Cherokee
Cherokee (pronounced CHAIR-uh-key). The name comes from the Creek word chelokee, which means “people of a different speech.” The Cherokee refer to themselves as Ani'-Yun'wiya', meaning “the real people” or “the principal people,” or Tsalagi, which comes from a Choctaw (see entry) word for “people living in a land of many caves.” The tribe's original name was Kituwah, which is why the traditional group calls itself the United Keetoowah Band.
Location. The Cherokee originally lived in parts of eight present-day southeastern states: North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. In the early twenty-first century, the tribal lands of the Cherokee Nation spanned 124,000 acres throughout fourteen counties in northeastern Oklahoma. Although the territory is not a reservation, the U.S. government holds it in trust and considers it a Jurisdictional Service Area. By the 2000s, most Cherokee lived in northeastern Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Population. In 1674, the Cherokee population was estimated to be around 50,000. From the mid-1600s to the 1730s, the population had dropped to about 25,000. In the 1990 U.S. Census, 369,979 people identified themselves as Cherokee. By the 2000 census, that number had decreased to 281,069. Many people also claim some Cherokee blood; 729,533 people said they have a Cherokee ancestor. The 2010 census counted 284,247 Cherokee, with a total of 819,105 people claiming some Cherokee ancestry, making it the largest tribal grouping in the United States. In 2011, the Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission showed a tribal enrollment of 299,862 for the Cherokee Nation and one of 14,300 for the United Keetoowah Band.
Origins and Group Affiliations. Many historians believe that the very early ancestors of the Cherokee moved from territory that is now Mexico and Texas to the Great Lakes region. Between three thousand to four thousand years ago, after enduring conflicts with the Iroquois and the Delaware (see entries) tribes, the Cherokee moved again—this time to the southeastern part of the present-day United States. Their traditional enemy was the Chickasaw (see entry) tribe. By the early 2000s, three major tribal groups and more than fifty other organizations in at least twelve states claimed to have Cherokee origins.
Before the arrival of Europeans in their territory in 1540, the Cherokee were an agricultural people numbering about 50,000 who controlled 40,000 square miles (103,600 square kilometers) of land. Over the years, the tribe lost many of its people to wars and to diseases brought by the settlers. The Cherokee became known as one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” along with the Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole nations (see entries). Settlers coined this term because these groups had formed institutions that American culture valued, such as constitutional governments and school systems. This, however, did not help the Cherokee and their allies when settlers wanted their land.
During the nineteenth century, the U.S. government forced many Cherokee to move westward, away from their homeland on the sad journey known as the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee formed a new government and school systems in Indian Territory, but the U.S. government abolished those when the state of Oklahoma was created in 1907. In spite of these tragedies, the Cherokee went on to become the largest Native American group in the United States and to enjoy a high standard of living.
Entry from UXL Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes
Books & eBooks
Center Places and Cherokee Towns by ISBN: 0817387722Publication Date: 2015-08-01Examines how architecture and other aspects of the built environment, such as hearths, burials, and earthen mounds, formed center places within the Cherokee cultural landscape In Center Places and Cherokee Towns, Christopher B. Rodning opens a panoramic vista onto protohistoric Cherokee culture. He posits that Cherokee households and towns were anchored within their cultural and natural landscapes by built features that acted as "center places." Rodning investigates the period from just before the first Spanish contact with sixteenth-century Native American chiefdoms in La Florida through the development of formal trade relations between Native American societies and English and French colonial provinces in the American South during the late 1600s and 1700s. Rodning focuses particularly on the Coweeta Creek archaeological site in the upper Little Tennessee Valley in southwestern North Carolina and describes the ways in which elements of the built environment were manifestations of Cherokee senses of place. Drawing on archaeological data, delving into primary documentary sources dating from the eighteenth century, and considering Cherokee myths and legends remembered and recorded during the nineteenth century, Rodning shows how the arrangement of public structures and household dwellings in Cherokee towns both shaped and were shaped by Cherokee culture. Center places at different scales served as points of attachment between Cherokee individuals and their communities as well as between their present and past. Rodning explores the ways in which Cherokee architecture and the built environment were sources of cultural stability in the aftermath of European contact, and how the course of European contact altered the landscape of Cherokee towns in the long run. In this multi-faceted consideration of archaeology, ethnohistory, and recorded oral tradition, Rodning adeptly demonstrates the distinct ways that Cherokee identity was constructed through architecture and other material forms. Center Places and Cherokee Towns will have a broad appeal to students and scholars of southeastern archaeology, anthropology, Native American studies, prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee culture, landscape archaeology, and ethnohistory.
Deconstructing the Cherokee nation : town, region, and nation among eighteenth-century Cherokees by ISBN: 0813038200Publication Date: 2011This significant contribution to Cherokee studies examines the tribe's life during the eighteenth century, up to the Removal. By revealing town loyalties and regional alliances, Tyler Boulware uncovers a persistent identification hierarchy among the colonial Cherokee.
Monuments to Absence by ISBN: 9781469630847Publication Date: 2017-02-02The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.
Sustaining the Cherokee Family by ISBN: 9780807834992Publication Date: 2011-09-26During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. In Sustaining the Cherokee Family, Rose Stremlau illuminates the impact of this policy on the Cherokee Nation, particularly within individual families and communities in modern-day northeastern Oklahoma. Emphasizing Cherokee agency, Stremlau reveals that Cherokee families' organization, cultural values, and social and economic practices allowed them to adapt to private land ownership by incorporating elements of the new system into existing domestic and community-based economies. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including Cherokee and United States censuses, federal and tribal records, local newspapers, maps, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral histories, Stremlau demonstrates that Cherokee management of land perpetuated the values and behaviors associated with their sense of kinship, therefore uniting extended families. And, although the loss of access to land and communal resources slowly impoverished the region, it reinforced the Cherokees' interdependence. Stremlau argues that the persistence of extended family bonds allowed indigenous communities to retain a collective focus and resist aspects of federal assimilation policy during a period of great social upheaval.
