Cherokee history is the written and oral lore, traditions, and historical record maintained by the living Cherokee people and their ancestors. In the 21st century, leaders of the Cherokee people define themselves as those persons enrolled in one of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, The Cherokee Nation, and The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians.
The first live predominantly in North Carolina, the traditional heartland of the people; the latter two tribes are based in what is now Oklahoma, and was Indian Territory when their ancestors were forcibly relocated there from the Southeast. The Cherokee people have extensive written records, including detailed genealogical records, preserved in the Cherokee language which is written with the Cherokee syllabary, and also in the English language.
Origins
The Cherokee are members of the Iroquoian language-family of North American indigenous peoples, and are believed to have migrated in ancient times from the Great Lakes area, where most of such language families were located. The migration is recounted in their oral history. They established a homeland in the Southeastern Woodlands, an area that includes present-day western Virginia, southeastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia. In the late eighteenth century, the Cherokee moved further south and west, deeper into Georgia and Alabama.
The Mississippian culture was a civilization that influenced peoples throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and into the Southeast. It was marked by dense town sites and extensive construction of platform mounds and other earthworks, used for religious and political purposes, and sometimes elite residences or burials.
In the Cherokee homeland of what is now western North Carolina, prehistoric platform mounds have been identified archeologically as built during the periods of the Woodland and South Appalachian Mississippian cultures, by peoples who were ancestral to the historic Cherokee. The Mississippian culture was influential here beginning about 1000 CE, later than further north. Also, rather than large settlements featuring multiple mounds, in this homeland, most settlements with mounds featured one. They were often surrounded by smaller villages.
According to Benjamin A. Steere and the Western North Carolina Mounds and Towns Project, in association with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and University of Georgia, as the historic Cherokee developed in this area, they began to create a different kind of public architecture, one that emphasized large townhouses standing on top of the mounds. During the next centuries, the Cherokee would add to or replace the townhouses and also maintain and enlarge the mounds in the process.
Cherokee culture shows association with Pisgah phase archeological sites, which were part of the Southern Appalachian Mississippian culture in this region. Artifacts from historic Cherokee towns also featured iconography from the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex. This is believed likely to have been due to Cherokee assimilation of regional survivors during the expansion of this people.
Corn is traditionally central to the religious ceremonies of the Cherokee, especially the Green Corn Ceremony. This tradition was shared with other Iroquois-language tribes, as well as with the Creek, Choctaw, Yuchi, and Seminole of the Southeast.
European contact
In 1540, at the time of the Hernando de Soto expedition, the Southeastern Woodlands region was inhabited by peoples of several mound-building cultures.
By the 1720s, the powerful Cherokee were well established at the southern end of the Great Appalachian Valley, having displaced the Muscogee Creek and other tribes.Brown, John P. "Eastern Cherokee Chiefs." Chronicles of Oklahoma. Vol. 16, No. 1, March 1938. (retrieved 21 Sept 2009) Other indigenous peoples also occupied territory and villages in Eastern Tennessee. For instance, the Long Hunter colonial expeditions of the 1760s recorded encountering Yuchi and Siouan-speaking traders and villages.
The Cherokee are believed to have settled more deeply into Georgia and Alabama in the late eighteenth century.
A Cherokee myth recorded in the late 18th century says that a "Moon-eyed people" had lived in the Cherokee regions before they arrived. The group was described in 1797 by Colonel Leonard Marbury to Benjamin Smith Barton. According to Marbury, when the Cherokee arrived in the area, they had encountered a "moon-eyed" people who could not see in the day-time.
Early culture
Much of what is known about pre-19th century Cherokee culture and society comes from the papers of American writer John Howard Payne. The Payne papers describe the oral account by Cherokee elders of a traditional societal structure in which a "white" organization of elders represented the seven clans. According to Payne, this group, which was hereditary and described as priestly, was responsible for religious activities such as healing, purification, and prayer. A second group of younger men, the "red" organization, was responsible for warfare. Because warfare was considered a polluting activity, the priestly class conducted purification ceremonies of participants before they could reintegrate into normal village life. This hierarchy had disappeared long before the 18th century. The reasons for the change have been debated, with the origin of the decline traced to a revolt by the Cherokee against the abuses of the priestly class known as the Ani-kutani. ("Aní-" is a prefix referring to a group of individuals, while the meaning of "kutáni" is unknown).Irwin 1992.
Early American ethnographer James Mooney, who lived with and studied the Cherokee in the late 1880s, was the first to write about the decline of the former hierarchy in relation to this revolt.Mooney (1900/1995), Myths of the Cherokee, p. 392. By the time Mooney lived with the Cherokee, their development of religious practitioners was more informal. It was based more on individual knowledge and ability than upon heredity.
Another major source of early cultural history comes from materials written in the 19th century by the didanvwisgi (Cherokee:ᏗᏓᏅᏫᏍᎩ), Cherokee medicine men, using the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah in the 1820s. Initially only the didanvwisgi used these materials, which were considered extremely powerful. Later, the writings were widely adopted by the Cherokee people.
Unlike most other Indians in the American southeast at the start of the historic era, the Cherokee spoke an Iroquoian language. Since the Great Lakes region was the core of Iroquoian-language speakers, scholars have theorized that the Cherokee migrated south from that region. However, some argue that the Iroquois all migrated north from the southeast, with the Tuscarora breaking off from that group during the migration and settling in North Carolina. Linguistic analysis shows a relatively large difference between Cherokee and the northern Iroquoian languages, suggesting a split between the peoples in the distant past. Glottochronology studies suggest the split occurred between about 1,500 and 1,800 B.C.Glottochronology from: Lounsbury, Floyd (1961), and Mithun, Marianne (1981), cited in Nicholas A. Hopkins, The Native Languages of the Southeastern United States.
The Cherokee identify their ancient settlement of Kituwa on the Tuckasegee River, formerly next to and now part of Qualla Boundary (the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), as the original Cherokee settlement in the Southeast.
16th century: Spanish contact The first known Cherokee contact with Europeans was in late May 1540, when a Spanish expedition led by Hernando de Soto passed through Cherokee country near present-day Embreeville, Tennessee, which the Spaniards referred to as Guasili. De Soto's expedition visited many of the villages later identified as Cherokee in Georgia and Tennessee. It recorded a Chalaque nation as living around the Keowee River where present-day North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia meet.Mooney New infectious diseases carried by the Spaniards and their animals decimated the Cherokee and other Eastern tribes, who had no immunity.Hill, 65
A second Spanish expedition came through Cherokee country in 1567 led by Juan Pardo. He was seeking an overland route to Mexican silver mines; the Spanish mistakenly thought the Appalachians were connected to a range in Mexico. Spanish troops built six forts in the interior southeast, including at Joara, a Mississippian culture chiefdom. They also visited the Cherokee towns Nikwasi, Estatoe, Tugaloo, Conasauga, and Kituwa, but ultimately failed to gain dominion over the region and retreated to the coast.Hill, 66–67 The Native Americans rebelled against their efforts, killing all but one of the garrison soldiers among the six forts. Pardo had already returned to his base. The Spanish did not try to settle this area again.
17th century: English contact
Regular encounter with English colonists began to take place in the mid-17th century. In 1650 the Cherokee were estimated to have a population of 22,500 persons, living primarily in independent towns and smaller villages along the river valleys of the South Appalachian Mountains in parts of present-day eastern Tennessee, the western parts of what are now defined as the states of North Carolina and South Carolina, and northeastern Georgia. Their territory had an area of approximately 40,000 square miles (100,000 square km).
The first Anglo-Cherokee contact may have been in 1656, when English settlers in Virginia Colony recorded that six to seven hundred "Mahocks, Nahyssans and Rechahecrians" had encamped at Bloody Run, located on the eastern edge of present-day Richmond, Virginia. A combined force of English and tributary Pamunkey drove them off, but the Pamunkey chief Totopotomoi was slain in the battle. While the first two named groups are considered to be Virginia Siouan, the identity of the Rechahecrians has been much debated. Historians have noted that the name closely resembles that of the Eriechronon, commonly known as the Erie tribe, an Iroquoian people who had been driven away from the southern shore of Lake Erie in 1654 during the Beaver Wars by the powerful Iroquois Five Nations based to the east. Anthropologist Martin Smith theorized that remnants of the Erie migrated to Virginia after the wars. (1986:131–32) Robert J. Conley (Cherokee) and a few other historians have suggested that the Erie were identical to the Cherokee, but this view does not have a consensus.Robert J. Conley, A Cherokee Encyclopedia, University of New Mexico Press, 2007, p. 3 Although believed to have been Iroquoian, the Erie language was too scarcely documented for linguists to fully place its relationship to Cherokee or other Iroquoian languages.
In 1673, fur trader Abraham Wood from Fort Henry (modern Petersburg, Virginia) sent two English traders, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur, to the Overhill Cherokee country on the west side of the Appalachians. Wood hoped to forge a direct trading connection with the Cherokee to bypass the Occaneechi people in Virginia, who acted as middlemen on the Trading Path. The two Virginia colonists likely made contact with the Cherokee. Wood called the people Rickohockens in his book of the expedition. The map accompanying the book, showed the Rickohockens occupying all of present-day southwestern Virginia, southeastern Kentucky, northwestern North Carolina and the northeastern tip of Tennessee. These areas on both sides of the Appalachian Mountains have been considered the homelands of the Cherokee, together with western South Carolina and northeastern Georgia.