Nancy Ward: Beloved Woman of the Cherokee
Put quote about 'do we not all live under same sky, etc.' imposed over a picture of polk county
Polk County, Tennessee
Once I lived and worked in Southeastern Tennessee and sometimes my work would take me into the small county of Polk County on Tennessee's eastern border. It's a lovely part of Tennessee, with few people and flowing streams, home to the white water events of the 1996 Summer Olympics, and the Cherokee National Forrest. I always made every excuse I could in my work to visit this location.
All of the towns in Polk County are small. They have names like Turtletown, Ducktown and Copperhill. The largest town in the whole county is Benton, population about 1300. That's the county
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seat. Driving into Benton on my trips to Polk County, I always passed a small monument with a marker with these words: "Nancy Ward. High priestess of the Cherokee and always loyal friend of white settlers, is buried on the ridge to the west. She repeatedly prevented massacres of white settlers and several times rescued captives from death at the hands of her people." I was always intrigued by Nancy Ward's story, the "Beloved Woman of the Cherokee".
Becoming a Ghigau, Beloved Woman of the Cherokee
Nancy Ward was born in 1738 in Chota ( Cherokee City of Refuge) in Eastern Tennessee, in what is today Monroe County, just north of Polk County. She was named Nan'yehi, meaning "one who goes about". Her mother was a member of the Wolf Clan of the Cherokee. Less is known about her father, perhaps because Cherokee society was matriarchal. Her mother's brother, Attakullakulla, would have been much more important in her life than her father. Some reports say her father was a British officer named Ward and others report he was a member of the Delaware tribe.
In 1751 Nan'yehi married Kingfisher another Cherokee. She fought with him in several battles. During one battle with the Creeks, Nan'yehi joined Kingfisher, laying behind a log to chew his bullets and make the edges jagged and more deadly. When Kingfisher was killed in this battle, she picked up his rifle and continued the fight, leading her people to victory.
Because of her bravery during this battle, Nan'yehi was given the title of Ghigau, which means Beloved Woman of the Cherokee. In addition to the honor this title represented, it also meant she was allowed to sit in the councils of the Cherokee and help make
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decisions. Becoming Nancy Ward As white settlers moved into Cherokee lands, Nan'yehi became convinced that the Cherokee should peacefully coexist with them. As a Ghigau, she became an ambassador and negotiator with the settlers. When the European colonists built a fort in the Cherokee area, the settlers and Cherokee traded and became friends. It wasn't uncommon for the Cherokee women to marry these white settlers. A few years after the death of her first husband, Kingfisher, Nan'yehi married Bryant Ward, an English trader. Ward already had a European wife living back in South Carolina, but he also took Nan'yehi as his wife and lived with her for several years. They had a daughter, Betsy, and Nan'yehi became Nancy Ward. Bryant Ward later returned to live with his family in South Carolina, but he continued to visit Nancy from time to time through the years. Peacemaker Living with Bryant Ward and becoming familiar with the ways of the white settlers, Nancy became convinced that the best path for the Cherokee people was to learn to coexist with them. Other Cherokee leaders, however, did not agree with this approach. One of those vehemently opposed to assimilation was her cousin Dragging Canoe, son of her maternal uncle, Attakullakulla, chief of the tribe and the most important male in Nan'yehi's life. The struggles of the Cherokee people at that time were embodied in these two cousins taking opposite approaches: One advocating for peaceful coexistence, the other for violent opposition to the encroachment of the European settlers who kept taking away their land. In the end, neither won. In 1776, Dragging Canoe, urged on and supported by the British, made plans to attack white settlers in Cherokee country. When Nancy Ward became aware of these plans she sent word to the white settlers to warn them, thwarting his plans. Her motives for betraying her people are unclear, but she is reported to have said, "The white men are our brothers. The same house shelters us and the same sky covers us all". Nancy's warnings did not stop the warring activities of Dragging Canoe and his fellow warriors however. When the warring parties captured two of the white settlers and brought them back to the village, she stepped in to try to save their lives. The first of the settlers, a man, was burned at the stake in spite of her protests. The second settler, a woman named Lydia Bean, was then tied to the stake and preparations made to light the fire when Nancy stepped in, pleaded for her life, and stopped the execution. After saving her life, Nancy brought Lydia Bean to her home and cared for her for some time. While living with Nancy, Lydia Bean taught her and her family how to make butter and cheese. Nancy then bought her own cattle and introduced dairy farming to the Cherokee economy. War and Peace Nancy Ward's effort at peacemaking continued, but so did the warfare between the Cherokee and the settlers.
At times, even though she did not stop the fighting, Nancy's family would be spared when the settlers attacked the Cherokee villages. Once when her whole village was captured, she and her family were spared.
In 1781, the settlers ordered the Cherokee to conduct a peace treaty and selected Nancy Ward to lead these negotiations. She spoke passionately in her efforts to bring about peace between the two factions, and as a result the settlers became less demanding in the negotiations and allowed the Cherokee to keep some of their land.
All of these peace negotiation ended in 1788, however, when a Cherokee chief was killed. Conflicts continued but some of the Cherokee people continued their attempts to assimilate into the new culture even though they were losing their lands at the hands of these settlers.
End of Ghigaus
One of the results of this assimilation with the white settlers was that the Cherokee society became more patriarchal and Nancy Ward's pleas for peace were less credible. No one was interested in listening now to an aging woman. The Beloved Woman's words didn't hold as much weight. She was the last Beloved Women of the
Cherokees. As an elderly woman, Ward cared for orphans in her homeland and was called "Granny Ward" until the lands where she grew up were sold and she was forced to move. The last three years of her life she ran an inn for travelers in her homeland. Nancy Ward died in 1822. She had fought bravely as a Cherokee, married a white settler, become a peacemaker between the whites and Native Americans, and befriended many white settlers. Less than ten years after her death, The Indian Removal Act was signed in to law by President Andrew Jackson. In 1838, as the deadline for removal approached, thousands of volunteers entered the territory and forcibly relocated the Cherokees. They hunted, imprisoned, raped, and murdered the Cherokees. Those surviving these horrors were forced on a 1,000-mile march to the established Indian Territory with few provisions. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this “Trail of Tears.” I've often wondered what would have happened to Nancy Ward, High Priestess of the Cherokee and always loyal friend of white settlers, during this time. Would she have remained in her ancestral home or would she have had to walk the long, tearful trail? Would the monument honoring her, placed there by the Nancy Ward Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1923, be standing in Polk County today? Lessons to Be Learned If Nancy Ward's attempts at peaceful coexistence had been more successful what would present day Polk County look like? It's now 96% white with a poverty rate of about 20 %. Would this beautiful land be richer if these two cultures had learned to peacefully coexist? Would both be better off? Are there lessons for us in present day America? Is diversity a good thing?
Native Americans have been fighting till this day for freedom. Millions of Native Americans have lost their lives fighting for freedoms and their lands. So far, not much have been done to the Native Americans and they have not achieved everything they had hoped for. Most Native Americans are still living on reservations and government are doing little to help them. A book titled “Lakota Women” by Mary Crow Dog takes us into the lives of the Native Americans, her childhood, adulthood, and her experiences of being an Indian woman.
At the time of Nampeyo's birth, Hopi pottery was indebted to the styles and designs of the Zuni people. The exact year or date of Nampeyo's birth is unknown, but thought to be between 1856 and 1860. In Hopi custom, the father's mother, grandmother names the baby. So, Nampeyo was originally named Tcu-mana or Snake Girl, but the Tewa people call her Nampeyo, which she is known as today. Nampeyo and Tcu-mana are identical in meaning. She had three brothers leaving her the only girl in her family. One of Nampeyo's brothers, Tom Polocca, would later play an influential role in helping her become discovered as an expert Hopi potter.
Shoemaker, Nancy. “ Native-American Women in History.” OAH Magazine of History , Vol. 9, No. 4, Native Americans (Summer, 1995), pp. 10-14. 17 Nov. 2013
Owen, Narcissa, and Karen L. Kilcup. A Cherokee woman's America memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831-1907. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
In the essay, “The Trail of Tears” by author Dee Brown explains that the Cherokees isn’t Native Americans that evaporate effectively from their tribal land, but the enormous measure of sympathy supported on their side that was abnormal. The Cherokees process towards culture also the treachery of both states and incorporated governments of the declaration and promises that contrived to the Cherokee nation. Dee Brown wraps up that the Cherokees had lost Kentucky and Tennessee, but a man who once consider their buddy named Andrew Jackson had begged the Cherokees to move to Mississippi but the bad part is the Indians and white settlers never get along together even if the government wanted to take care of them from harassment it shall be incapable to do that. The Cherokee families moved to the West, but the tribes were together and denied to give up more land but Jackson was running for President if the Georgians elects him as President he agreed that he should give his own support to open up the Cherokee lands for establishment.
When Mary was seventeen, she met and married John Musgrove, Jr., who was a colonel sent to visit the Creeks and set up a peace treaty with them by South Carolina's governor. He had a heritage much like Mary's; he had a Native American mother and a colonial landowner father. The Musgroves started out living on Creek land but ended up moving to Pomponne, where John's estate was located. In 1732, they...
In March of 1768, in present-day Ohio, Tecumseh was born. Tecumseh's name means "Panther in the sky." Tecumseh was the fifth born in his family. His mom, Methotaske, was a Creek, and his dad, Puckeshinewa, was a Shawnee. He excelled at the game's Indian boys played. He also organized other boys to go on hunts. When Tecumseh was younger he admired and looked up to the warriors, like his older brother. He also tried to be like the warriors. Later in his life, Tecumseh became a powerful chief to the Native American Tribe, the Shawnee's. He did not want the Americans to take the Native American's land. He accomplished many things in his life.
Tecumseh ,Shawnee war chief, was born at Old Piqua, on the Mad River in western Ohio. In 1774, his father, Puckeshinwa, was killed at the Battle of Point Pleasant, and in 1779 his mother, Methoataske, accompanied those Shawnees who migrated to Missouri, later died. Raised by an older sister, Tecumpease, Tecumseh would play war games with other fellow youths in his tribe. Tecumseh accompanied an older brother, Chiksika, on a series of raids against frontier settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee in the late 1780’s. Chiksika had a vision that he would not survive the battle at Buchanan’s station he went ahead as plan and attacked the stockade and was mortally wounded and was carried from the battle field and the dying warrior asked not to be buried but to be placed on a hill. Tecumseh and the other’s retreated back to a Cherokee village where most went back to Ohio while Tecumseh and some other warriors stayed behind. After that Tecumseh went on mostly hunting but occasionally attacking settler’s. After that moved back towards home and come to find out that the Shawnee’s had moved on to where it’s much safer. The battle of Fallen Timber’s broke confidence in British assistance as well as many casualties. Pissed off by the Indian defeat, he refused to sign the Treaty of Greenville (1795). In the 1800’s Tecumseh began to show signs of a prominent war chief. He led a group of yong Indian warriors to a village on the White River in east-central Indiana. There in 1805 Lalawethika ex...
She was the daughter of Wahunsenacah. The most important Powhatan Indian was Chief Powhatan. His real name is Wahunsonacah. Chief Powhatan was named as the leader of the Powhatan Confederacy. Chief Powhatan was actually more like a European king than a traditional Algonquian chief.
In 1783, the American Revolution ended. Since most of the Cherokees helped the British in the Revolutionary War, the Americans needed to make peace with them. Then in1785, the treaty of Hopewell was signed (Perdue 8). This was a peace treaty between the Cherokee and the Americans. This treaty defined the Cherokees’ boundaries and it gave them the right to get rid of unwanted settlers. The states of Georgia and North Carolina ignored this treaty. The people of these states expanded into Cherokee land, and the Cherokees continued to resist.
Lakota Woman Essay In Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Dog argues that in the 1970’s, the American Indian Movement used protests and militancy to improve their visibility in mainstream Anglo American society in an effort to secure sovereignty for all "full blood" American Indians in spite of generational gender, power, and financial conflicts on the reservations. When reading this book, one can see that this is indeed the case. The struggles these people underwent in their daily lives on the reservation eventually became too much, and the American Indian Movement was born. AIM, as we will see through several examples, made their case known to the people of the United States, and militancy ultimately became necessary in order to do so.
The Creek Indians, one of the Five Civilized Tribes, “was composed of many tribes, each with a different name.” The Creeks formed a loose confederacy with other tribes before European contact, “but it was strengthened significantly in the 1700s and 1800s.” The confederacy “included the Alabama, Shawnee, Natchez, Tuskegee, as well as many others.” There were two sections of Creeks, the Upper and Lower Creeks. The Lower Creeks occupied land in east Georgia, living near rivers and the coast. “The Upper Creeks lived along rivers in Alabama.” Like many other Native Americans, ...
7. Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore. Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 2003. Print.
Perdue stated that prior to America 's involvement in Cherokee society, Cherokee women had a voice in Cherokee government and they were respected. She mentioned that it was a Cherokee woman who wrote to Benjamin Franklin in contemplation of negotiating peace with the new American nations. This anecdote indicated traditional Cherokee women’s political status in Cherokee society and their involvement in deciding major decisions of the nation, and women were the leading roles in resisting American’s potential invasion. Perdue went on explaining that the political influence come from “their maternal biological role in procreation and their maternal role in Cherokee society, …” in which women were the major economic sources that support families and they were women who represented their kins in negotiating with American
As white settlers poured across the mountains, the Cherokee tried once again to compensate themselves with territory taken by war with a neighboring tribe. This time their intended victim was the Chickasaw, but this was a mistake. Anyone who tried to take something from the Chickasaw regretted it, if he survived. After eleven years of sporadic warfare ended with a major defeat at Chickasaw Oldfields (1769), the Cherokee gave up and began to explore the possibility of new alliances to resist the whites. Both the Cherokee and Creek attended the 1770 and 1771 meetings with the Ohio tribes at Sciota but did not participate in Lord Dunnmore's War (1773-74) because the disputed territory was not theirs. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British government scrambled to appease the colonists and negotiate treaties with the Cherokee ceding land already taken from them by white settlers. To this end, all means, including outright bribery and extortion, were employed: Lochaber Treaty (1770); and the Augusta Treaty (1773) ceding 2 million acres in Georgia to pay for debts to white traders. For the same reasons as the Iroquois cession of Ohio in 1768, the Cherokee tried to protect their homeland from white settlement by selling land they did not really control. In the Watonga Treaty (1774) and the Overhill Cherokee Treaty (Sycamore Shoals) (1775), they sold all of eastern and central Kentucky to the Transylvania Land Company (Henderson Purchase).