so today I want to talk about the Cherokees and give you an overview of their history up to about 1865 but with a specific focus on Indian Removal and I do this to give you a more specific example I mentioned in Indian removal in the lecture on Andrew Jackson but I wanted to talk about how it affected one specific tribe and this was the tribe that was most famously affected by it not the only tribe but the most famous One so first of all I want to start with the present um who the Cherokee People are today because not only are they're still around but it is the most populous tribe in America there are actually three federally recognized Cherokee tribes and this the fact that there are three instead of one is directly related to the forced migrations in the 1800s there are two in Oklahoma uh one is called the Cherokee Nation and the other is called the United kitua band of Cherokee Indians and there's another one in North Carolina and it's uh the biggest one is the Cherokee Nation it has uh I've seen figures a quarter of a million three hundred thousand something around their official tribal members making it the biggest tribe in America the other two have far fewer members I think 14 000 or so for the ketua band in Oklahoma and a few thousand for the North Carolina band um in addition to the officially recognized tribes according to the U.S census over 800 000 Americans believe that they have some Cherokee interest ancestors uh that's really common where we are in the South uh which is kind of the historic grounds of the Cherokee People um black and white Americans uh believe that they have some Cherokee ancestry um but most of these people are not officially recognized as Indians these are just people who think this is a part of their ancestral makeup so the Cherokee are members of the Iroquoian Language family that means linguistically their language is related to the Iroquois language and we think well there are two theories one theory is that the original Cherokee were around the Great Lakes region and the I mean the original Iroquois thousands of years ago were all around the Great Lakes region and the Cherokee branched off around 15 to 2 1500 to 2000 years ago and move to their historic Homeland which is North Carolina Tennessee Georgia South Carolina another theory is that no it's the opposite the Cherokee and a group called The Tuscarora or also Iroquoian speaking um and all the other Iroquoian Language groups started out in the southeastern United States where the Cherokee were at historic times and then the other groups moved North to the Great Lakes the other members of the Iroquois Confederacy um it's probably the former it's probably that the Great Lakes is the original Homeland and the reason I say that is because Cherokee lore Cherokee stories tell of a migration long long ago from the Great Lakes region to their historic homelands and the Smoky Mountains area in the Southeast and so they just all kind of connects that way so by let's so at least a thousand years ago the Cherokee were inhabiting North Carolina and these other states in the American southwest this is actually a picture of a place called kitua Mound and this is according to the Cherokee cell themselves their ancestral Homeland this is the spot where they first settled after their Great Migration from the North like I said maybe 2000 years ago and this is hard for you to see but it is a mount it is not just a natural slope in the land um from where you're sitting you maybe you can't distinguish this but somewhere around the middle of the picture if you look very closely you can see a line where the color of the grass changes subtly and above this line This is the mount and originally it was much taller uh but over the last couple of hundred years it has been whittled away by Farmers or whoever that took dirt and destroyed who knows how many countless artifacts um but we knew it was much bigger a thousand years ago when it was originally settled by the Cherokee another interesting thing about it is the Cherokee became a part of this Mississippian culture that built mounds and and stuff like I talked about way back the beginning of class with Cahokia but they tended to put townhouses on top of the Mounds rather than temples and so this might have been an actual dwelling place for people to to live and to sleep um another interesting thing about it if I remember correctly and I'm pretty sure I did the this kitua mound is in the present day boundaries of the reservation of the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina they bought it about 50 years ago they bought the land and they decided not to do archaeological studies they decided because there were burials and things there they decided for the moment at least they do some things but they only do non-invasive stuff in other words they don't do any digging because they don't want to disturb it so I thought that was kind of interesting I'm going to skip this for today in in the interest of time uh the green corn ceremony is common to all Southeastern Indians and even North Eastern Indians East along the Atlantic coast that part of the United States and it's an annual sort of here I said I was going to skip it no I'm not skipping it uh it's an annual ceremony to Mark the first harvest of corn and um it involved some really interesting things sacrificing the first fruits of the Harvest not just the corn but the other plants and edible things that were that were grown and by sacrificing these first fruits This was meant to sort of cleanse them of sins and start a new year in a sense so it's kind of a Harvest Festival and New Year festival at the same time and one really really interesting thing about it to me at least they would build a fire in the center of four huge logs or Timbers pointing in the cardinal directions north south east and west and this new fire would they would extinguish all the other fires in their household they would burn all the old items that were no good anymore and Destroy them and then use that fire I think to build the new Fire and then they would use the new Fire to relight the fires in all their homes this is very simple or similar to an Aztec ceremony in central Mexico around 1500 1300 which is probably pure coincidence but I think the similarity is very very interesting so uh [Music] in the ancient times hundreds of years ago we know because of Cherokee stories that they were ruled by a Priestly class a hereditary class of priests called the anikutani and we know that about 300 years or so before European contact which would be sometime in the 1200s that they had a revolution a revolt against this Priestly class and killed them and never allowed hereditary castes or classes to rule over them again which is kind of interesting again probably unrelated but this and probably just a coincidence but this is the same time that Cahokia fell in around St Louis today and sort of mysteriously disappeared the people left and it became uninhabited by 1300 a days uh this is what a Mississippian priest might have looked like about a thousand years ago uh and we know that the Cherokee were influenced by the Mississippian culture at that time but this is uh an actual account this is the Cherokee story of the revolt against the anikutani also sometimes written nicotani or nicotani so the people long brooded in silenced over the oppressions and outrages of this High cast whom they deeply hated but greatly feared at length a daring young man a member of an influential family organized a conspiracy among the people for the massacre of the priesthood the immediate provocation was the Abduction of the wife of the young leader of the conspiracy his wife was remarkable for her beauty and was forcibly abducted and violated by one of the nicotani while he was absent on the case on the chase sorry on his return he found no difficulty in exciting in others the resentment which he himself experienced so many had suffered in the same way so many feared that they might be made to suffer that nothing was wanted but a leader a leader appearing in the person of the young Brave whom we have named I didn't write his name down here the people Rose under his Direction and killed every nicotani young and old thus perished a hereditary secret society since which time no hereditary privileges have been tolerated among the Cherokee so I just think that's a really interesting account this is what the Cherokee themselves told an American about 200 years ago who was living with them and writing down their stories and so what happened sometime around 12 1300 A.D is at this Priestly class which was hereditary had become very oppressive and abusive and were apparently even you know uh reaping young women who belong to the other clans or the other other casts and one of them had had enough and was Fed Up and launched a revolution that killed all of them and did away with this hereditary class so the first European contact with the Cherokees uh was probably the DeSoto Expedition uh Hernando de Soto hernandezoto was a Spanish explorer and he explored the Southwest Southeast excuse me along this red line that you see here and a lot of these names that you see up in here are the names of Cherokee Villages that we know he passed by or visited uh unfortunately it was not a pleasant uh meeting of the two groups the Soto's Exposition was very violent and abusive looking for gold and fought with Cherokee and left behind infectious diseases that caused an epidemic and killed many Cherokee and may have drastically transformed their culture and their society just because of the massive death that resulted from this epidemic a little later there was a second Spanish Expedition this is 1567 so about 25 years later it was led by a guy named Juan Pardo and he established six forts in Cherokee territory so he was trying to establish a permanent Spanish presence but when he left and these are the Cherokee towns he visited and Drew maps of um when but he left the six Forts and went back to his base on the coast or in Florida and while he was gone the Cherokee attacked and wiped out the six forts killed all but one of the soldiers there and that was the end of Spanish forts in Cherokee territory foreign so by 1650 the Cherokee were estimated to have about 22 500 persons they lived in towns these were not whatever your images of mobile um Indians planes Indians who chased the Buffalo and that sort of thing the Cherokee were not like that the Cherokee were farmers who lived in towns they did go on hunts but these were like Hunting Expeditions the men would leave and go on these long hunts to places like Kentucky which was a traditional hunting ground for the Cherokee and the Shawnee and other Indians and then they would come back you know Laden with animals and skins and stuff uh but they claimed a territory of about 40 000 square miles like I said had about 22 500 uh by the 1600s they are in contact with English colonists who are trading with them and the English um are trading um for deerskins mostly and in exchange the English are giving the Cherokee Iron and Steel tools like knives kettles also of course Firearms gunpowder uh ammunition those sorts of things are in demand things that the Cherokee can't produce from themselves let's see so in the 1700s the Cherokee and the English had an uneasy relationship the Cherokee were allied with the English against the Tuscarora who were another Iroquoian speaking group in South Carolina and together they pushed the Tuscarora out of South Carolina and they ended up traveling up to around New York State and living with the other iroquois-speaking groups in the Iroquois Confederation um but the Cherokee who by the 1730 who let's see by the 1700s we're sending Expeditions uh not Expeditions diplomatic missions to London uh meeting with the King signing treaties with the King they had a falling out with the English during the French and Indian War they started off as allies and then by the end of the war they ended up actually fighting each other and this led to a Cherokee defeat and um and was really at the beginning of about 50 years or more of conflict between the Cherokee and the English and the Cherokee and the Americans another thing that I have to talk about very important around 1738 1739 a terrible epidemic of smallpox broke out and this had a huge influence impact on Cherokee history and indirectly on the United States history because it wiped out about half the Cherokee People remember I said there was something like 22 000 Cherokee people uh in the mid 1600s um so thousands of people were wiped out we think hundreds of people can made it suicide because of the disfigurement and the suffering that went along with the smallpox epidemic and we think that the Cherokee culture in a sense the society was almost broken this was so devastating that that the the entire culture was kind of demoralized by what had happened foreign thing of importance to the Cherokee is that after the French and Indian War and I've mentioned this before in the contest of the American Revolution the king of England tried to draw a line along the top of the Appalachian Mountains and forbid European I mean American and English colonists to travel over that line and to settle west of the Appalachians and this was meant to prevent encroachment on Cherokee lands and other tribal lands and try to prevent Wars between the colonists and the Indians and of course it wasn't very successful actually in 1776 in 1777 um during the American Revolution the Cherokees were also at war with the Americans the Cherokees attacked American settlers on in the Appalachian in the Appalachians and by 1977 something like 50 Cherokee towns have been wiped out by Americans who are County attacking so this was another devastating defeat for the Cherokee um these two people were famous historical figures the guy on the left is named Dragon canoe he was one of the leaders in the war against the Americans in 1776 and 1777. he left with his followers for um Chattanooga Tennessee and where they kept fighting kind of Guerrilla warfare against the Americans for the next I don't know 30 years or so his niece was named Nancy Ward she has a Cherokee name but unfortunately I can't remember it and I didn't write it oh well I can't read Cherokee I don't remember how to pronounce that or something like that or Nancy Ward was famous for um convincing many Cherokees not her uncle Dragon canoe but many others to stop attacking the Americans and to seek peaceful relations with them the Cherokee just had a play about her or something like that just a year or two ago so now I'm getting into the 1800s and the era that directly relates to Indian Removal uh but I want I wanted to go into all that so you can see that the Cherokee had a long relationship with the English and then the Americans sometimes allies against other Indians sometimes at war between the Cherokees and the Americans or the Cherokees and the English um but now we're in the 1800s and one of the most interesting people in American history and in charity history is this guy his name is Sequoia and Sequoia around 1808 decided to do something truly remarkable he decided to invent his own system of writing he had seen American traders writing letters and writing reading books and he understood what they were doing they were reading symbols that corresponded with sounds in their language and he thought this would be a really useful tool for the Cherokees to have for themselves and he wanted to make up something like it so he spent over a decade he was finished around 20 around 1821 1822 so it took him about 13 14 years and he came up with a syllabary which was a system not our alphabet where we have 24 26 letters but they have something like 60 or 70 uh signs that stand for syllables in their alphabet in their language right so there's a unique sign for every syllable now what's interesting about this is that initially it's a little harder you have to learn 70 or so signs instead of just 26. but after you've memorized those signs and the syllables they stand for it gets really really easy because you can read very quickly unlike English where you learn the 26 letters but then they're you know who knows how many dozens and dozens of combinations they they sound one way in this word in a different way in the other word once you learn the Cherokee syllables that you can see right here you can pronounce anything effortlessly perfectly without almost any confusion um so the Cherokee adopted his system and they still use it today and almost overnight they became went from an illiterate uh nation that didn't know how to read or write unless they could read or write in English to a fluent literate people they were reading they were writing they were publishing their own bilingual newspaper this is the Cherokee Phoenix it was published by 1828 they translated the Bible into Cherokee and they printed the Bible and they translated hymns like Amazing Grace and so they went from being non-literate to being almost complete fully literate within just a couple of decades so that was pretty interesting now Sequoia who I just mentioned and several others dragging canoe who I mentioned a few minutes ago this guy John Jolly um they are a group of people that we call East either the Western Cherokee or the Old Settlers and what that means is simply by the early 1800s by the 18 teens these folks have realized or decided that they had to move west to escape from the rapidly growing American settlements the settlers were pouring over the Appalachian Mountains the settlers were pouring into the southeast of states of Georgia and Tennessee and filling up South Carolina and North Carolina and so these folks first went to Arkansas where the U.S government established a reservation for them in 1815 some of them ended up in Texas and were here in Texas until the 1830s ended up leaving uh when they were went to war with the Republic of Texas um but these Old Settlers are historically the ancestors of the the ketua tribe that's one of those three official tribes that I mentioned they that tribe traces its Origins back to these Old Settlers who were the first to move west uh escaping from the American you know wave settlement another interesting thing about the Cherokee around the time that Sequoia was developing a written language for them they were coming up with their own national government and they modeled this on the United States government they had a bicameral legislature meaning a house and a senate they had courts they had a legislature so they created in Georgia North Carolina South Carolina Tennessee in that area basically their own Modern Nation they had their newspaper they had everything right um it was small only 20 000 people or so uh but they were they were consciously modernizing their system of government and their systems of communication uh and they were doing it to some degree in order to get along better with the Americans they figured if we modernize ourselves then we'll get along better with these American settlers who are filling up our lands uh some of the leaders in this process James Van is the guy on the upper left and the guy on the upper right was called different things over the course of his life which was common for Indians uh the ridge is how I identify them here and that seems to be the most common identifier he was also sometimes called path killer and other things um one interesting thing about these guys I should say this now before I forget um these were especially these two men van and the ridge they were leaders in the effort to form a national government they were leaders in the effort to modernize they worked and lived very much like their southern white neighbors they had slaves they had plantations um if you went into a Cherokee house if you visited and you can if you visit James Van's house it looks like a Southern plantation home not very much with the only difference being he was an Indian instead of an American so Indian Removal um the Indian Removal Act was signed into law by Andrew Jackson on May 28 1830 it authorized the president to Grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders president Jackson said the removal policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing extinction what she said was the fate of the Mohegan the Narragansett and the Delaware these are the Indians of the northeastern states by the end of Jackson's presidency his administration had negotiated almost 70 removal treaties and these led to the relocation of nearly 50 000 Eastern Indians to the Indian Territory that later became Oklahoma and it opened up 25 million acres of land to White Settlement and to the expansion of slavery yes sir that's who the highest population today is still alive yes absolutely yeah uh uh yeah now there are other large populations there's a lot of uh Indians in the New Mexico Arizona area and in places like South Dakota Montana but I'm pretty sure the largest the most concentrated group of Indians and the biggest population of Indians is still and I'm almost positive yeah great question so a couple of things about this what's interesting is Jackson I read his his speech to Congress where he asked for this and it's an interesting speech arguably very hypocritical but interesting um he says that only movement West of the Mississippi River to the Indian Territory will save the Cherokee from cultural Extinction and he is predicting it's a very it's a very pessimistic prediction that if they stay there will be Warfare and conflict with the Americans and they will be destroyed just like the Indians and Virginia were destroyed by their conflicts with Jamestown and just like the Indians and New England were destroyed in King Philip's War in their conflict with the Puritans he says if we move them West we're saving them from destruction at our own hands which is an interesting argument um but there's another thing to consider the ACT didn't say well let me ask you this if you're a Cherokee living in Georgia under the Cherokee Nation your own Court your own legislature your own uh and you say I don't want to go is there a way you could not go is there a way you could avoid going yes yes renounce your Cherokee citizenship accept American citizenship and acknowledge that you are now a citizen of the state of Georgia and of the United States and the Cherokee means nothing to you right you're not a tribal member anymore so they could have stayed if they announced that they were dissolving their tribal governments and that they were no longer a separate political tribal entity they were just ordinary Georgians and tennesseans like everyone else subject to the laws of Georgia and the laws of Tennessee now there were lots of reasons why that was unpalatable to them most importantly they wanted to roll themselves they had done so for thousands of years they wanted to keep doing so but this was kind of a demand this was kind of a demand from Congress and Jackson if you want to be a separate nation you have to do it somewhere else you can't do it within the territorial bounds of the United States I wanted to point all that out because it'll help you to understand the Eastern bat in North Carolina in just a minute okay so the Cherokee uh had a lot of fights with Georgia this is where some of the most heated arguments were sometime around 1828 Georgia Extended its state laws with the Cherokee tribe in other words it declared all Cherokee laws and customs null and void so this is the Cherokee Nation within Georgia in the upper kind of northwest corner of Georgia where the Cherokee territory was and so Georgia was saying your government is no and void we don't recognize its validity and no laws that you passed are legitimate laws you are subject to Georgia laws completely and in this story all right um so the the the Cherokee challenged this in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said something very interesting uh it said that the Cherokee in all Indian tribes were something called domestic dependent Nations and if you are interested in Indian law or Indian history in particular this phrase is a very important one because this is legally constitutionally this is the way it is all the way till today this is still current Indian tribes are not States like Texas and Oklahoma Indian tribes are not Nations like Canada France Mexico but they are something right they are some kind of a government and the Supreme Court recognized that they were something there were some kind of a legitimate government so it called them domestic dependent Nationals and the idea was Congress can rule over them is what the Supreme Court came up with but not States states have no authority to rule over them now in this particular case Cherokee Nation versus Georgia the court didn't issue any kind of ruling it backed off it said it didn't have jurisdiction over this case uh we don't need to worry about that but this case was really interesting Worcester versus George Worcester was a Christian Missionary Samuel Worcester and he like many Christian missionaries was visiting living amongst the the Cherokee and Georgia passed the law saying that no American no white American could go on tribal land without a license from the state of Georgia and if they did if they violated the law if they trespassed they would be they could be punished with up to four years in prison and so he violated the law and they arrested him and he he went to prison in prison in Georgia in the 1830s was probably a terrible place to be now why do you think they wanted to pass a law forbidding Christian missionaries like him from traveling on Indian lands to protect the Indians no it's very unlikely that they cared about protecting the Indians right so what are they afraid of what's he doing that they don't want to happen well one answer is obvious jump right at you he's christianizing the Indians right that's what he's there for uh why would they not want that pathetic yeah yeah then you might then one argument for treating them like uh what garbage goes away you can no longer say Well they're heathens or Savages if they're now living in towns well they've been living in towns but they're going to churches like everybody else uh all the distinctions that you use to discriminate against them are falling away so that's one reason another reason that's good is um he and these other Christian missionaries were helping them build uh get printing presses and use the presses to print newspapers to print books to print Bibles he was educating the Indians he was helping them to educate themselves is probably a better way to put it and a lot of these Christian missionaries were also very active in helping the Cherokee and other Indians understand the American court system and use it to fight back against States like Georgia and so uh these missionaries were in other words they were trying to help they were trying to help the Indians and Georgia wanted to stop that so they arrested him um the case went all the way to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said that this Georgia law was unconstitutional because the reason I said that states can't legislate over Indian tribes unfortunately Worcester had to stay in prison for a while because Georgia just ignored the Supreme Court and said we don't care what you say and just left him in jail anyway until they could work out basically a compromise between his side and theirs but this was very important again it's precedent for this idea that states like Oklahoma can't just pass laws however they like without regards to Indian sovereignty so John Ross was the principal chief of the Cherokee tribe in 1828 and remained so for many years he became a leader in the battle against removal from their homes in the southeast and he became the leader of a group that will sometimes call the National Party Ross and these are the groups that are in favor of staying in the southeast and they fought against people who were either called the treaty party or sometimes the ridge party named after the ridge major Ridge that I mentioned just a few slides ago by the mid-1830s all of the tribes in the Southeast except the Cherokee had signed treaties agreeing to remove them thank you the treaty party led by Major rich and some others uh believed that removal was inevitable that it was going to happen and that it was just Folly to fight against it and they feared that if the Cherokee were obstinate and just refused to go and refused to sign any treaty sooner or later a war would happen and they would be removed by force and they would get nothing they would get no compensation for their land uh no money and so they thought we'd better take whatever deal we can get and sign whatever Freedom we can sign just to accept the inevitable and so the treaty party signed in 1835 the Treaty of new ichota there were 75 Cherokees who signed the training including the ridge well I mentioned a few slides ago he was the leader of this group uh his son I think signed as well other prominent figures um they signed in exchange for five million dollars and other supplies uh promises and and so forth and however these 75 did not represent a majority of the Cherokee People there were some 16 000 Cherokees most of them were against signing any trees um so this was a minority and they were not actually the recognized government of the Cherokee People John Ross was the recognized president of the Cherokee so it was it was highly dubious this tree from the Cherokee point of view from the point of view of John Ross and most Cherokees it was just illegal and it was actually violated in 189 19 Cherokee law that made it a capital crime to sell tribal lands in other words the death sentence if you tried to sell any tribal Landing nevertheless this treaty was used it was put into Force the American Army under Winfield Scott used three thousand soldiers to round up about 16 000 Cherokees and during the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839 they were removed to Indian Territory some of them had to walk as much as a thousand miles over this four-month period and approximately 4 000 of them died on the way one out of every four the Cherokees also took their slaves those of them who did have something like seven percent of Cherokee families were slave owners I think it was seven percent and the slaves went with them which is in the past that was a sometimes ignored aspect of the story but the slaves suffered and endured uh just like everybody else did now what do you think happened when they got to Oklahoma and but in terms of this rivalry this disagreement equally deadly so what happened was the leaders of the treaty party in 1839 were assassinated they were all just murdered and this was clearly in retribution for signing the treaty uh they were if I remember I read about this gosh 30 years ago so my memory may be failing me but the assassinations were timed it was like a scene from The Godfather or something like there were time to all be basically simultaneous so no one could warn the others about what was happening uh but major Ridge John Ridge his son another famous Indian named a Cherokee named Elias boudinot John Van who I showed you a picture of a little earlier they were all basically simultaneously executed by Cherokees from the other side who were angry at the treaty over the Treaty of nuachota now back in North Carolina about a thousand Cherokees stayed they accepted the the disillusion of their government they accepted North Carolina's authority over them and became American citizens and for gosh 100 years or so they lived a poor life in the South Western corner of North Carolina in their ancestral Homeland but just like all the other North Carolinian Southerners uh sometime in the early 1900s they slowly and painstakingly began to reconstitute their government and um like I said a few thousand of them still live there today now the blood settling the feuds didn't quite end when the Civil War broke out some a little over 20 years after the removal the Cherokee split in other words the Civil War in the United States was also kind of a civil war among the Cherokee People most of the Cherokees supported the South they formed Confederate armies the leader of the Cherokee Confederates was undoubtedly this man his name was Stan dewaite he was one of the treaty party Indians who escaped assassination and during the Civil War uh this was a North Carolina Cherokee Stan Whitey was the most prominent Confederate Cherokee in Oklahoma this man was the most prominent Cherokee in North Carolina his name was William Holland Thomas um but during the Civil War in Oklahoma people took advantage of the fact that the Civil War was going on to settle feuds and weighty was still angry at John Ross and the others who had killed his friends and his family member members back in 1839 and he chased them out of Oklahoma basically um so it wasn't until after the Civil War that all of the Bloodshed and all of the hatred that arose out of the Indian Removal process finally began to settle down and began to go and that's where I'll stop for today so I will see you next time