Mankiller, page 11
We are now about to take our leave and kind farewell to our native land, the country that the great spirit gave our Fathers, we are on the eve of leaving that country that gave us birth … it is with sorrow that we are forced by the authority of the white man to quit the scenes of our childhood … we bid a final farewell to it and all we hold dear.
George Hicks, Cherokee leader on the Trail of Tears
November 4, 1838
That is why I continue to think about the past and to circle back to my tribal history for doses of comfort. I still contemplate the lives of my ancestors—some of those early transplants who became part of the Cherokee Nation West. That all took place long before the conclusion of the Treaty of New Echota of 1835—the controversial document that provided for the Cherokees’ shameful eviction from our ancestral lands, and the tribe’s inevitable removal to an alien region. The experiences of those who made that journey to Indian Territory remain an unrivaled lesson in courage and hope.
I also reflect on those times before the white men and the United States government took control of our lives, when the Cherokees thrived in the ancient homeland of what became Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. I see in my mind’s eye the steady European intrusion, and how the old Cherokee people gradually blended their timeless customs with the concoctions and innovations of the whites. I visualize the events that marked those years when my people were pressured to move from the Southeast to the unknown lands west of Arkansas. Remembrances can be powerful teachers. When we return to our history, those strong images assist us in learning how not to make identical mistakes. Perhaps we will not always be doomed to repeat all of our history, especially the bad episodes.
From the annals of time, from those bittersweet years of the 1800s, the spirits of long-dead Cherokees and other native men and women from other tribes remain unsettled. Their spirits still cry out, warning us about the dangers that lie ahead. They speak of the need to read small print on documents and to search between the lines on treaties. They caution us to be aware of the droves of government bureaucrats who tend to approach native people just as those well-meaning “Bless Your Heart” ladies did in Oklahoma, the ones who tried to coax me into their big shiny cars when I was a child walking down a dirt road to school.
The spirits admonish us to be careful. They draw from their own knowledge and experience, no doubt recalling the snares and pitfalls uncovered along the way when they became “civilized” and struggled to retain some dignity and appease the white ruling class. Through the spirits’ chiding, we become aware that the “civilizing” of the Cherokees did us much more harm than good in many ways. We look back on those times and, if we allow ourselves, we can learn so much.
Although many Cherokees tried to stay with the old ways, especially regarding clan dances and medicine, some adopted at least what seemed the most ideal elements of the white man’s world. That is why, among our people, some became farmers, merchants, and traders. They dressed like whites. They lived in log cabins, sent their children to schools, attended Christian churches, and adopted written laws. For the most part, they abandoned many of the old traditions and customs that the whites frowned on and considered pagan and offensive.
Some Cherokees, mostly the prosperous mixed-bloods, began to treat women as second-class citizens, kept black slaves, and even owned large plantations. Some Cherokee leaders believed that if our people would only adopt the beliefs and lifestyle of the white Americans, we would be allowed to survive as a tribe in our own homeland. Perhaps the whites would leave us alone. Just maybe the song and dance would work, and the Wolves would let Rabbit be. That proved to be a costly mistake in judgment.
As early as the 1820s, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks were becoming known by some whites as the “Civilized Tribes.” Eventually, the Seminoles would be added to those ranks. By the late 1850s, long after all the tribes had been removed on their individual trails of tears to Indian Territory, they put aside most of their old antagonisms toward one another. They would be referred to as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” Those three words—“Five Civilized Tribes”—continue to be a pejorative term still in use to this day, even by some Native Americans.
The Cherokees were able to live effectively in the Cherokee world as well as in the white world. To white society, that meant our people were the most acculturated, although we still were not—and never would be—placed on the same level as the whites. Still, the Cherokee mixed-bloods were accepted in many white circles, and their influence in the tribal communities increased. Mixed-blood surnames such as Adair, Ward, Rogers, Vann, Lowery, and Ross became well established in our tribe.
By the 1820s, the mixed-bloods, some of them with blue eyes and light hair, had acquired most of the tribal wealth. Even though they still had to share their power with the full-bloods, they held at least 40 percent of the Cherokee government posts. Although the majority of the white blood in members of the tribe came from the male side, an 1824 Cherokee Nation census noted seventy-three white women as the spouses of Cherokee men, and 147 white men as husbands of Cherokee women.
The impact of the mixed-bloods and the influence of Christian missionaries became increasingly evident. Charles Hicks, one of our tribe’s mixed-blood leaders and author some of the first written Cherokee laws, adopted by the tribal council in 1808, was the chief who gave his approval to the establishment of churches and schools in Cherokee communities. “Our very existence depends upon it,” Hicks reportedly told a missionary.
Early on in the nineteenth century, some of our people’s spiritual needs were ministered to by various white missionaries, starting with a small group of Moravians who established a mission in Georgia in 1801. Other white Christian missionaries—Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Quaker—all anxious to “save the savages,” soon moved into our homeland. They built churches and mission schools where, in most instances, academic lessons were supplemented with an abundance of hymn singing, public prayers, and Scripture readings.
How can we trust you? When Jesus Christ came on earth, you killed him and nailed him to a cross.
Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, 1810
In 1819, as part of the government’s commitment to “civilize” all native people, Congress authorized an annual sum of $10,000 to the War Department to support and promote the civilization of Indians by employing “capable persons of good moral character, to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic.” Without fail, our tribe received the largest proportion of this fund each year. The five schools in the Cherokee Nation in 1809 had increased to eighteen by 1825, with the enrollment climbing from ninety-four to 314 students. There also were many mission schools, where besides the “three Rs,” the standard curriculum included Bible and catechism study. Graduates of the mission schools, mostly those with more white than Cherokee blood, often were sent to colleges or academies in New England.
Typical of the religious literature of that era was a tract entitled A Discourse or Lecture on the subject of Civilizing the Indians, in which is exhibited a New Plan to Effect their Civilization and to Meliorate their Condition. Published in 1826 in Washington, D.C., by the Reverend J. Darneille, former rector of Amherst Parish, Virginia, the thirty-six-page pamphlet sold for a dollar per copy, a tidy sum in those days. The author, mindful of marketing strategy, explained up front that “if the intrinsic value of the work be overrated, yet you will have the pleasure of making this small donation to civilize and instruct the Indians; to remunerate and return to them, in this way, some indemnity for the fair and fertile country which you now possess and enjoy on the shores of the Atlantic, their rightful inheritance, from which their ancestors were driven by ours, and for which, in justice to them, your sympathy for their sufferings, and your bounty for their relief, can never be misapplied.”
Darneille’s primary intent in publishing the slim volume was to suggest the establishment of a missionary school and farm among the Old Settler Cherokees living in Arkansas. He also proposed taking his own family to the Cherokee Nation West so he could oversee the Indian school and preach the gospel to the “heathens.” If Darneille would have had access to a time machine to make a forward journey to 130 years later in Oklahoma, he unquestionably would have fit right in with those “Bless Your Heart” ladies in Adair County. And no doubt those ladies—dressed to the nines for all to see—would have been in the first-row pew of his church every Sunday morning. Like those opinionated Oklahoma ladies, the pious Reverend Darneille had nothing but sympathy for the Cherokees, a sympathy that reflected his patronizing concern for what he perceived to be our “plight.”
Darneille and the other sanctimonious do-gooders of that period did not have the slightest clue about the workings of the Native American culture and belief system. “The scourge of their lives pursue and seem to afflict them even after death,” Darneille wrote in his treatise. “Nature prompts the survivors to bury their dead, but of this they are deprived for want of instruments to open the earth. They, therefore, enclose the body with bark, and suspend it as high as they can on a tree.”
The Reverend Darneille’s pamphlet was not published in Cherokee, although by 1826, the Cherokee syllabary, publicly demonstrated a few years earlier, had been printed for the first time.
Most historians credit Sequoyah, the most famous Cherokee, with the invention of the syllabary. However, some oral historians contend that the written Cherokee language is much, much older. But even if there was an ancient written Cherokee language, it was lost to the Cherokees until Sequoyah developed the syllabary. The development of the syllabary was one of the events which was destined to have a profound influence on our tribe’s future history. This extraordinary achievement marks the only known instance of an individual creating a totally new system of writing.
Born in the 1770s in the Cherokee village of Tuskegee on the Tennessee River, Sequoyah was a mixed-blood whose mother, Wureth, belonged to the Paint Clan. Sometimes the young man was known by his English name, George Gist or Guess, a legacy from his white father. Sequoyah, reared in the old tribal ways and customs, became a hunter and fur trader. He was also a skilled silver craftsman who never learned to speak, write, or read English. However, he was always fascinated with the white people’s ability to communicate with one another by making distinctive marks on paper—what some native people referred to as “talking leaves.”
Handicapped from a hunting accident and therefore having more time for contemplation and study, Sequoyah supposedly set about to devise his own system of communication in 1809. He devoted the next dozen years to his task, taking time out to serve as a soldier in the War of 1812 and the Creek War. Despite constant ridicule, criticism from friends and even family members, and accusations that he was insane or practicing witchcraft, Sequoyah became obsessed with his work on the Cherokee language.
It is said that in ancient times, when writing first began, a man named Moses made marks upon a stone. I, too, can make marks upon a stone. I can agree with you by what name to call those marks and that will be writing and can be understood.
Attributed to Sequoyah
Some historians say that ultimately Sequoyah determined the Cherokee language was made up of particular clusters of sounds and combinations of vowels and consonants. The eighty-five characters in the syllabary represent all the combination of vowel and consonant sounds that form our language. In 1821, Sequoyah’s demonstration of the system before a gathering of astonished tribal leaders was so dramatically convincing that it promptly led to the official approval of the syllabary.
Within several months of Sequoyah’s unveiling of his invention, a substantial number of people in the Cherokee Nation reportedly were able to read and write in their own language. Many mixed-bloods were already literate in English, but the syllabary made it possible for virtually everyone in the Cherokee Nation, young and old, to master our language in a relatively short period of time.
The Christian missionaries opposed the new syllabary at first, but later saw how it could be used to further their conversion work. Soon, they made sure that laboriously copied Cherokee translations of the Bible and other religious works were being distributed among our people. Our tribal council was resolved to put the syllabary to good use in other ways also. Stimulated by this achievement, our entire tribe advanced rapidly, much to the chagrin of those whites who still regarded all native people, even those with “book learning,” as pests who stood in the way of the whites’ progress.
In 1827, the Cherokee council appropriated funding for the establishment of a national newspaper. Early the following year, the hand press and syllabary characters in type were shipped by water from Boston and transported overland the last two hundred miles by wagon to our capital of New Echota, established two years before in Georgia. Elias Boudinot, whose true name was Buck Watie, or Galagina, “the Buck,” was selected as the first editor. Formally educated in Connecticut, Watie took the name Elias Boudinot after becoming friends with a Revolutionary War hero of the same name, who had written a book claiming that the Cherokees were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
The inaugural issue of the newspaper, Tsa la gi Tsu lehisanunhi or the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in parallel columns in Cherokee and English, appeared on February 21, 1828. It was the first Indian newspaper published in the United States.
The name given to the newspaper was a fitting choice. The power of that mythical bird—which was swallowed by flames but rose from its ashes—reminds us of the Cherokees’ eternal flame. It has come through broken treaties, neglected promises, wars, land grabs, epidemics, and tribal splits. According to our legend, as long as that fire burns, our people will survive.
We would now commit our feeble efforts to the good will and indulgence of the public … hoping for that happy period when all the Indian tribes of America shall arise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes, and when the terms “Indian depredation,” “war whoop,” “scalping knife,” and the like, shall become obsolete.
Elias Boudinot’s first editorial
Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828
A written Cherokee Constitution, adopted on July 26, 1827, by a convention of elected delegates from the eight districts whose representatives had gathered at New Echota, was produced in both languages on the new national printing press. Modeled after the United States Constitution, the document provided for three branches of government, two legislative houses, a legal system that included a supreme court and jury system for trials, and a national police force to enforce our written laws. It boldly proclaimed the existence of an independent Cherokee Nation with complete dominion over our tribal lands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama.
Some of our people frequently single out the many positive events of the late 1820s as the high point of the Cherokee Renaissance, from the conclusion of our war with the Creek people in 1814 to the mid-1830s. In terms of lifestyle and culture, the Cherokees had a highly developed society, as opposed to the largely ignorant frontier riffraff in the South, made up of many whites who envied Indian achievements, coveted their land and, generally, treated them as savages. The great majority of white political leaders and citizens from Georgia—the nerve center of the Cherokee Nation—had no respect for native people. They found the concept of “civilized” Indians and the notion of Cherokees forming their own republic most offensive; such radical ideas only served to undercut the proposed federal removal policy.
More important to the white Georgians, gold was discovered in July of 1828 on Ward’s Creek near the present town of Dahlonega, not far from New Echota in the heart of Cherokee country. De Soto’s dream seemed to be coming true. The discovery of gold caused even more of a stampede of white settlers into the region. More than ever, the whites clamored for the removal of the Indians. Georgia’s political vanguard immediately began to draft restrictive legislation. Our tribal leaders did not dare to admit it, but the fate of the Cherokee Nation was sealed. The old myth about Rabbit and his Wolf enemies suddenly applied. But this time, Wolves were all around, and Rabbit’s song and dance did not divert the enemies’ attention. Even trying to act like Wolves and mimicking their way of life did not work. Wolves pressed in, and Rabbit had no place to run.
Besides the discovery of gold, Georgians remained alarmed because of the adoption of the written Cherokee Constitution asserting that our people were independent and had complete jurisdiction over our own territory. A further complication for our people loomed on the horizon—the election of Andrew Jackson as president of the United States in 1828. An intensely ambitious Tennessean and proud son of the southern frontier, the cunning Jackson was a seasoned “Indian fighter,” an outspoken advocate of Indian removal, and a well-known antagonist of the Cherokees.
Just a month before “Old Hickory” won the presidential election in November of 1828, John Ross—the primary author of our constitution and a tireless guardian of Cherokee rights—was elected as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, an office he would be reelected to until his death in 1866. Although only one-eighth Cherokee, Ross always will be remembered as one of our most remarkable chiefs, a dedicated and beloved leader who became the hope of the Cherokees as the whites swept our people forever from our rightful land.
Ross was born in 1790 at Turkeytown in what is now northern Alabama. His mother was Molly McDonald, a quarter-blood Cherokee and the daughter of the Tory agent among the Chickamaugas. Ross’s father was Daniel Ross, a Scottish immigrant who was traveling through Cherokee country on a trading mission before the American Revolution when he encountered a war party of Dragging Canoe, the fearless Chickamauga warrior. The warriors spared Daniel Ross’s life and made him a member of the Cherokee Nation. Two years later, he married Molly. John was their oldest son, the third of nine children.
Even though John Ross was seven-eighths Scottish, it is important to note that the influence of the United States government in the area of identifying Indians by degrees of native blood had not yet had its effect on our tribe. To the Cherokee mind at that time, one’s identity as Cherokee depended solely on clan affiliation. Ross’s mixed-blood mother was a Cherokee by definition because she and her sisters were members of the Bird Clan. Cherokee children belong to their mother’s clan and retain membership for life, so Ross, too, was a Cherokee of the Bird Clan.
