Cherokee Tribe History

The Cherokee are an indigenous people of North America of Iroquois lineage. There are many theories about the origin of the name Cherokee. It may have originally been derived from one of the

tribe

s in the area. Also believed to be the Choctaw or one of the five national Iroquois

tribe

s. The name is derived from a creek word meaning people of different speech. The name the Cherokee originally used for themselves is anianwia, meaning chief people. They speak an Iroquois language and have a writing system in their own language developed in the 19th century by a famous and influential man.

Cherokee leader named Sequoia Origins and ancestors Anthropologists and historians have two main theories about the origins of the Cherokee. One is that the Cherokee arrived relatively late in the Southern Appalachians and may have migrated in late prehistoric times from the northern areas around the great lakes. This has been the traditional territory. Of the Iroquois nations and other Iroquois-speaking peoples, other evidence indicates that the Cherokee migrated in prehistoric times from present-day Texas or northern Mexico to the Great Lakes area and later migrated to the mountains and valleys of the southern part of the Appalachian chain and The ethnographer who lived with the tribe in the late 19th century named James Mooney recorded conversations with elders who recounted an oral tradition of the Cherokee people migrating south from the Great Lakes region in ancient times.

Around the year 1500 BC. A distinct Cherokee language had developed, and by the year 1000 the Cherokee lived a forested lifestyle with unique cultural characteristics influenced by Mississippi traditions. The Cherokee economy, like that of other southeastern tribes, was based primarily on agriculture, growing corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. Deer, bear and elk were hunted with bows and arrows. such as raccoons, rabbits, squirrels and turkeys, were hunted with long-shank blowguns propelling wood and feather darts for fishing, hooks and lines, spears and traps, wild plant foods were used, including roots, greens, berries and nuts, as well They were collected as another source of nutrition, various clothing. from season to season but consisted mainly of woven cloth or deerskin women wore dresses men wore trousers and everyone wore shoes in winter they wore a cloak made of woven cloth or fur hairstyles differed greatly from clan to clan some men went clean shaven others wore beards, some men shaved their heads, others wore a bun or a ponytail at the time of European contact.

The Cherokee were a settled agricultural people who lived in approximately 200 fairly large towns and cities. The typical Cherokee village consisted of 30 to 60 houses and a large council house where general meetings were held and a sacred fire was burned. The houses were usually of adobe and adobe, a circular structure woven with branches like an upside-down basket and plastered with The entire structure was partially sunken into the ground, then it became windowless logs with bark roofs, huts with a door and a smoke hole in the roof. An important religious observance was the Basque or Green Corn Festival of Firstfruits. and the celebration of the new fire the

cherokee

s are a matrilineal society in the old days they were divided into seven matrilineal clans who lived in numerous permanent villages typically located along rivers and streams historically women have been primarily heads of households owning the home and the land, farmers of the family land and mothers of the clans, as in many Native American cultures, Cherokee women are honored as life-givers, givers and caregivers. of life through childbirth and plant cultivation Women are traditionally community leaders in Cherokee communities The ancient Cherokees lived in an alternative state of war and peace that required a dual organization of tribal government, a white or peace organization and a red or war organization each city was governed by its two main chiefs, the white chief in peacetime and the red chief in war.

Present at each war council was a group of important women who served as advisors to the male leaders and also regulated the treatment of prisoners of war. component of Cherokee society before European colonization, as they frequently enslaved enemy captives taken during times of conflict with other indigenous tribes over their oral tradition. The Cherokee viewed slavery as the result of an individual's failure in war and as a temporary status pending the freeing of slaves. adoption into the tribe during the colonial era Carolinian settlers purchased Cherokees as slaves in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. They were also among the Native Americans who sold native slaves to traders to use as laborers in Virginia and further north when the Cherokee began to adopt some customs European Americans began to purchase African American slaves to serve as workers on their farms or plantations when the Cherokee were forcibly removed following the trail of tears they took slaves with them and continued trade in indian territory european contact hernando de soto and his men spanish explorers led an expedition believed to have made the first european contact in 1540 with the

cherokee

s when they found on the Tennessee River de Soto did not spend much time with them but was hostile towards other natives although Juan Pado The expedition revisited the area in 1566 and the Spanish built a fort and a small mining and smelting operation in the area until 1690 The Cherokee's location in the interior mountains kept them relatively isolated until after the settlement of Virginia in 1609.

In 1629, English traders had worked their way west to the Appalachians and met the Cherokee. Its population in the 17th century was between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. In 1673, English settlers arrived in Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, to establish trade relations. European goods such as brass teapots, textiles, scissors, knives, guns. and ammunition metal axes, hoes, and trinkets were traded for native deerskins, beeswax, river cane baskets, and native slaves, major changes began to occur within Cherokee society, as a result, leadership shifted from medicine man to warrior and warriors became hunters for profit. Cherokee relations with their neighbors. They were not always friendly, attacking Spanish settlements in Florida during 1673 and fighting coastal tribes in the Carolinas, but European trade and competition aggravated these rivalries and destabilized the region.

By 1680, most tribes had obtained their first weapons. of fire and the Cherokee had fortified their largest territory. Constant fighting broke out in the villages with the Catawba tribe in the east, followed by increasing friction with the Creek and Choctaw in the south. In the west there was traditional hostility with the Chickasaw, also a British ally in the north. The fight between the French, the Dutch and the English. in the fur trade the beaver wars began in 1730 the cherokees made an alliance with the english swearing allegiance to the british crowned king george ii and promising to trade only with the english other european powers were also making alliances with native american tribes the english needed special protection from their greatest rival, the French, a series of smallpox epidemics in the 18th century reduced the Cherokee population by half.

Diseases transmitted by Europeans were a big problem for the Native Americans, greatly reducing their numbers at the time. The territory had been firmly established in the Appalachian region of the southeastern United States, encompassing terrain that included parts of modern North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia; However, through negotiations in 10 different treaties between 1721 and 1777 with Great Britain, large sections of land were granted. by the Cherokee drastically reducing their territorial possessions United States from the early days of American independence Relations with Native American tribes had been a primary concern for national security Two of the most influential people in shaping the new government's Indian policy of the United States were Henry Knox, the Secretary of War, as well as President George Washington.

President Washington believed that civilizing or assimilating the tribes to European ideals would provide the best path to lasting peace. Their vision of civilization meant that Native Americans would become farmers and stop hunting on the vast lands necessary to maintain the migratory lifestyle and development of permanent villages. They felt that Natives should adopt European clothing and family life and learn to speak English. and convert to Christianity Christian missionaries participated in the assimilation of the Cherokees missionaries taught reading writing arithmetic personal cleanliness table etiquette and other topics from which they were discouraged On the other hand, any pagan activity the Cherokee accepted ideas that they considered useful and they rejected those that seemed useless.

It soon became apparent that the new American settlers were no more willing to stop their territorial expansion than the English settlers who preceded them. Deep and lasting divisions emerged within. Cherokee leaders and among the tribe itself about how to respond to the continued efforts of new settlers Some advocated negotiation and assimilation while others fought diplomacy at every turn In the early years of the 18th century, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah He helped his people preserve their language and cultural traditions and remain united amid the invasion of the new American society on their territory. Working over a period of 12 years, Sequoia created a syllabary, a set of written symbols to represent each syllable in the language.

Spoken Cherokee This made it possible for The Cherokee to achieve mass literacy in a short period of time and different tribes communicated wherever they were in the early 19th century. The continued loss of Cherokee lands caused many to move to reserved and temporarily uncontested lands further west in the late 18th century. The people living east of the Mississippi formed a centralized government. Affairs were no longer run at the Klan level. About one-third of the Cherokee people moved to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River around 1817. They signed a treaty with the United States. who exchanged land in the southeastern United States for land in present-day Arkansas in 1828, Sequoyah went with a delegation of Western Cherokees to Washington DC to sign a new treaty exchanging land in present-day Arkansas for land in present-day Oklahoma, also known as indian territory, earning the name old settlers because they were the first of the tribe to settle in indian territory in the west the cherokee made great efforts to show the united states that they assimilated established a new modern capital called new achota created their own constitution and the first native american newspaper however this did not alleviate the pressure placed on the cherokee to move west to the designated indian territory, the discovery of gold in cherokee territory brought these tensions to a head finally, in may 1830, President Jackson convinced Congress to pass his Indian Removal Act, which called for the removal of all Eastern Native tribes to territory west of the Mississippi.

Four of the five civilized tribes, the Chickasaw, Choctaw Creek, and the Seminole, signed treaties of removal in 1832 the cherokees rejected president jackson's demands and took their case to the supreme court several american lawyers helped chief john ross fight for his people in the case of the cherokee nation versus georgia, meanwhile the settlers continued to move and live in Cherokee Territory Even though that was illegal in 1834, much of the land the Cherokee still claimed in Georgia was auctioned off in a land lottery despite the decision of Chief John Ross. Objections, a small number of Cherokees later known as the Treaty Party gathered to formally accept the Treaty of New Echota in which the remaining Cherokee lands were sold for territory in the West for five million dollars along with some provisions and supplies. for the trip to the west and a year of travel. value of federal support for those who moved the united states senate ratified the treaty and president jackson immediately signed it giving the cherokee until may 1838 to leave the trail of tears as a result nearly sixteen thousand cherokee along with other natives were relocated by force from their eastern homeland although some of them remained hidden in the mountains in June 1838, the Cherokees were loaded onto flat boats at Ross's landing in Georgia and sailed down the Tennessee River, the boats were described as as crowded that almost collapsed, some traveled by trainwhile others traveled on foot four thousand died on the long road to the oklahoma territory after the impeachment chief ross and his supporters in the national party encountered another problem the construction of a new combined cherokee government in the west the eastern cherokees They had a constitution modeled after that of the United States, but the old settlers created a system based on traditional Cherokee laws, unable to compromise, Sequoia, an old settler, and Jesse Bushyhead, an Eastern Cherokee Baptist minister, They made a suggestion that the parties meet in July 1839 and let the people determine the form of government they preferred earlier.

At that meeting a group of Cherokees from the National Party conspired to take revenge on those who felt most responsible for signing the Treaty of New Echota and Trail of Tears secretly made a list of people they felt deserved the maximum penalty of death. These three men were killed around the same time that Major Ridge was killed while traveling on the highway in Washington County, Arkansas. Elias Boudinot was attacked by a group of men who claimed they needed medicine and John Ridge was dragged from his bed and stabbed to death in July 1839. John Ross the National Party and some representatives of the former settlers signed an act of union in September a constitution similar to that created in the East was accepted with John Ross elected as principal chief and an old settler as second principal chief for the next.

For several years, the Cherokee nation underwent a series of internal conflicts, sometimes violent, that They led to a civil war as the former settlers, the treaty party and the national party, adjusted to life in the west. Sequoia worked with John Ross to try to bring peace between the factions. The war ended with a treaty between the factions negotiated by the United States government on August 6, 1846, signed by delegates from each faction. The treaty of 1846 promised that Cherokee lands would be available to all members of the Cherokee Nation and offered a general amnesty for crimes committed against the nation or individuals during the American Civil War after a major internal conflict the tribe sided with the confederacy the Cherokees In western North Carolina they served as part of Thomas' Legion, a unit of approximately eleven hundred men of Cherokee and white origin who fought primarily in Virginia, where their battle record was outstanding.

Thomas' legion was the last Confederate unit to surrender in North Carolina at Waynesville on May 9, 1865. A postwar treaty with the United States freed black slaves. belonging to tribal members in Indian Territory between the elimination of the Cherokee Nation in 1838 and the end of the Civil War, many Cherokees gave their money to William Holland Thomas, their agent and later their only white chief, to buy land from them. Thomas acquired many of the clues that would make up the modern koala boundary the official name of the Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina these Cherokees along with the hundreds who had hidden in the mountains who already owned land legally through the treaty of 1817 or who had escaped the trail of tears and returned from the core of what would become the Eastern Cherokee Band under the General Allotment Act of 1887, resisted without concessions by the Cherokee, parcels of tribal land were forcibly assigned to individual members, surplus lands unassigned to Cherokee individuals were parceled out by the federal government and in 1891, the tribe's territorial expansion westward, the Cherokee Strip or Cherokee Outlet was sold to the United States in 1893 and opened primarily to non-Native settlers of the 20th century and the present. , the Cherokee government was dissolved and its people became American citizens when Oklahoma achieved statehood. in 1907.

In this action the Cherokee of Oklahoma lost their right to elect their own chiefs who were from there and were appointed by the presidents until 1970 when the Cherokee recovered their right to elect their own government through an act of Congress signed by President Nixon on August 21. 1918 British forces began attacking German positions along a 10-mile stretch of the Western Front in northwestern France. The assault was part of the World War I action now known as the Sama Offensive attached to the British troops fighting in the region were the US 119th and 120th Infantry Regiments which contained several Western Cherokee soldiers. of North Carolina, signal officers at the time assumed that the Germans would not be able to understand the Cherokee language and instructed Cherokee troops to deliver messages by telephone in their native language.

The Cherokee code talkers were the first known use of Native Americans in the US military to transmit messages under fire and continued to serve in this unique capacity for the remainder of World War I after World War II broke out. Cherokees were among the 25,000 Native Americans who actively fought in both Europe and the Pacific. The Cherokees also spoke code once again along with many other native tribes during the civil rights movement. They fought for the rights of Native Americans and African Americans and regained the right to choose their own government today. The Cherokee tribes are federally recognized The Kitua United Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina In the year 2000, about 281,000 people identified themselves as Cherokee and another 448,000 people They reported that they were part Cherokee The Cherokee language is spoken by between twelve thousand and twenty-two thousand people today.