Native American Cultural Assessment: The Cherokee

The word Cherokee comes from a Creek word "Chelokee" meaning "people of a different speech." In their own language the Cherokee called themselves the Aniyunwiya or "principal people" or the Keetoowah, "people of Kituhwa."

The Cherokee are perhaps one of the most interesting of Native American Groups. Their life and culture are closely intertwined with early American settlers and the history of our own nation’s struggle for freedom. In the interest of promoting tolerance and peace, and with regard to the United States government’s handling of Native affairs, their story is one that is painful, stoic, and must not be forgotten.

The Cherokee people were a large and powerful tribe. The Cherokees' Macro-Siouan- Iroquoian language and their migration legends demonstrate that the tribe originated to the north of their traditional Southeastern homelands. Linguists believe that the Cherokee migrated from the Great Lakes area to the Southeast over three thousand years ago. The Cherokee language is a branch of the Iroquoian language family, related to Cayuga, Seneca, Onondega, Wyandot-Huron, Tuscarora, Oneida and Mohawk. Original locations of the Cherokee were the southern Appalachian Mountains, including western North and South Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, southwest Virginia, and the Cumberland Basin of Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern Alabama. The Cherokee sometimes refer to themselves as Ani-Kituhwagi, "the people of Kituhwa". Kituhwa was the name of an ancient city, located near present Bryson City, NC, which was the center of the Cherokee Nation.

Long before Columbus discovered the "New World" or Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto arrived, the Cherokee territory stretched from the Ohio River to the north, and southward into Georgia and Alabama. Their homelands extended over 135,000 square miles. Cherokee villages had populations of about 350 to 600 persons. Before contact with Europeans, families built round, earth-covered homes for the winter. For the warmer summers they built larger, rectangular homes. The rectangular homes had upright poles forming a framework. The outer covering was bark, wood or woven siding coated with earth and clay.

The Cherokee were primarily an agricultural people. They relied heavily on corn, beans, and squash, supplemented by hunting and the gathering of wil...

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...r near the North Carolina reservation. Cherokee tribal governments have fairly liberal membership standards compared to other tribes. Some population estimates exceed 370,000, which would make the Cherokee the largest Native American group in the United States

It is amazing that through European epidemics, attempts to assimilate eradicate and remove, that any Cherokee are left today. Despite all they have endured and lost, Cherokee levels of education and living standard ranks among the highest of all Native American tribes. I am proud to be an American citizen. I am also especially proud that my Mother’s Great-Grandmother, a descendant of Trail of Tears survivors, was Cherokee.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Thomas E. Mails, The Cherokee People: The Story of the Cherokees from Earliest Origins to Contemporary Times

Merwyn S. Garbarino, Native American Heritage

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians http://www.charweb.org/neighbors/na/cherokee.htm James Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees

Morris L. Wardell, A Political History of the Cherokee Nation 1838-1907

Collier, Peter. When Shall They Rest? The Cherokees' Long Struggle with America