpless victims.
 
I don't think getting rid Jackson will make things any better. Whites will be still moving into Cherokee lands causing the latter to rebel prompting some other president to force them out anyway.

Maybe if Custard wins the Battle of Little Big Horn then the public might see it as the government massacuring helpless victims.

The Battle of Little Big Horn is still known as the largest pie fight in history.

Seriously though, what if Will Rogers took seriously the requests for him to run for president?
 
I would consider that if you took a straight forward definition of 'Native American' than basically anybody after Washington (and a lot before) would qualify. Within the scope of their time they would be Native Americans, since the various indian tribes are, in some instances, considered nations.

I don't think we'd be well served to redefine words so that they mean something they've never actually meant. We all know what is really meant by "Native American" and also what is really meant by "President of the U.S." No matter what linguistic tricks one wants to pull, the reality is that those two categories have not yet intersected.
 
IOTL, the 'Five Civilized Tribes' were divided on what to do in regards to the ACW. The Choctaw and Chickasaw fought for the Confederates, the Creek and Seminole supported the Union, and the Cherokee fought a civil war within their own nation between the pro-Confederate and the pro-Union factions.

So a POD could have all of the tribes, or at least the Cherokee joining the Creek and Seminole, to fight for the Union. Post Civil War, post 14th Amendment, during Reconstruction or later, its might be possible for a 'Indian' state to be formed, à la TL-191's Sequoyah.

There actually was an OTL movement to found a state of Sequoyah consisting of eastern Oklahoma in the early 1900s. TR, under pressure from eastern politicians worried about increasing western political power by adding two states (and four Senators) where there could only be two, ruled that the Oklahoma territories could only achieve statehood as one single territory.

Another POD would be for TR to resist these politicians (which isn't entirely implausible, TR being TR. And considering he viewed people from westerns states in better light than eastern ones already) and allow the State of Sequoyah movement to go forward.
 
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