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Native American Indian Information
THE CHEROKEE NATION
The Beginnings
The best-known episode in Cherokee history
was also the worst: the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the
Cherokee people from their ancestral home in the southeast to Oklahoma. The
Cherokee had been one of the most acculturated of Indian societies--an urban,
Christian, agricultural, largely intermarried people who supported the United
States against other tribes. In the end this was all for nothing. Though some
prominent Americans, such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster, spoke against
Removal, and though the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, President
Andrew Jackson, declaring "Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let
him enforce it," sent in the army. Fifteen to twenty thousand Cherokee and
their Indian neighbors (Choctaw, Muskogee, and others)
were rounded up and herded to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-1839. Driven from
their homes without being allowed to collect their possessions first, even their
shoes, these prosperous and largely citified Indians were no better equipped for
an 800-mile forced march than a white suburb today would be. Between four and
eight thousand Cherokee people died of exposure, starvation, disease, and simple
exhaustion along the Trail of Tears. If you understand this, both the extent to
which the Cherokees had adopted American standards of civilization before the
Removal and the ultimate futility of it, you will go a long way towards
understanding the Cherokee mentality and also the attitudes of other Indian
peoples towards us....
Please learn more about the Cherokee Nation at:
http://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_culture.htm
The People
'Cherokee' is Creek
for 'people with another language'. (It's really amazing how white settlers
always managed to learn some other tribe's name for any group of Indians. They
learned the Creek word for Cherokee, but not the Creek word for themselves.)
Anyway, our original name for ourselves was Aniyunwiya, but Cherokee is fine too
(though we say it Tsalagi--there's no R in our language). There are about
350,000 Cherokee people today, primarily in Oklahoma and North Carolina
Please learn more about the Cherokee Nation at: http://www.native-languages.org/cherokee_culture.htm
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