Cherokee Indian Quotes

May the warm winds of heaven blow softly upon your house. May the Great Spirit bless all who enter there. May your mocassins make happy tracks in many snows, and may the rainbow always touch your shoulder.

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.

Before you judge a person you have to walk in their moccasins and live in their lodge for a month.

the medicine wheel is inside of you it not in a pile of stones the medicine wheel is inside the heart and body

There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.

The Cherokee lives as a natural part of his environment and strives to complement it, not subdue or dominate it. It’s an Indian philosophy that is playing an increasing role in everyone’s life now that we realize that natural resources are limited and imbalance between man’s technology and nature is perilously close to disaster. —HUEY P. LONG, CHEROKEE

In a series of rulings known as the Marshall Trilogy, the court affirmed the rights of the Cherokee and ruled the removal of Indians unlawful. Andrew Jackson did it anyway.

The council works for the best interest of the whole. Decisions from past councils are weighed to carefully consider the effect of any new proposal, following the self-governing tenets of the Cherokee Indian tribe in eastern America, which made no decision until the effects of that decision were considered for seven generations into the future. The Gathering itself is a participatory workshop in self-government.

In the 1830s, the forced removal of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles from the fertile lands of the southeastern United States, under the direction of President Andrew Jackson, amassed even more land for cotton cultivation and expansion of the wealth of white people. As Native Americans made the involuntary treks to what would become Indian Country or Oklahoma, white Americans dislocated approximately one million African Americans through the domestic slave trade, moving them from the Upper South to the Lower South and westward, destroying families, and severing community ties in order to create plantations and cultivate cotton.

As Cherokee writer Thomas King says, “Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.

The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart’s heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business . . . a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

Four wonderful books on early Creek and Cherokee histories are Michael Green’s The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis; Claudio Saunt’s A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816; Theda Purdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866; and Angela Pulley Hudson’s Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without Indigenous peoples’ consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad companies and various municipal and state bonds. For instance, the Cherokee national fund and the Muskogee Creek Orphan Fund were so invested. Indigenous leaders were well aware of these practices but were powerless to stop them.

Appalachia, an Indian name meaning “Endless Mountains”, is well suited to the land. The Appalachians are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, and were at one time higher in elevation than the Himalayas are today. The territory was originally home to many of the eastern Indian tribes, including the Iroquois, the Mohicans, the Cherokee and the Shawnee.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

On October 1, 1838, the first detachment set out in what was to be known as the Trail of Tears. As they moved westward, they began to die—of sickness, of drought, of the heat, of exposure. There were 645 wagons, and people marching alongside. Survivors, years later, told of halting at the edge of the Mississippi in the middle of winter, the river running full of ice, “hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground.” Grant Foreman, the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokees died. In December 1838, President Van Buren spoke to Congress: It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.

Grant Foreman, the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokees died. In December 1838, President Van Buren spoke to Congress: It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects.

In Indian Medicine, energy is a continuum that does not change. We as energy beings have our own special vibration, and we connect with other energy by a process of phasing our energy into our center or spirit self, then emerging or opening our hands to receive the energy of the Universal Circle. Instead of seeing energy as just being work, the elder teachers consider it associated with each of the Four Directions as physical, mental, spiritual, and natural. It can be directed, interfered with, and taught.

Early farming villages worldwide were much less authoritarian places than later societies. But the Indians of the eastern seaboard institutionalized their liberty to an unusual extent—the Haudenosaunee especially, but many others, too. (“Their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty,” said colonist James Adair of the Ani Yun Wiya [Cherokee].) Important historically, these were the free people encountered by France and Britain—personifications of democratic self-government so vivid that some historians and activists have argued that the Great Law of Peace directly inspired the U.S. Constitution.

Before this, the Cherokees had, like Indian tribes in general, done without formal government. As Van Every puts it: The foundation principle of Indian government had always been the rejection of government. The freedom of the individual was regarded by practically all Indians north of Mexico as a canon infinitely more precious than the individual’s duty to his community or nation. This anarchistic attitude ruled all behavior, beginning with the smallest social unit, the family. The Indian parent was constitutionally reluctant to discipline his children. Their every exhibition of self-will was accepted as a favorable indication of the development of maturing character. . . .

Your father doesn't like me," Charley said to Wesley later when Wesley had gotten them away from the crowd. "Father doesn't seem to like anyone," Wesley said. "Don't let it worry you." "But you brought me to his house. I don't like to be in the home of someone who doesn't like me." "But my brother Skylar claims it is his home, and I believe that Skylar does like you," Wesley said. "He's Indian like you." "Yes. We are both Cherokees. What is Skylar's clan?" "I believe I've heard him say that it's Wolf." "Then we are related. I'm Wolf clan." "That's amazing, Charley. So you and my brother are related. Does that make us related too?" "I don't think so, Wesley, because the relationship is through our mothers." "Well, that's too bad. I would like to be your brother.

A striking example from the history of writing is the origin of the syllabary devised in Arkansas around 1820 by a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah, for writing the Cherokee language. Sequoyah observed that white people made marks on paper, and that they derived great advantage by using those marks to record and repeat lengthy speeches. However, the detailed operations of those marks remained a mystery to him, since (like most Cherokees before 1820) Sequoyah was illiterate and could neither speak nor read English. Because he was a blacksmith, Sequoyah began by devising an accounting system to help him keep track of his customers’ debts. He drew a picture of each customer; then he drew circles and lines of various sizes to represent the amount of money owed. Around 1810, Sequoyah decided to go on to design a system for writing the Cherokee language. He again began by drawing pictures, but gave them up as too complicated and too artistically demanding. He next started to invent separate signs for each word, and again became dissatisfied when he had coined thousands of signs and still needed more. Finally, Sequoyah realized that words were made up of modest numbers of different sound bites that recurred in many different words—what we would call syllables. He initially devised 200 syllabic signs and gradually reduced them to 85, most of them for combinations of one consonant and one vowel. As one source of the signs themselves, Sequoyah practiced copying the letters from an English spelling book given to him by a schoolteacher. About two dozen of his Cherokee syllabic signs were taken directly from those letters, though of course with completely changed meanings, since Sequoyah did not know the English meanings. For example, he chose the shapes D, R, b, h to represent the Cherokee syllables a, e, si, and ni, respectively, while the shape of the numeral 4 was borrowed for the syllable se. He coined other signs by modifying English letters, such as designing the signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively. Still other signs were entirely of his creation, such as , , and for ho, li, and nu, respectively. Sequoyah’s syllabary is widely admired by professional linguists for its good fit to Cherokee sounds, and for the ease with which it can be learned. Within a short time, the Cherokees achieved almost 100 percent literacy in the syllabary, bought a printing press, had Sequoyah’s signs cast as type, and began printing books and newspapers. Cherokee writing remains one of the best-attested examples of a script that arose through idea diffusion. We know that Sequoyah received paper and other writing materials, the idea of a writing system, the idea of using separate marks, and the forms of several dozen marks. Since, however, he could neither read nor write English, he acquired no details or even principles from the existing scripts around him. Surrounded by alphabets he could not understand, he instead independently reinvented a syllabary, unaware that the Minoans of Crete had already invented another syllabary 3,500 years previously.

It was late afternoon, and only six men were left loitering about the depot. My brother, Sam, was one of them. He wore overalls and a plaid shirt. His hair was cut in the high-right and low-left style that most of the young men wore. He was neither the tallest nor the shortest man on the platform. What set him apart from the others was his light complexion and the sandy-brown color of his hair. He looked like, and was often mistaken for, a white man, although everybody in Pakersfield knew he was Negro. Probably the only person who did not know he was colored was our mother. She took pleasure in categorizing her children by race. Mushy, Harvey, Sam, and Martha Jean were her white children. Tarabelle, Wallace, and Laura were Indians - Cherokee, no less. Edna and I were Negroes.

So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present. Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.” Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.” Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?” Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating. “What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked. “Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not. “Go ahead,” he said. “The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.” Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected. “Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?” He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.

In the U.S. Articles of Confederation, the federal government gave itself the exclusive right to regulate “the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians.” This power was repeated in the 1790 Trade and Intercourse Act, which further refined “trade” and “affairs” to include the purchase and sale of Indian land. The intent of these two pieces of legislation was clear. Whatever powers states were to have, those powers did not extend to Native peoples. Beginning in 1823, there would be three U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Johnson v. McIntosh, Cherokee v. Georgia, Worcester v. Georgia—that would confirm the powers that the U.S. government had unilaterally taken upon itself and spell out the legal arrangement that tribes were to be allowed. 1823. Johnson v. McIntosh. The court decided that private citizens could not purchase land directly from Indians. Since all land in the boundaries of America belonged to the federal government by right of discovery, Native people could sell their land only to the U.S. government. Indians had the right of occupancy, but they did not hold legal title to their lands. 1831. Cherokee v. Georgia. The State of Georgia attempted to extend state laws to the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee argued that they were a foreign nation and therefore not subject to the laws of Georgia. The court held that Indian tribes were not sovereign, independent nations but domestic, dependent nations. 1832. Worcester v. Georgia. This case was a follow-up to Cherokee v. Georgia. Having determined that the Cherokee were a domestic, dependent nation, the court settled the matter of jurisdiction, ruling that the responsibility to regulate relations with Native nations was the exclusive prerogative of Congress and the federal government. These three cases unilaterally redefined relationships between Whites and Indians in America. Native nations were no longer sovereign nations. Indians were reduced to the status of children and declared wards of the state. And with these decisions, all Indian land within America now belonged to the federal government. While these rulings had legal standing only in the United States, Canada would formalize an identical relationship with Native people a little later in 1876 with the passage of the Indian Act. Now it was official. Indians in all of North America were property.

{Excerpt from a message from one of the Cherokee chiefs - Onitositaii, commonly known as Old Tassle} ... 'If, therefore, a bare march, or reconnoitering a country is sufficient reason to ground a claim to it, we shall insist upon transposing the demand, and your relinquishing your settlements on the western waters and removing one hundred miles back towards the east, whither some of our warriors advanced against you in the course of last year's campaign. Let us examine the facts of your present eruption into our country, and we shall discover your pretentions on that ground. What did you do? You marched into our territories with a superior force; our vigilance gave us no timely notice of your manouvres [sic]; your numbers far exceeded us, and we fled to the stronghold of our extensive woods, there to secure our women and children. Thus, you marched into our towns; they were left to your mercy; you killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals, spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased, and returned again to your own habitations. If you meant this, indeed, as a conquest you omitted the most essential point; you should have fortified the junction of the Holstein and Tennessee rivers, and have thereby conquered all the waters above you. But, as all are fair advantages during the existence of a state of war, it is now too late for us to suffer for your mishap of generalship! Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. Indeed, much has been advanced on the want of what you term civilization among the Indians; and many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manners, and your customs. But, we confess that we do not yet see the propriety, or practicability of such a reformation, and should be better pleased with beholding the good effect of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or reading your papers to us upon such subjects. You say: Why do not the Indians till the ground and live as we do? May we not, with equal propriety, ask, Why the white people do not hunt and live as we do? You profess to think it no injustice to warn us not to kill our deer and other game for the mere love of waste; but it is very criminal in our young men if they chance to kill a cow or a hog for their sustenance when they happen to be in your lands. We wish, however, to be at peace with you, and to do as we would be done by. We do not quarrel with you for killing an occasional buffalo, bear or deer on our lands when you need one to eat; but you go much farther; your people hunt to gain a livelihood by it; they kill all our game; our young men resent the injury, and it is followed by bloodshed and war. This is not a mere affected injury; it is a grievance which we equitably complain of and it demands a permanent redress. The Great God of Nature has placed us in different situations. It is true that he has endowed you with many superior advantages; but he has not created us to be your slaves. We are a separate people! He has given each their lands, under distinct considerations and circumstances: he has stocked yours with cows, ours with buffaloe; yours with hogs, ours with bear; yours with sheep, ours with deer. He has indeed given you an advantage in this, that your cattle are tame and domestic while ours are wild and demand not only a larger space for range, but art to hunt and kill them; they are, nevertheless, as much our property as other animals are yours, and ought not to be taken away without consent, or for something equivalent.' Those were the words of the Indians. But they were no binding on these whites, who were living beyond words, claims ...

Julia Bradshaw was part Cherokee Indian. She was small and dark and the inscrutability of her eyes hinted at enigmas a man might unravel would he take the time to try. Bloodworth was to learn that it is the nature of an enigma to remain unsolved, and that inscrutability means just what it says.

We should not blindly follow traditions—there’s no learning in that. We need to understand them. —Overhill Cherokee Indian saying

Elvis’ form of B matches Chickasaws, Choctaws and Creeks.

Elvis Presley was born and grew up in Tupelo, on the edge of Chickasaw country. But his maternal ancestor Nancy Burdine came from Kentucky in Cherokee territory. His remote female ancestor could have been either Chickasaw or Cherokee.

In conclusion, there may be a reason why Elvis claimed to be Jewish and Native American and loved Hawaii.

More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

The Eastern and Western Cherokees live thousands of miles from each other. Yet, many ties remain, through family, friends, and a shared culture. In the beginning, for both, there were Kana'ti and Selu, from whom the Cherokees learned the importance of balance and harmony. They also developed an ability to adapt and change as was needed. Maintaining their culture while absorbing many features of the modern world, the Principal People have created a perfect harmony between their thousand-year-old past and their diverse present.

When the Sky Woman was pleased with this new world, the Creator sent First Man down to be her husband and help her care for the new land. At first they were happy, but eventually they began to argue. After one particularly bitter argument, Sky Woman grabbed her belongings and walked away from her husband. “I am going to find somewhere else to live,” she said. “You are lazy and you ignore me all the time.” She turned her back on him and left. Soon, First Man began to regret his harsh words, and he tried to catch up with his wife so he could apologize. But after struggling to reach her, he realized that she was simply too far ahead of him. He cried to the Creator, “Slow her down, Creator! I want to tell her how much she means to me!” The Creator heard his cries and answered, “Is her soul one with yours?” “We have been one since time began,” First Man answered. “We have been one since you breathed life into us, and we will remain one until the end of time.” The Creator was touched by the man’s words, and he intervened to stop her. As the woman walked, he caused plants to grow at her feet to slow her down. On one side of her, blackberries sprang up, and on the other, huckleberries, but she avoided them and walked on. He made gooseberries and serviceberries grow on either side of her, but she kept going. Finally the Creator grabbed a handful of strawberry plants that were growing in his garden and cast them down in front of her, where they began to bloom and ripen. The berries looked so good, Sky Woman paused to try one. As she picked and ate the berries, her anger disappeared, and while she filled her basket with the fruit, she began to wish that her husband was there to share it with her. Just then, First Man appeared, his heart full of gladness to have found his wife. With a smile, she took a strawberry from her basket and placed it in his mouth. He smiled with pleasure and gave thanks to the Creator. Together they returned home hand in hand, eating strawberries along the way.

Probably the best-known images of any Cherokee are those of Sequoyah, who is virtually always pictured wearing what appears to be a turban and blue jacket of European design. Both were, in fact, common clothing among Cherokee of that era, though not the tribe’s original dress. Although some have claimed the turban as evidence of pre-European contact by Arabs, the real origin of the outfit was more recent. When the first delegation of Cherokee visited England, the tattooed heads and bodies of the men were deemed too savage and frightening for their audience with the Royal Family. To cover up these markings, they were given English smoking jackets and turbans, such as those worn by the Muslim servants of the royal household. For whatever reason, these styles caught on among the people of the Five Civilized Tribes and continue to be part of cultural dress among the Cherokee.

By the time the settlers and pioneers of America reached the West Coast, they had gone through many dramatic landscapes, but nothing quite prepared them for the size of the California redwoods. The giant trees led to many disputes, including the very name that should be applied to them. In 1853, British botanists proposed to name the trees Wellingtonia gigantea and called them “Wellingtonias” in honor of the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. They justified the name on the grounds that the greatest tree in the world should bear the name of the greatest general in the world. Fortunately, the Americans resisted this choice and supported instead a native American name. Conservationists felt that so great a tree should not be named for a military general. They proposed instead the name Sequoia sempervirens, “evergreen Sequoia,” in honor of the man who invented a way of writing the Cherokee language and worked hard to promote literacy among his people. Both the coastal redwoods and the giant redwoods of the Sierra Nevada bear the genus name Sequoia, in honor of one of the greatest Indian intellectuals and leaders of the nineteenth century.

During World War One, our country had used other Indians, Cherokees and Chickasaws, to send messages in their own language to confuse the enemy.

Grampa pulled off his lucky hat and sank into the recliner. Before long, he was snoring like a rusty hymn. 'Zzzzzz . . .' Uncle Leonard tossed Ray over one shoulder and hauled him into the kitchen, where the smell of frying bacon filled the air. 'Any fish today?” Aunt Wilhelmina asked. 'Yes, ma’am,” Ray said, 'but that’s not all we caught.' Uncle Leonard sat Ray down. 'What else was there?” 'Something bigger' is all that Ray would say.

As of 2015 only a dozen of the then 567 federally recognized tribal nations recognize same-sex marriage...Other tribes, however, have explicitly restricted same-sex marriage (all following the passage of DOMA), including the Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, and Iowa Tribe. Although Congress could pass a statute that affects Indian Country Lindsay Roberson...considers it highly unlikely, given the federal government's relatively hands-off support for tribal governance. Within the Navajo context, this issue has brought about deep debate about the nature of tradition. Joanne Barker has written about the battles over same-sex marriage in Navajo Nation (as well as Cherokee Nation). She documents how the tribal legislation bans and defense of them affirm the discourses of U.S. nationalism, especially in their Christian and right-wing conservative forms. IN these cases, the tribal nation's exercise of sovereignty and self-determination replicates the relations of domination and dispossession that resemble the U.S. treatment of Native Peoples.

Indian removal, Marshall’s ruling was the

This story of Indian Medicine begins with the many stories that were shared by many elder Native American teachers. There is a simple innocence about the complex nature of Nature. As a Nachez Medicine Elder once said to me, “It (Nature) is as it always was, but we as humans try to change it to make it ours. In fact, we are the younger, ’cause Nature was here before us. So we must honor Nature, and in doing so, we honor our ancestors who realized the critical balance we have with all things.

During the years it took to remove the Five Civilized Tribes, the Indians underwent great hardships. By 1838 the bulk of the proud Cherokee Nation had been rounded up, often at gunpoint, from their farms in Georgia and Tennessee and herded west. More than 14,000 Cherokees were relocated. Most were forced to make the 800-mile trek on foot. During the six-month journey one-fourth of the Cherokees died. Forever, this infamous forced march would be known as “the Trail of Tears.

At this time, 1890, we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race. Truth is, the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed.   Future generations will read and condemn the act and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter.

However, murder is murder whether committed by the villain skulking in the dark or by uniformed men stepping to the strains of martial music.   Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the 4000 silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile.

Upon its passing, the Indian Removal Act effectively kicked out almost 125,000 Native Americans, mostly from the Cherokee nation, from their ancestral homes in Georgia, and sent the people, both young and old, trekking thousands of miles on foot towards their new settlements in Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 Native Americans died, either through exhaustion, hunger, or exposure, while on the way to Oklahoma. This huge number of casualties is what led to this forced exodus to get the moniker “The Trail of Tears.

Of course, numerous Native Americans were averse to the new law that forced them to leave their homes, one of which was the Cherokee tribe. The Cherokees tried to fight the Indian Removal Act. They filed a case against the entire state of Georgia, and it eventually found its way to the Supreme Court where Justice John Marshall declared that the government had no right to claim the Cherokee’s ancestral lands as its own. Unfortunately, President Jackson overruled this declaration and allowed it to push through.

Reverend Samuel Worcester was released from a Georgia prison, after serving four years of hard labor for speaking out against the mistreatment of Cherokee Indians.

The Cherokees had 1,200 miles to go before they reached eastern Oklahoma, the end of the trek they would forever be remembered as the Trail of Tears. As their homeland disappeared behind them, the cold autumn rains continued to fall, bringing disease and death. Four thousand shallow graves marked the trail. Marauding parties of white men appeared, seized Cherokee horses in payment for imaginary debts, and rode off. The Indians pressed on, the sullen troopers riding beside them. They

Hawk’s on his way,” Anderson said. “Kelly wants him to have a look around before the rest of the gang gets here.” Dockendorf sighed. “You talkin’ about the new guy, from Oklahoma of all places, Daniel Fishinghawk, the crime scene genius? What do you know about him?” Anderson answered, “Rumor has it that his background is Cherokee Indian — though you could never tell by looking at him. I’ve heard he’s smart as hell — could be in Mensa if he wanted — a speed reader who digests over five books a week —” “I’m sick of that guy,” Dockendorf interrupted. “He makes the rest of us look bad. So he’s gotten lucky on a few cases. So what?

Anywhere he went in the town he could hear water running. Beulah had told him Yuneetah was the white man’s corruption of an Indian word for the spirit of the river. She said the Cherokees who once lived on its shores had called it Long Man, with his head in the mountains and his feet in the lowlands.

The Indian was a gentleman named Sequoyah, somewhat older than the young Wilsons and their friends. He nodded soberly to Jamie, and swinging the bundle off his shoulder, laid it on the ground at Jamie’s feet, saying something in Cherokee.

Twenty-one months after her admission, Lockwood became the first woman to participate in oral argument at the Court. She next and last argued before the Court in 1906. She was then seventy-five. Using the skill she had gained over a thirty-year span in her specialty—pressing money claims against the United States—she helped to secure a five-million-dollar award for Eastern Cherokee Indians whose ancestral lands had been taken from them without just compensation.

Almost as soon as he was inaugurated, Jackson waged war against the Cherokee people with such savagery (he recommended, amongst other things, that Cherokee women and children should be killed as part of policy of extermination) that he was given the nickname “Indian Killer” in the U.S. administration. His policy proved popular with the American people, and he was re-elected to serve a second term as president in 1832.

It passed laws forbidding any Indian to engage “12in digging for gold in said land, and taking therefrom great amounts of value, thereby appropriating riches to themselves which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state.” They passed a law that further denied Indians rights in a court, declaring that an Indian cannot testify at a trial involving white men; that no Indian testimony was valid without at least two white witnesses; that no Indian contract was valid without at least two witnesses. They voted through a bill making it unlawful “13for any person or body of persons … to prevent, or deter any Indian, head man, chief, or warrior of said Nation … from selling or ceding to the United States, for the use of Georgia, the whole or any part of said territory.” The penalty was a sentence in the Georgia penitentiary, at hard labor, for up to four years. They passed a bill making it illegal for any person or body of persons to prevent, by force or threat, Cherokees from agreeing to emigrate or from moving to the West. They passed in this same bill a provision outlawing all meetings of the Cherokee council and all political assemblies of Indians in Georgia, except for purposes of ceding land.

The Five Tribes not only physically displaced other Indian nations in Indian Territory; they erased the history of southern Plains people and drafted a new history of Indian Territory. For example, in 1955, the Chickasaws built their council house, a sixteen-by-twenty-five-foot log house. Here, the Chickasaws rewrote their constitution and took their first actions as a sovereign legislature, under the first Chickasaw governor, Cyrus Harris. Although the log house was quickly replaced (within the next year or so) by a brick iteration, the log house serves a particular purpose in the pantheon of Chickasaw public history. In 1911, the Wapanucka Press, an Oklahoma-based newspaper, interviewed someone (presumably a representative of the Chickasaw Nation) about the story of the log house’s origins. The paper reported, ‘Slaves of the Chickasaws toiled in the dense oak forests cutting down the finest trees and hewing them into shape…Thick undergrowth was cleared from a knoll…paths were cut from bottom meadows.’ Rough-hewn and surrounded by overgrown foliage, the log house is meant to evoke the idea that the Chickasaws encountered a ‘wilderness’ in early Indian Territory. The reader is meant to believe that, as civilizers, the Chickasaws shaped this wilderness into the modern space that it became. This idea of ‘civilization’ is based on Euro-American colonizer’ ideas of advanced societies. The Cherokee Nation alleges on its website that ‘upon earliest contact with European explorers in the 1500s, Cherokee Nation was identified as one of the most advanced among Native American tribes.’ Although the Cherokees were asserting their longevity as a people and their pride in their culture, here they use a European measurement of their merit. In the nineteenth century, the Five Tribes succeeded at crafting a perception of difference. The western Indians certainly saw them as settlers. The special agent to the Comanches reported that they were angry that tribes such as the Creeks and Choctaws ‘have extended their occupation and improvements to the country heretofore used by themselves as a hunting ground,’ expressing that they saw the Five tribes as unlawful settlers, just like whites, and themselves as the dispossessed indigenous peoples of the region.

Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’ Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation.

In reality, the various movements and removals of Indigenous peoples from the Southeast due to white invasion meant that the first western settlers were often Native Americans who migrated to spaces other than their homelands, where they encountered other tribes—longtime enemies, other displaced peoples, and groups who had long called this land home. Native peoples adjusted their oral histories and survivance strategies to incorporate their new surroundings as they had done for millennia, crafting stories that told of successful migrations and learning about the food and herbs of their new homes. As they were forced westward, the Five Tribes’ experience in Indian Territory was different from the other Indigenous migrations occurring around them. The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole Nations sought to use the settler colonial process to cast themselves as civilizers of their new home: they used the labor system that Euro-Americans insisted represented sophistication—chattel slavery—to build homes, commercial enterprises, and wealth, and they portrayed themselves as settlers in need of protection from the federal government against the depredations of western Indians, which, the Five Tribes claimed, hindered their own civilizing progress. Moreover, they followed their physical appropriation of Plains Indians’ land with an erasure of their predecessor’s history. They perpetuated the idea that they had found an undeveloped ‘wilderness” when they arrived in Indian Territory and that they had proceeded to tame it. They claimed that they had built institutions and culture in a space where previously neither existed. The Five Tribes’ involvement in the settler colonial process was self-serving: they had already been forced to move once by white Americans, and appealing to their values could only help them—at least, at first. Involvement in the system of Black enslavement was a key component of displaying adherence to Americans’ ideas of social, political, and economic advancement—indeed, owning enslaved people was the primary path to wealth in the nineteenth century. The laws policing Black people’s behavior that appeared in all of the tribes’ legislative codes showed that they were willing to make this system a part of their societies. But with the end of the Civil War, the political party in power—the Republicans—changed the rules: slavery was no longer deemed civilized and must be eliminated by force. For the Five Tribes, the rise and fall of their involvement in the settler colonial process is inextricably connected to the enslavement of people of African descent: it helped to prove their supposed civilization and it helped them construct their new home, but it would eventually be the downfall of their Indian Territory land claims. Recognizing the Five Tribes’ coerced migration to Indian Territory as the first wave among many allows us to see how settler colonialism shaped the culture of Indian Territory even before settlers from the United States arrived. Though the Cherokee ‘Trail of Tears’ has come to symbolize Indian Removal, the Five Tribes were just a handful of dozens of Indigenous tribes who had been forced to move from their eastern homelands due to white displacement. This displacement did not begin or end in the 1830s Since the 1700s, Indian nations such as the Wyandot, Kickapoo, and Shawnee began migrating to other regions to escape white settlement and the violence and resource scarcity that often followed. Though brought on by conditions outside of their control, these migrations were ‘voluntary’ in that they were most often an attempt to flee other Native groups moving into their territory as a result of white invasion or to preempt white coercion, rather than a response to direct Euro-American political or legal pressure to give up their homelands….

The labor of enslaved women and men was crucial to the Five Tribes’ economic and social success in Indian Territory... Preserved through family lines and nourished by increasing dividends, Black chattel slavery had bene an element of life in the Five Tribes for decades by the time of the Civil War.” Pg 23 “The Five Tribes, to varying degrees, adapted the institution of slavery to suit their own needs beginning in the late 1700s and intensifying in the early 1800s. Along with the institution of slavery the Five Tribes also adopted other parts of American ‘civilization,’ such as Euro-American clothing, agriculture, political language, religion….while retaining aspects of their own culture. As in the United States, the majority of people in the Five Tribes did not own slaves. Yet, Indian elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners…In 1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves (15 percent of their total population), Choctaw members owned 2,349 slaves (14 percent of their total population, and Creek members owned 975 slaves, which amounted to 18 percent of their total population, a proportion equivalent to that of white slave owners in Tennessee, a former neighbor of the Chickasaw Nation. Slave labor allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before. John Ross, a Cherokee chief, lived in a log cabin directly after Removal. After a few years, he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch.

1. HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

Pushing Indians off the land: Removals to a much-diminished Indian Country Indians regarded these squatters with horror. “No matter how little is left the red man, such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character

In general, the chakra system branched into two sections: the Vedic and the Tantric (now alive within Ayurvedic medicine and Tantric yoga, for example). The term tantra comes from two words: tanoti, or to expand; and trayati, or to liberate. Tantra therefore means “to extend knowledge that liberates.” Tantra is a life practice based on teachings about the chakras, kundalini, hatha yoga, astronomy, astrology, and the worship of many Hindu gods and goddesses. Tantric yoga originates in pre-Aryan India, around 3000 to 2500 BC. Many other varieties of Tantric yoga or spirituality have arisen from it, including Tantric Buddhism. Each system derived from Tantric yoga has a unique view on the chakras and their related gods, cosmology, and symbols. The history of chakras, as complex as it sounds so far, is even more complicated. The chakra system is intertwined with—and maybe even created by—several different cultures. Although usually associated with India, Tantric yoga was also practiced by the Dravidians, who originated from Ethiopia, as is revealed in the many similarities between predynastic Egyptian and African practices and ancient Indian Tantric beliefs.6 For example, numerous Hindu deities are rooted in “India’s black civilizations, which is why they are often depicted as black.”7 Some historians point out that early Egyptians were greatly affected by African beliefs,8 and in turn influenced Greek, Jewish, and, later, Islamic and Christian thought, in addition to the Indian Hindu.9 Other cultures also exchanged chakra ideas. Many practices of the early Essenes, a religio-spiritual community dwelling in Palestine in the second century BC through the second century AD, mirrored those of early India.10 The Sufis—Islamic mystics—also employed a system of energy centers, although it involved four centers.11 The Sufis also borrowed the kundalini process from Tantric yoga, as did certain Asian Indian and American Indian groups.12 As we shall see, the Maya Indians of Mexico, the Inca Indians of Peru, and the Cherokee Indians of North America each have their own chakra method. The Maya believe that they actually taught the Hindu the chakra system. The chakra system was brought to the West in yet another roundabout way. It was first thoroughly outlined in the text Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, written by an Indian yogi in the sixteenth century. Arthur Avalon then delivered chakra knowledge to Western culture in his book The Serpent Power, first published in 1919. Avalon drew heavily upon the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana as well as another text, Pakaka-Pancaka. His presentation was preceded by Theosophic Practica, a book written in 1696 by Johann Georg Gichtel, a student of Jakob Bohme, who refers to inner force centers that align with Eastern chakra doctrines.13 Today, many esoteric professionals rely on Anodea Judith's interpretation of Avalon’s work, to which she has added additional information about the psychological aspects of the chakras.

Un indian cherokee îşi învăța nepotul despre o bătălie care se dă în fiecare om. El i-a spus tânărului: „Bătălia se dă între doi lupi. Unul este leneş, laş, înfumurat, arogant şi plin de autocompătimire, tristețe, regret, invidie şi mânie. Celălalt lup este harnic, curajos, smerit, binevoitor şi plin de compasiune, bucurie, empatie şi credință.” Apoi s-a făcut tăcere. Nepotul s-a gândit puțin la lupi, iar apoi şi-a întrebat bunicul: „Care dintre cei doi lupi învinge?” Bătrânul indian cherokee a răspuns: „Cel pe care îl hrăneşti.

But then they got to thinking — which was a mistake because they were run-of-the-mill Cowboys. They figured one of them was Sequoia. Like a Cherokee living among Apaches.

Tribal Councils at first didn’t see the need to keep written records, until Chief Tecumseh created a Cherokee language in relation to English. Tecumseh realized that his people had to prove who they were to be counted or validated in white society. And then he assumed a written language would protect them, but he was wrong. Even though their ancestors had roamed the land for thousands of years before Columbus, nothing would protect them from the British, Scots, Irish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese who descended with greedy, land-hungry eyes.

Before the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—were forced to leave their homes and tribal lands in the Southeast, many had assimilated in order to save themselves, to keep their land. They cut their hair and wore western clothes and adopted white ways to make whites feel “safer” around “Native” Americans. They owned hundreds of slaves, who walked with them during the Great Removal to Indian Territory in Oklahoma and Alabama. Slaveholding Indians? I never learned about that in school.

The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage institution persisted in Indian Territory as the planter-slaveholder elite set out to rebuild its exchange-oriented cotton and tobacco economy. This created secure markets for Comanche slavers who now commanded extensive raiding domains in Texas and northern Mexico.

On 24 July, Captain La Corne Saint-Luc left with another body of nearly four hundred Indians and two hundred Canadians. His departure had been delayed for two days – because of a lacrosse tournament between the Abenakis and Iroquois. The game was played with a ball and sticks curved in the shape of a crosier; it was this fancied resemblance to a bishop’s staff that inspired the French name for the tribal sport. The stakes in this grudge-match were high: one thousand crowns worth of wampum in belts and strings. Amongst the Indians, lacrosse was a serious business; it could result in broken bones and even the occasional death; it was not for nothing that the Cherokees dubbed it the little brother of war. The mission communities clustered around Montréal were particular aficionados; a 1743 plan of the settlement at the Lake of the Two Mountains shows an extensive lacrosse field. The neighbouring Caughnawagas were no less dedicated to the game and long remained so; a team of Mohawks from the village toured Britain in 1876. Their dazzling exhibition matches sparked the interest that led to the sport’s adoption, in a slightly less violent form, by British schoolgirls. Even that glum widow Queen Victoria considered the game very pretty to watch. It is unlikely that she would have used the same words to describe the Abenaki-Iroquois clash of July 1758.

One evening an old Cherokee Indian told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.

But a more deadly example of why rights matter was shown by what happened in the early years of the United States to America’s unfortunate Cherokee Indians. These were one of the continent’s original races, who had on paper become a recognised partner in the newly United States. The Americans confiscated the Cherokee’s land under a special law called the Indian Removal Act, and whose idea was that? None other than Thomas Jefferson who’d written those glowing words for the Declaration of Independence that I start the chapter with!

Houston was actually a strange choice to carry this banner of racial pride. Between 1829 and 1833, before he became president, he lived with the Cherokees, took two Indian wives, and sat for a portrait in full Indian garb.

Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion— The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property… arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to keep accounts, and here they begin to labour; enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin… fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter now instituting a government.

Wilma spent her first ten years on her paternal grandfather’s land, called Mankiller Flats, in rural Oklahoma. This was his allotment at the end place of the Trail of Tears, the infamous forced march of the 1830s that deprived Cherokees of their Georgia homeland. More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold. Mankiller

Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

As principal chief Chad Smith told me, many people saying they are Cherokee likely have some ancestry. However, their ancestors ‘expatriated from the nation’ and renounced their tribal ties by failing to travel west on the Trail of Tears. The cost of that decision is that their descendants cannot now claim citizenship. Cherokee Nation Supreme Court justice Troy Wayne Poteete further emphasizes the often emotion, group kindship nation of the issue, fine details often missed by non-Indians claiming Indian status. ‘Our issue is no our ancestors had so little to pass on to us. We lost 90 percent of what we had. What they were able to pass on to us was a unique legal status, as well as a distinct culture and heritage.

In existing writings about federally recognized tribes and their engagement with tribal acknowledgment politics, a palpable theme is clear: presently recognized nations are not acting the ‘Indian way’ when they refuse to acknowledge their less fortunate Indian relatives and share with them. To many writers, federally recognized tribal leaders are so ensconced in the hegemonic colonial order that they are no even aware that they are replicated and reinforcing it inequities. According to this line, because the Five Tribes and related groups like the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and the Eastern Band of Cherokees have embraced nonindigenous notions of ‘being Indian’ and tribal citizenship using federal censuses such as the Dawes Rolls and blood quantum they are not being authentic. Some critics charge that modern tribes like the Choctaw Nation have rejected aboriginal notions and conceptions of Indian social organization and nationhood. This thinking, however, seems to me to once again reinforce stereotypes about Indians as largely unchanging, primordial societies. The fact that the Creek and Cherokee Nations have evolved and adopted European notions of citizenship and nationhood is somehow held against them in tribal acknowledgment debates. We hear echoes of the ‘Noble Savage’ idea once again. In other context when tribes have demanded a assay in controlling their cultural property and identities – by protesting Indian sports mascots or the marketing of cars and clothing with their tribal names, or by arguing that studios should hire real Indians as actors – these actions are applauded. However, when these occur in tribal recognition contexts, the tribes are viewed as greedy or racists. The unspoken theme is that tribes are not actin gin the ‘traditional’ Indian way…With their cultures seen as frozen in time, the more tribes deviate from popular representation, the more they are seen as inauthentic. To the degree that they are seen as assimilated (or colonized and enveloped in the hegemonic order), they are also seen as inauthentic, corrupted, and polluted. The supreme irony is that when recognized tribes demand empirical data to prove tribal authenticity, critics charge that they are not being authentically ingenious by doing so.

What kind of a precedent is the Cherokee Nation setting by breaking a treaty? Does it give it the right to break other treaties? Or only treaties with Cherokee Nation or treaties with any Indian tribe? With all Indian tribes? Opponents of the rights of tribal sovereignty have for years been calling for the abrogation of all Indian treaties, claiming that they are old and out of date and no longer applicable. Will the actions of the Cherokee Nation regarding the 1866 treaty give those opponents further ammunition? I should think that it will. I have one further thought about this recent Cherokee Nation action and the reasons given for it. If the Cherokee Nation is really serious about exercising its sovereignty and determining its membership, then why the hell does it continue to use the Dawes Commission Roll, which was put together by the U.S. government and then closed by the U.S. government? The Cherokee Nation does not have a current roll. It is not allowed to have one by the U.S. Congress. The Dawes ROll is the only roll, and when the last original enrollee on the Dawes Roll dies, there will be no Cherokee Nation roll. When the CHerokee Nation lists anyone as a current tirbal memebe,r it puts him or her on a 'tribal membership list.' It 'registers' him or her only. I have never read anything about the Dawes Roll that did not condemn the roll for being inefficient, faulty, even fraudulent, or talked to anyone about the Dawes Roll who did not agree with that assessment. Legitimate Cherokee citizens of mixed blood who could get away with it were enrolled as less Cherokee than they really work in order to be able to sell or least their land sooner some whites without a legitimate claim were falsely enrolled...

2 Nikes and my pair of blue jeans, Levi Strauss.