Mankiller, page 4
At last “Beaver’s Grandchild,” the little Water-beetle called Dayunisi, offered to leave the sky and investigate the water below. Water-beetle darted in every direction over the water’s surface, but could not find any place to rest. So the beetle dived to the bottom of the sea and returned with soft mud, which began to grow and spread until it became known as earth.
The earth eventually became a great island floating in the sea of water. It was suspended from the heavens at each of the four principal points by cords which hung from the sky vault. The myth keepers claimed that when the earth grows old and wears out, the cords will become weak and break and the earth will sink into the ocean and everything will die. All will be water again.
After the Water-beetle returned to the sky rock and told the others about what he had done, the creatures sent out the Great Buzzard, grandfather of all buzzards, to find a place for them to live. The new earth was wet and soft and flat. The Buzzard soared low, searching for a suitable place. He grew tired, and as his huge wings dipped and struck the pliable earth, deep valleys were created. When the bird rose in the sky, his flapping wings formed ridges and mighty mountains. This is what would become Cherokee country.
At last the earth dried and the creatures came down, but it was still dark, so they convinced the sun to move overhead every day from east to west. But the sun was so hot that Tsiskagili, the Crawfish, scorched his shell a bright red, and his meat was spoiled. Then the conjurers moved the sun higher in the sky, and at last they positioned it seven handbreadths high, just below the sky arch. This became what the soothsayers called “the seventh height,” or the highest place. To this day the sun moves along below this arch, and then returns every night on the upper side to the starting point.
When all the animals and plants were created, they were told to stay awake and keep vigil for seven nights. They tried their best to do this, and nearly all of them remained awake the first night. But the next night several dropped off to sleep, and by the third night even more were asleep. This continued until the seventh night, when only the owl, the panther, and a few others were still awake. Because they did not succumb to sleep, they were given the power to see in the dark. Of the trees, only the pine, the spruce, the cedar, the holly, and the laurel remained awake seven nights. They were allowed to remain always green and were considered to be the best plants for medicine. Unlike the other trees, they were also allowed to keep their hair throughout the winter. This was their gift.
Human beings were created after the animals and plants. There were several versions of the story of how the first humans were made. It was said by some of the old Cherokees that in the beginning there were only a brother and sister, and that the man touched the woman with a fish and told her to multiply. In seven days she bore a child. She continued to do this every seven days until the earth became crowded. Then it was deemed that a woman should have only one child each year.
It is said that the first red man was called Kanati, or the Lucky Hunter. The first woman was named Selu, or Corn, and she was also red. So these red mortals—the first human beings—came to be called Yunwiya, the real people.
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As with many other native peoples, we Cherokees have differing versions of our genesis story. Beyond the many theories of how we originated are debates about how we came to be called Cherokee.
When I studied or listened to the creation stories, I learned that the proper name by which we originally called ourselves is Yunwiya or Ani-Yunwiya, in the third person, which means “Real People” or “Principal People.” The names by which many tribes are known today were given to them by white explorers and trappers. For example, Nez Percé is a French phrase meaning “those with pierced noses.” But the Nez Percés called themselves Nimipu, meaning “the People.” The Iroquois, the Delawares, and the Pawnees all called themselves by names that also meant “the People” or “Real People.” And the people of the Dine (Navajo) Nation, when they refer to themselves, prefer the word Dineh, which means “the People.”
Ancient Delawares in the Southeast called the Cherokee people Allegans. Cherokees were known to the Shawnees as the Keetoowahs. This was a variant spelling of Kituhwa, the name of an ancient Cherokee settlement on the Tuckasegee River in what is known today as North Carolina. According to our storytellers, it was one of the “seven mother towns” of our tribe. The inhabitants were called Ani Kituhwagi, or “people of Kituhwa,” and they seemed to have exercised considerable influence on all the other towns along the Tuckasegee and the upper part of the Little Tennessee. Sometimes the name was used by other tribes as a synonym for Cherokee, most likely because the Kituhwa guarded the Cherokee northern frontier. Many years later, just before the start of the Civil War, the word resurfaced among our people residing in Indian Territory and was given as the name of a powerful secret society, commonly spelled Keetoowah in English.
Some scholars believe the word Cherokee is derived from the Muskogean word tciloki, which means “people of a different speech.” Others claim that Cherokee means “cave people” or “cave dwellers” because several early tribes lived in an area full of caves. This derivation is from the Choctaw chiluk ki, or “cave people,” alluding to the many caves in the mountain country where the Cherokees lived. The Iroquois called us Oyata ge ronon, “inhabitants of the cave country.” Some of the other tribal people gave our people a name that meant “mountaineers” or “uplanders.”
We have found that the name Cherokee has been spelled at least fifty ways throughout history. Most historians agree that the name is a corruption of Tsa lagi. It first appears as Chalaque in the Portuguese description of de Soto’s expedition, published in 1557. Then our name shows up as Cheraqui in a 1699 French document, and in the English form as Cherokee in 1708.
As far back as anyone knows, our early people were, indeed, mountaineers, people who lived in the Allegheny region in what is now the southeastern United States. They made their homes in parts of the present states of North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and West Virginia. They lived in this region so long that some of our origin stories have taken on a local character. For example, one of those early Cherokee stories is an explanation of the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range of about eighty peaks more than five thousand feet high near the junction of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Our people hunted in these mountains and considered them sacred.
In spite of that tribal sense of our genesis in the Southeast, others believe that our Cherokee ancestors migrated south from somewhere around the Great Lakes. This theory is based largely on linguistic evidence, because we speak an Iroquoian tongue related to the languages of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas—all tribes that formed the Iroquois League. Others point to the tribal history of the Delawares, which describes a long, protracted war in which the Cherokees were ultimately driven south. Still other students of America before the Europeans came make a case for our people having come from South America, tracing a long migration trail north, then east, then south, finally stopping in the Great Smoky Mountain region. There is even one legend from our Cherokee oral tradition that seems to support that particular theory. This legend says the Cherokees originated on an island off the South American coast.
Little is certain except that when the Europeans arrived in the Americas, our people had been in their home in the Smoky Mountains for a great many years. Most likely our ancestors were mound builders.
As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors.
Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
God Is Red
A tale from our oral tradition suggests that there was once an ancient hereditary society called the Ani-Kutani. This society kept to itself a great deal of sacred knowledge, and controlled the spiritual functions of the tribe. This group eventually became too omnipotent and abused its sacred powers. Then, as the story goes, the people rebelled against its members and overthrew them. But for as long as we can tell, there was no central ruling clan or society. Our people lived in autonomous villages scattered over their southeastern domain. There is some evidence that each town had a war chief and a peace chief, sometimes called a Red Chief and a White Chief, charged respectively with the external and internal affairs of government. Each chief had a council of advisers.
Although many of the details of how our governments worked are not perfectly clear, it is certain that Cherokee women played an important and influential role in town government. Women shared in the responsibilities and rights of the tribal organization. Our Cherokee families were traditionally matrilineal clans. In general, women held the property, including the dwelling and garden. Women also maintained family life and farmed, while the men spent much of their time away on the hunt or in warfare. Early European observers made disparaging remarks such as, “Among the Cherokees, the woman rules the roost,” and “The Cherokees have a petticoat government.” It is said that when Ada Kulkula, or Little Carpenter, attended a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, he was astonished to find no white women present. He even asked if it were true that “white men as well as Red were born of women.”
There was also a very powerful woman who is alternately described as the Ghigau or Beloved Woman. The name may be a corruption of giga, or blood, and agehya, or woman. If so, the title might be phrased more accurately as “Red Woman” or “War Woman.”
Whatever the case, prior to European contact and the influence of the whites on our culture, women played a prominent role in the social, political, and cultural life of the Cherokees. Nancy Ward, Ghigau of the Cherokees, participated in a May 1817 tribal council meeting at which she presented a statement signed by twelve other women pleading with the Cherokee people not to give up any more land.
Precious few non-Indian people are aware of the role native women played in ancient tribal societies. Written records of tribal people have been taken from the notes and journals of diplomats, missionaries, explorers, and soldiers—all men. They had a tendency to record observations of tribal women through their relationships to men. Therefore, tribal women have been inaccurately depicted, most often as drudges or ethereal Indian princesses.
In our tribal stories, we have heard of a Women’s Council, which was headed by a very powerful woman, perhaps the Ghigau. This oral history is frequently discredited by Western historians as “merely myth.” I have always found their repudiation fascinating. An entire body of knowledge can be dismissed because it was not written, while material written by obviously biased men is readily accepted as reality. No wonder our written history speaks so often of war but rarely records descriptions of our songs, dances, and simple joys of living. The voices of our grandmothers are silenced by most of the written history of our people. How I long to hear their voices!
Because enemy tribes surrounded us, we found it necessary to be militaristic. Women even occasionally accompanied men to the battlefield as warriors. We were also profoundly religious, believing that the world existed in a precarious balance and that only right or correct actions kept it from tumbling. Wrong actions could disturb the balance.
Sometimes when our people were not careful or let down their guard, that balance was unsettled. That is just what occurred when the Cherokee people became more acculturated and adopted more of the values of the Europeans who invaded and infiltrated their country. Europeans brought with them the view that men were the absolute heads of households, and women were to be submissive to them. It was then that the role of women in Cherokee society began to decline. One of the new values Europeans brought to the Cherokees was a lack of balance and harmony between men and women. It was what we today call sexism. This was not a Cherokee concept. Sexism was borrowed from Europeans.
Probably the first Europeans our people ever saw were those in the company of Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who landed in Florida in 1539. Flush from conquests of native tribes in Peru, he and his men wandered northward through our highland villages and other Indian communities, kidnapping tribal leaders to ensure safe passage. In 1542, de Soto died, presumably of fever, in his camp on the banks of the Mississippi River. The following year, the remainder of de Soto’s exhausted party, led by Luis de Moscoso, limped back to Mexico. Twenty-six years later, the Spaniards of the expedition led by Captain Juan Pardo arrived in Cherokee country.
The European intruders might as well have been from a different planet. Long before those white men made contact with our tribe, the Cherokees had developed a complex culture and society. The Spanish narratives from that period are unclear and sometimes contradictory. Either we somehow managed to fare better with the Spanish than other tribes did, or else all of that experience was suppressed by the Cherokee wisdom keepers and not included in the oral recitations of our history.
What is known is that the Spanish “explorers,” as many of us as schoolchildren were taught to call these invaders, were some of the most brutal and barbaric of the Europeans who invaded the “New World,” as the whites called it. In their fruitless quest for gold and mineral riches, these enforcers of the notorious Spanish Inquisition mistreated and antagonized all the native people they happened upon in a zealous attempt to convert them to Christianity.
The lands that these Europeans invaded was hardly a “New World.” Yet even today, there are people who believe that this vast domain called America was nothing but a wild and virgin land just waiting for the advent of the wise and superior Europeans to tame and domesticate it. In 1492, there were more than seventy-five million native people in the Western Hemisphere, with six million of those residing in what is now the United States. They spoke two thousand languages, and had been part of thriving civilizations long before the coming of Columbus. This rich culture of the native people nonetheless was demolished methodically and ruthlessly within a historically short period. The time for suffering had begun.
[Columbus] makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.
Indian activist Russell Means, 1991
The Spanish conquest must be repudiated. Celebrating it would be shameful and the justification of a massacre.
Ecuador Indian leader Manuel Castro, 1991
That is why I thought it was very sad, in 1992, when so many people wished to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. There were festivals, parades, seminars, motion pictures, and many attempts to summarize the monumental changes North America has undergone since 1492. It is doubtful that many Americans even paused to reflect on the true history of the continent—that of indigenous people who have lived on this land since time immemorial. The so-called Columbus discovery, which is indeed a myth, launched an era of cultural decimation and murder. Columbus and those who followed him are responsible for genocide, slavery, colonialism, cultural plunder, and environmental destruction. There was no “discovery.” Nor was it an “encounter.” That is also wrong. The “discovery” was, in fact, wholesale rape, theft, and murder.
From the moment we realized 1992 would be the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, we knew we couldn’t overlook it. We live in a state with the largest concentration of both Native Americans and Native American tribes in the country. We would have to ignore, literally, the history of more than 250,000 Oklahomans not to know there was an America before Columbus.
Jeanne M. Devlin, editor
Oklahoma Today, May–June 1992
But who can blame most Americans for forgetting or never knowing about native people? Who can fault them for not knowing about the high degree of organization and democracy many tribal cultures had attained prior to the invasion of Europeans? There is such a woeful absence of accurate information about native people, either historical or contemporary, that it is little wonder this void has been filled with negative stereotypes from old western movies and romanticized paintings. One friend of mine, a Seneca scholar, once remarked that many people have a mental snapshot of native people taken three hundred years ago, and they want to retain that image.
In the quarter century following the arrival of Columbus on Hispaniola, the island’s native population plummeted from five hundred thousand to only five hundred. Contemporary historians estimate that North America aside, the Spanish conquerors slaughtered twelve million to nineteen million native people in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America in the first four decades of the sixteenth century. The invaders proved to be just as lethal on this continent. Since these purportedly God-fearing men—whose forebears in the name of God had been responsible for the Crusades and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain—could find no biblical reference to any people with red-toned skin, they believed that the natives were not human beings at all, but savages or merely some sort of animal. It was open season. Killing and maiming Indians with lances, crossbows, and packs of the terrifying perros de guerra, or war dogs, were considered great sport.
The Almighty seems to have inspired these people [Indians] with a weakness and softness of humor like that of lambs, and the Spanish who have given them so much trouble, and fallen upon them so fiercely, resemble savage tigers, wolves and lions when enraged with pressing hunger.
They laid wagers with one another, who should cleave a man down with his sword most dexterously at one blow; or who should take his head from his shoulders most cleverly; or who should run a man through after the most artificial manner: they tore away children from their mothers’ arms and dashed out their brains against the rocks.… They set up gibbets, and hanged up 13 of these poor creatures in honor of Jesus Christ and his 12 apostles. They kindled a great fire under those gibbets to burn those they had hanged upon them.
