In the beginning, before Mother Earth was made, there was only a vast body of water that was both salty and fresh. There were no human beings, only animals. They lived in the heavens above the sea. They were secure in a solid rock sky vault called Galunlati. As the animals, birds, and insects multiplied, the sky became more crowded and there was a fear that some creatures would be pushed off the sky rock. All the creatures called a council to decide what to do.
At last “Beaver’s Grandchild,” the little Water-beetle called Dayunisi, offered to leave the sky and investigate the water below. Water-beetle darted in every direction over the water’s surface, but could not find any place to rest. So the beetle dived to the bottom of the sea and returned with soft mud, which began to grow and spread until it became known as earth.
The earth eventually became a great island floating in the sea of water. It was suspended from the heavens at each of the four principal points by cords which hung from the sky vault. The myth keepers claimed that when the earth grows old and wears out, the cords will become weak and break and the earth will sink into the ocean and everything will die. All will be water again.
After the Water-beetle returned to the sky rock and told the others about what he had done, the creatures sent out the Great Buzzard, grandfather of all buzzards, to find a place for them to live. The new earth was wet and soft and flat. The Buzzard soared low, searching for a suitable place. He grew tired, and as his huge wings dipped and struck the pliable earth, deep valleys were created. When the bird rose in the sky, his flapping wings formed ridges and mighty mountains. This is what would become Cherokee country.
At last the earth dried and the creatures came down, but it was still dark, so they convinced the sun to move overhead every day from east to west. But the sun was so hot that Tsiskagili, the Crawfish, scorched his shell a bright red, and his meat was spoiled. Then the conjurers moved the sun higher in the sky, and at last they positioned it seven handbreadths high, just below the sky arch. This became what the soothsayers called “the seventh height,” or the highest place. To this day the sun moves along below this arch, and then returns every night on the upper side to the starting point.
When all the animals and plants were created, they were told to stay awake and keep vigil for seven nights. They tried their best to do this, and nearly all of them remained awake the first night. But the next night several dropped off to sleep, and by the third night even more were asleep. This continued until the seventh night, when only the owl, the panther, and a few others were still awake. Because they did not succumb to sleep, they were given the power to see in the dark. Of the trees, only the pine, the spruce, the cedar, the holly, and the laurel remained awake seven nights. They were allowed to remain always green and were considered to be the best plants for medicine. Unlike the other trees, they were also allowed to keep their hair throughout the winter. This was their gift.
Human beings were created after the animals and plants. There were several versions of the story of how the first humans were made. It was said by some of the old Cherokees that in the beginning there were only a brother and sister, and that the man touched the woman with a fish and told her to multiply. In seven days she bore a child. She continued to do this every seven days until the earth became crowded. Then it was deemed that a woman should have only one child each year.
It is said that the first red man was called Kanati, or the Lucky Hunter. The first woman was named Selu, or Corn, and she was also red. So these red mortals—the first human beings—came to be called Yunwiya, the real people.
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As with many other native peoples, we Cherokees have differing versions of our genesis story. Beyond the many theories of how we originated are debates about how we came to be called Cherokee.
When I studied or listened to the creation stories, I learned that the proper name by which we originally called ourselves is Yunwiya or Ani-Yunwiya, in the third person, which means “Real People” or “Principal People.” The names by which many tribes are known today were given to them by white explorers and trappers. For example, Nez Percé is a French phrase meaning “those with pierced noses.” But the Nez Percés called themselves Nimipu, meaning “the People.” The Iroquois, the Delawares, and the Pawnees all called themselves by names that also meant “the People” or “Real People.” And the people of the Dine (Navajo) Nation, when they refer to themselves, prefer the word Dineh, which means “the People.”
Ancient Delawares in the Southeast called the Cherokee people Allegans. Cherokees were known to the Shawnees as the Keetoowahs. This was a variant spelling of Kituhwa, the name of an ancient Cherokee settlement on the Tuckasegee River in what is known today as North Carolina. According to our storytellers, it was one of the “seven mother towns” of our tribe. The inhabitants were called Ani Kituhwagi, or “people of Kituhwa,” and they seemed to have exercised considerable influence on all the other towns along the Tuckasegee and the upper part of the Little Tennessee. Sometimes the name was used by other tribes as a synonym for Cherokee, most likely because the Kituhwa guarded the Cherokee northern frontier. Many years later, just before the start of the Civil War, the word resurfaced among our people residing in Indian Territory and was given as the name of a powerful secret society, commonly spelled Keetoowah in English.
Some scholars believe the word Cherokee is derived from the Muskogean word tciloki, which means “people of a different speech.” Others claim that Cherokee means “cave people” or “cave dwellers” because several early tribes lived in an area full of caves. This derivation is from the Choctaw chiluk ki, or “cave people,” alluding to the many caves in the mountain country where the Cherokees lived. The Iroquois called us Oyata ge ronon, “inhabitants of the cave country.” Some of the other tribal people gave our people a name that meant “mountaineers” or “uplanders.”
We have found that the name Cherokee has been spelled at least fifty ways throughout history. Most historians agree that the name is a corruption of Tsa lagi. It first appears as Chalaque in the Portuguese description of de Soto’s expedition, published in 1557. Then our name shows up as Cheraqui in a 1699 French document, and in the English form as Cherokee in 1708.
As far back as anyone knows, our early people were, indeed, mountaineers, people who lived in the Allegheny region in what is now the southeastern United States. They made their homes in parts of the present states of North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and West Virginia. They lived in this region so long that some of our origin stories have taken on a local character. For example, one of those early Cherokee stories is an explanation of the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains, a range of about eighty peaks more than five thousand feet high near the junction of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. Our people hunted in these mountains and considered them sacred.
In spite of that tribal sense of our genesis in the Southeast, others believe that our Cherokee ancestors migrated south from somewhere around the Great Lakes. This theory is based largely on linguistic evidence, because we speak an Iroquoian tongue related to the languages of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas—all tribes that formed the Iroquois League. Others point to the tribal history of the Delawares, which describes a long, protracted war in which the Cherokees were ultimately driven south. Still other students of America before the Europeans came make a case for our people having come from South America, tracing a long migration trail north, then east, then south, finally stopping in the Great Smoky Mountain region. There is even one legend from our Cherokee oral tradition that seems to support that particular theory. This legend says the Cherokees originated on an island off the South American coast.
Little is certain except that when the Europeans arrived in the Americas, our people had been in their home in the Smoky Mountains for a great many years. Most likely our ancestors were mound builders.
As the long-forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors.
Vine Victor Deloria, Jr.
God Is Red
A tale from our oral tradition suggests that there was once an ancient hereditary society called the Ani-Kutani. This society kept to itself a great deal of sacred knowledge, and controlled the spiritual functions of the tribe. This group eventually became too omnipotent and abused its sacred powers. Then, as the story goes, the people rebelled against its members and overthrew them. But for as long as we can tell, there was no central ruling clan or society. Our people lived in autonomous villages scattered over their southeastern domain. There is some evidence that each town had a war chief and a peace chief, sometimes called a Red Chief and a White Chief, charged respectively with the external and internal affairs of government. Each chief had a council of advisers.
Although many of the details of how our governments worked are not perfectly clear, it is certain that Cherokee women played an important and influential role in town government. Women shared in the responsibilities and rights of the tribal organization. Our Cherokee families were traditionally matrilineal clans. In general, women held the property, including the dwelling and garden. Women also maintained family life and farmed, while the men spent much of their time away on the hunt or in warfare. Early European observers made disparaging remarks such as, “Among the Cherokees, the woman rules the roost,” and “The Cherokees have a petticoat government.” It is said that when Ada Kulkula, or Little Carpenter, attended a meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, he was astonished to find no white women present. He even asked if it were true that “white men as well as Red were born of women.”
There was also a very powerful woman who is alternately described as the Ghigau or Beloved Woman. The name may be a corruption of giga, or blood, and agehya, or woman. If so, the title might be phrased more accurately as “Red Woman” or “War Woman.”
Whatever the case, prior to European contact and the influence of the whites on our culture, women played a prominent role in the social, political, and cultural life of the Cherokees. Nancy Ward, Ghigau of the Cherokees, participated in a May 1817 tribal council meeting at which she presented a statement signed by twelve other women pleading with the Cherokee people not to give up any more land.
Precious few non-Indian people are aware of the role native women played in ancient tribal societies. Written records of tribal people have been taken from the notes and journals of diplomats, missionaries, explorers, and soldiers—all men. They had a tendency to record observations of tribal women through their relationships to men. Therefore, tribal women have been inaccurately depicted, most often as drudges or ethereal Indian princesses.
In our tribal stories, we have heard of a Women’s Council, which was headed by a very powerful woman, perhaps the Ghigau. This oral history is frequently discredited by Western historians as “merely myth.” I have always found their repudiation fascinating. An entire body of knowledge can be dismissed because it was not written, while material written by obviously biased men is readily accepted as reality. No wonder our written history speaks so often of war but rarely records descriptions of our songs, dances, and simple joys of living. The voices of our grandmothers are silenced by most of the written history of our people. How I long to hear their voices!
Because enemy tribes surrounded us, we found it necessary to be militaristic. Women even occasionally accompanied men to the battlefield as warriors. We were also profoundly religious, believing that the world existed in a precarious balance and that only right or correct actions kept it from tumbling. Wrong actions could disturb the balance.
Sometimes when our people were not careful or let down their guard, that balance was unsettled. That is just what occurred when the Cherokee people became more acculturated and adopted more of the values of the Europeans who invaded and infiltrated their country. Europeans brought with them the view that men were the absolute heads of households, and women were to be submissive to them. It was then that the role of women in Cherokee society began to decline. One of the new values Europeans brought to the Cherokees was a lack of balance and harmony between men and women. It was what we today call sexism. This was not a Cherokee concept. Sexism was borrowed from Europeans.
Probably the first Europeans our people ever saw were those in the company of Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador who landed in Florida in 1539. Flush from conquests of native tribes in Peru, he and his men wandered northward through our highland villages and other Indian communities, kidnapping tribal leaders to ensure safe passage. In 1542, de Soto died, presumably of fever, in his camp on the banks of the Mississippi River. The following year, the remainder of de Soto’s exhausted party, led by Luis de Moscoso, limped back to Mexico. Twenty-six years later, the Spaniards of the expedition led by Captain Juan Pardo arrived in Cherokee country.
The European intruders might as well have been from a different planet. Long before those white men made contact with our tribe, the Cherokees had developed a complex culture and society. The Spanish narratives from that period are unclear and sometimes contradictory. Either we somehow managed to fare better with the Spanish than other tribes did, or else all of that experience was suppressed by the Cherokee wisdom keepers and not included in the oral recitations of our history.
What is known is that the Spanish “explorers,” as many of us as schoolchildren were taught to call these invaders, were some of the most brutal and barbaric of the Europeans who invaded the “New World,” as the whites called it. In their fruitless quest for gold and mineral riches, these enforcers of the notorious Spanish Inquisition mistreated and antagonized all the native people they happened upon in a zealous attempt to convert them to Christianity.
The lands that these Europeans invaded was hardly a “New World.” Yet even today, there are people who believe that this vast domain called America was nothing but a wild and virgin land just waiting for the advent of the wise and superior Europeans to tame and domesticate it. In 1492, there were more than seventy-five million native people in the Western Hemisphere, with six million of those residing in what is now the United States. They spoke two thousand languages, and had been part of thriving civilizations long before the coming of Columbus. This rich culture of the native people nonetheless was demolished methodically and ruthlessly within a historically short period. The time for suffering had begun.
[Columbus] makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent.
Indian activist Russell Means, 1991
The Spanish conquest must be repudiated. Celebrating it would be shameful and the justification of a massacre.
Ecuador Indian leader Manuel Castro, 1991
That is why I thought it was very sad, in 1992, when so many people wished to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. There were festivals, parades, seminars, motion pictures, and many attempts to summarize the monumental changes North America has undergone since 1492. It is doubtful that many Americans even paused to reflect on the true history of the continent—that of indigenous people who have lived on this land since time immemorial. The so-called Columbus discovery, which is indeed a myth, launched an era of cultural decimation and murder. Columbus and those who followed him are responsible for genocide, slavery, colonialism, cultural plunder, and environmental destruction. There was no “discovery.” Nor was it an “encounter.” That is also wrong. The “discovery” was, in fact, wholesale rape, theft, and murder.
From the moment we realized 1992 would be the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, we knew we couldn’t overlook it. We live in a state with the largest concentration of both Native Americans and Native American tribes in the country. We would have to ignore, literally, the history of more than 250,000 Oklahomans not to know there was an America before Columbus.
Jeanne M. Devlin, editor
Oklahoma Today, May–June 1992
But who can blame most Americans for forgetting or never knowing about native people? Who can fault them for not knowing about the high degree of organization and democracy many tribal cultures had attained prior to the invasion of Europeans? There is such a woeful absence of accurate information about native people, either historical or contemporary, that it is little wonder this void has been filled with negative stereotypes from old western movies and romanticized paintings. One friend of mine, a Seneca scholar, once remarked that many people have a mental snapshot of native people taken three hundred years ago, and they want to retain that image.
In the quarter century following the arrival of Columbus on Hispaniola, the island’s native population plummeted from five hundred thousand to only five hundred. Contemporary historians estimate that North America aside, the Spanish conquerors slaughtered twelve million to nineteen million native people in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America in the first four decades of the sixteenth century. The invaders proved to be just as lethal on this continent. Since these purportedly God-fearing men—whose forebears in the name of God had been responsible for the Crusades and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain—could find no biblical reference to any people with red-toned skin, they believed that the natives were not human beings at all, but savages or merely some sort of animal. It was open season. Killing and maiming Indians with lances, crossbows, and packs of the terrifying perros de guerra, or war dogs, were considered great sport.
The Almighty seems to have inspired these people [Indians] with a weakness and softness of humor like that of lambs, and the Spanish who have given them so much trouble, and fallen upon them so fiercely, resemble savage tigers, wolves and lions when enraged with pressing hunger.
They laid wagers with one another, who should cleave a man down with his sword most dexterously at one blow; or who should take his head from his shoulders most cleverly; or who should run a man through after the most artificial manner: they tore away children from their mothers’ arms and dashed out their brains against the rocks.… They set up gibbets, and hanged up 13 of these poor creatures in honor of Jesus Christ and his 12 apostles. They kindled a great fire under those gibbets to burn those they had hanged upon them.
Bishop Bartoleme de las Casas, 1552
Just as the Spanish conquistadores, bearing sword and cross, wreaked havoc amongst the Pueblo people to the west, their comrades in arms committed unspeakable atrocities against the various tribes they came upon in the Appalachian woodlands. Besides the extreme and intentional physical abuse that the Spanish dealt the native people they met during their quest, they also devastated the native population by spreading diseases such as measles, smallpox, and bubonic plague.
Our medicine men and women were correct in believing that all pestilence was the result of the world being out of balance. The violence and deadly diseases brought by the invaders most assuredly spun our world out of balance. Fortunately for our people, the Spanish did not remain long. But the time they did spend with the various tribes took its toll. The eventual arrival of French and English explorers in North America did little to change that aggressive behavior or to change for the better the native people’s predicament. Neither our medicine nor our sacred rites could alter that.
For the Cherokees, one of the largest and culturally richest tribes in the Southeast, major change in lifestyle and custom did not occur after our fleeting encounters with the Spaniards. Cherokee culture shock occurred more than a century later when we came face to face with the English. Although not as overtly cruel as the Spanish, they were at best an imperialistic people capable of destroying entire villages of Cherokees, including women and children.
In 1654, some native people established a new village, as our forebears were wont to do from time to time, at the falls of the James River near where Richmond, Virginia, is now located. The English of the Virginia colony, who had just concluded a bloody war with the Powhatan tribes, were alarmed by the sudden arrival of the native people. The English did not want any more Indian people to live anywhere near them. So the colony sent forth one hundred Virginians and one hundred allied Pamunkey Indians to attack the village and drive out or exterminate the inhabitants. Neither goal was accomplished. The plan backfired. The resulting battle proved disastrous for the whites and the Pamunkeys, who lost their chief and most of their fighting men in combat. The village warriors were victorious. That episode—a humiliating defeat for the British—marked the beginning of a bitter, often murderous, relationship between the native people and the English colonies.
The relationship between the British and the native people continued to be fraught with violence. For example, we know that in July of 1673, James Needham and Gabriel Arthur of the Virginia colony made contact with Cherokees in eastern Tennessee. During a quarrel on a return trip to Virginia to procure trade goods, Needham was killed by his native guide, known as Indian John. After much heated discussion, the Cherokees determined that Arthur, who remained behind to learn the Cherokee language, would be spared. Arthur lived with our people for almost a year. Disguised as a Cherokee, he even went on a few war parties against the Shawnees and other enemies before he was allowed to return to his home.
Other white men soon followed. Ever mindful of our valuable stores of pelts, bears’ oil, and beeswax, they were most anxious to negotiate trade routes between their colonial homes and the Cherokee domain. In 1674, Henry Woodward journeyed from Charleston to Virginia over a route that brought him to what he called “Chorakae” settlements on the headwaters of the Savannah River. Records are scant, but it is believed that by the late 1600s, despite occasional conflicts, more and more English traders from Virginia and South Carolina, lured by the prospects of great financial gain, began to visit the Cherokee Nation on a regular basis.
In 1684, a decade after Woodward first traded with our tribe, a treaty was drawn up at Charleston between some of the Cherokee chiefs and the colony of South Carolina. Presumably this document, signed in picture writing, was meant to guard our people against enemy tribes that had captured a number of Cherokees and sold them into slavery. But like so many other treaties to come, the agreement was abrogated quickly. Less than nine years later, another Cherokee delegation went to Charleston to complain that other tribes still were selling many of our people to the English for slaves. More promises were made and, as was frequently the rule throughout our tribal history; those promises too were unkept.
From that time until the American Revolution, our people were variously military allies, trading partners, or enemies of the English colonists. Now and then we were a combination, or even all three at the same time. We also engaged in on-and-off warfare with neighboring Indian tribes. The confusion of this period of our history resulted in large part because we did not have one person who was responsible for military decisions for all the Cherokee towns, or any person who could make unilateral decisions for all the Cherokees. The English colonies functioned in much the same manner. South Carolina, for instance, was not obligated in any way to honor pledges made by, say, Virginia. Different colonies were allied at different times with various Indian tribes, or with individual towns within the tribes, and those tribes might have been at war with one another.
Although some historians have argued otherwise, it is generally held that the first white trader to marry a Cherokee was Cornelius Dougherty (sometimes called Alexander Dougherty), a stalwart Irishman from Virginia who apparently settled among our people and spent the rest of his life with the tribe. Eleazar Wiggan, known to the Cherokees as “Old Rabbit,” and Ludovic Grant were also early traders who took Cherokee wives. These traders established what were undoubtedly some of the first of the many old Cherokee mixed-blood families. Mingling and intermarriage with the whites had a critical effect on tribal development. The consequences would be felt for generations to come.
By marrying native women, the white traders found they were accepted in the Cherokee community. There were many practical rewards. White husbands learned their wives’ customs and language; the women served as interpreters in matters of commerce. All of the offspring would be considered Cherokee, since the matrilineal kinship system, like that of the Jews, maintains that the children of our women are always Cherokee despite the race of their fathers. Nonetheless, there were negative effects. Marrying white traders, for example, disturbed the traditional Cherokee social organization because many of the wives went to live with their husbands. This was contrary to our custom of husbands residing in their wives’ domiciles. Cherokee women who married whites tended to be submissive, and often acquiesced to their husbands. The spiritual leaders fought against the marrying of white men to Cherokee women unless the men accepted our way of life and came to live with their wives in the Cherokee community.
There were problems for the children, as well. They took their fathers’ surnames along with the clan affiliation of their mothers, and became heirs to their fathers’ houses and possessions. This caused much confusion and infighting. For the first time in our tribe’s history, there was great inequality of wealth.
Other quandaries had to be faced. Oftentimes, the children of mixed marriages spoke both Cherokee and English, attended school, and embraced some of their fathers’ customs and beliefs. They also picked up much of their mothers’ wisdom about the natural world, plants, animals, and mountain living. However, Cherokee society began to erode as many of the mixed-blood youths, swayed by their fathers’ religion, decided the old ways were heathen and bad. Mixed-bloods exerted tremendous influence on the tribe. Eventually, they would ascend to the ruling class in Cherokee society, replacing the old form of government. The purebloods and traditionalists tried to hold on, aware that the balance of our world was going awry.
As more white caravans moved into Cherokee country in the 1700s, elements of our tribe gradually became dependent on the various trade goods the whites brought with them, particularly tools such as knife blades and hoes fashioned of metal, which proved to be far superior to traditional stone implements. The old tribal customs and native attire still prevailed, although some Cherokees yearned to own more of the traders’ utensils and trinkets. Those of our people who experienced significant contact with the English came to believe that they could not live without those things. In those instances, some Cherokees increased their dependency on the whites, swapping deerskins and other staples for hatchets, kettles, bolts of cloth, rum, firearms, and ammunition. Instead of luxuries, the white men’s trade goods came to be regarded by some Cherokees as necessities. Native handicrafts gradually became scarce.
Increased associations with white settlers and traders brought other changes to the Cherokee way of life. Some of the old tribal customs and native dress persisted, but little by little, there were subtle adjustments to the surge of white dominance. Log cabins with several rooms began to take the place of traditional one-room dwellings. Native people developed a taste for white cuisine and strong drink. Domesticated animals such as horses, hogs, and poultry made life easier. So did the white men’s ordnance. Guns became the primary weapons for hunting and warfare. Soon, some of the native people lost their prowess with the bow and arrow or the blowgun made from hollowed cane. They often put aside their knives made of stone, preferring the white man’s blades of forged steel.
Sometimes even the act of hunting game took on a different meaning. Traditional attitudes about killing the animals of the forests and the tribe’s ageless concern for keeping the world in balance were altered. Instead of relying on deer and other fur-bearing creatures for sustenance, a need was created to take more animals than were necessary, to supply skins and pelts for trading purposes. The deerskin trade comprised a vast infrastructure of commerce linking the leather industry in Europe with Indian tribes throughout the Appalachians.
White traders also came to the Cherokees to purchase Indian captives taken during battles. In the tribe’s earlier history, most prisoners of war were tortured or slain. Slavery did not exist among our tribe before the coming of the Europeans. That changed with the traders. The shackled Indians delivered by the Cherokees were sent off to market. There they were sold on the block as slaves, like the Africans who were forced to work on the many plantations of the mainland colonies and the West Indies.
Spanish conquistadores had begun the importation of misery when they brought the first African captives to the Americas in 1505. Because the indigenous people of the Caribbean perished so quickly from maltreatment and disease, enslaved Africans were imported to perform manual labor. During the following four centuries, before the last black slaves in Brazil were finally freed in 1888, about ten million fettered slaves made the difficult journey from Africa. Virtually none of them ever again touched their native soil. It is believed that at least two million died at sea on squalid slave ships. Much of the human cargo went to sugarcane fields in the Caribbean or to Brazil. Although the Portuguese originally monopolized the slave trade, Dutch, British, and French sailors later dominated the trafficking, which peaked in the 1700s. Without regard for the individual lives of African slaves, the white Europeans viewed them only as a profitable commodity for all of the traders.
During the 1700s, if not before, our people also came to value the possession of slaves and to participate in the terrible commerce, introduced into the tribe by English traders who intermarried with our women. The Cherokees’ black slaves were taken as the spoils of war or were captured runaways. The British government also presented slaves to influential tribal leaders, calling them “king’s gifts.” During the late eighteenth century, a growing number of the Cherokee elite—mimicking the English colonists—bought and sold slaves for their own use as field workers and servants. By 1790, the Cherokee elite had definitely adopted black slavery, although the practice never permeated the entire Cherokee Nation.
In 1738, a deadly smallpox epidemic, brought to South Carolina by slave ships, broke out among our tribe. Nearly half of our people died within a year. Another outbreak of smallpox occurred in 1739, probably brought by Cherokees who had contracted the disease after helping the British battle the Spanish in Florida settlements where smallpox was rampant. Smallpox struck our people again in 1759, and at various times throughout the rest of the century. Deadly epidemics of measles and influenza contributed to our misery.
As the smallpox scourge spread unchecked throughout the Cherokee communities, a veil of anguish fell on the Cherokee Nation. Many of our spiritual leaders believed the disease was a punishment for having broken ancient tribal laws. They discarded sacred objects, thinking they had lost their protecting power. Hundreds of our warriors committed suicide after seeing the mutilation and disfigurement that the disease caused to their bodies. Some shot themselves, others cut their throats or stabbed themselves with knives or pointed cane spears. Many sought relief through death by leaping into huge bonfires.
In time, alcohol became even more ruinous than smallpox. When rum was introduced into the Appalachian Mountains, it was swapped to the Indian tribes for deerskins. The impact of “demon rum” on Native American societies brought catastrophic changes to the world of the Choctaws, Cherokees, and other southern tribes.
Many factors conspired to weaken our tribe and to increase stress. Continual warfare with other tribes and with whites took an intolerable toll, and so did infectious diseases and alcoholism. Cherokees and other native people no longer thought of themselves as partners in any sort of compatible liaison with the world around them. Many Native Americans felt utterly violated and compromised. It seemed as if the spiritual and social tapestry they had created for centuries was unraveling. Everything lost that sacred balance. And ever since, we have been striving to return to the harmony we once had. It has been a difficult task. The odds against us have been formidable. But despite everything that has happened to us, we have never given up and will never give up. There is an old Cherokee prophecy which instructs us that as long as the Cherokees continue traditional dances, the world will remain as it is, but when the dances stop, the world will come to an end. Everyone should hope that the Cherokees will continue to dance.