Search Results

This chapter examines the impact of Christianity and colonialism on the Cherokees’ established modes of life. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee struggled to rebuild their communities amid the devastation caused by the Revolutionary War. During this period, tribal nationalism was deeply influenced by the teachings of Christian missionaries. This chapter considers how the Cherokee people wrestled with the possible uses and limitations of both Christianity and nationalism in their quest to define Cherokee identity in terms recognizable not only to themselves but also to Euroamericans. It also explores how influential Cherokee leaders viewed education and literacy, as well as trade and economic prosperity, with respect to Cherokee identity and migration. Finally, it discusses the Cherokee syllabary as an example of cultural syncretism, along with issues of race and sex in relation to the Cherokee diaspora.

This chapter explores the origins of the Cherokee diaspora, with particular emphasis on the Cherokee oral traditions that seek to make sense of their historical origins and of travel and migration. It begins with an overview of Cherokee Country prior to the Cherokee people’s dispersal before turning to a discussion of the challenges faced by the Cherokee people during the latter half of the eighteenth century with respect to their established modes of life, including the matrilineal and matrilocal social structures that gave Cherokee life its meaning and purpose, due to an overlapping series of imperial political, commercial, military, and cultural pressures. It then considers the major social and political changes that reshaped Cherokee life during this period, and how the Cherokee became Indigenous agents of settlement and resettlement. It also examines the diasporic Cherokees’ self-conscious struggle to maintain a sense of Cherokee identity rooted in traditional town and matrilineal kinshipties.

This chapter examines questions related to Cherokee identity, social status, “blood,” and migration—what the prominent Cherokee leader W. P. Adair called the refugee business—in the trans-Mississippi West in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War. More specifically, it considers the social, political, and economic problems caused by refugees who settled in and around Indian Territory after the Civil War. It also discusses the impact of frontier violence on people of Cherokee descent after the Civil War; the migration of North Carolina Cherokees to Indian Territory; and how the loss of land undermined the political homeland of the Cherokee diaspora. It shows how the migration of people of every race, religion, and ethnic background to the West following President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Homestead Act in 1862 affected the Cherokee Nation in terms of land ownership.

This chapter examines the complex historical backdrop against which the twentieth-century Cherokee diaspora took shape. It considers how the Cherokee diaspora opened up new geographical vistas and socioeconomic opportunities for Cherokees living in diaspora and outside the homelands in Indian Territory and western North Carolina. It also explores how the intersection of the past and present, the significance of travel and migration, and shifting perceptions of “home,” “blood,” and the value placed on memory and historical narration all helped define Cherokee identity. Finally, it discusses the impact of the federal government’s land allotment and assimilation as well as “termination” and “relocation” programs on life in the Cherokee diaspora.

This book explores the origins of the Cherokee diaspora, focusing on the years roughly between 1756 and 1945. It investigates how or why the Cherokee people became a traveling, diasporic people and the manner in which they interpreted narratives about their origins, understood their relationships to other human beings, and reimagined their cultural beliefs and kinship practices in new places. It considers the impact of eighteenth-century colonialism on the purpose of travel and the nature of Cherokee politics and diplomacy. The discussion centers on three interconnected concepts: migration and resettlement, memory, and identity. Part I of the book deals with the significance of Cherokee narratives about human creation and migration, whereas Part II examines the nuances of Cherokee identity during the American Civil War, the tumultuous decades of Reconstruction, and the rise of the allotment, assimilation, and termination era in the period spanning the 1880s and World War II.

This chapter examines how Cherokee slaves gained freedom following the American Civil War. On the eve of the Civil War, approximately fifteen percent of the Cherokee Nation’s total population were slaves held by Cherokee slave owners. The war, however, provided an opportunity for slaves to flee the Cherokee plantations and homes that had once prescribed the parameters of daily life. In refugee camps, former Cherokee slaves waited for the war to end and their new life of freedom to begin. When the war ended, the 1866 treaty between the United States and Cherokee Nation confirmed the Cherokee Nation’s Act of Emancipation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution: slavery was finally abolished. The treaty established the legal foundation on which Cherokee freedpeople, or freedmen, claimed citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. This chapter explores issues of Cherokee identity, race, intermarriage, and residency within the Cherokee diaspora’s political homeland in the post-Civil War era.

This chapter examines the politics of Cherokee removal in the early nineteenth century within the larger context of Cherokee diasporic politics between the 1817 treaty—in which the Cherokees ceded 651,520 acres of land in Georgia and Tennessee to the United States government—and the opening of the 1840s, when most Cherokees settled in the trans-Mississippi West. No event changed the course of nineteenth-century Cherokee history more profoundly than the forced migration along the so-called Trail of Tears during the years 1838–1839. In preparation for the journey into the West, Cherokees were forced to huddle around military establishments such as Fort Butler in North Carolina. In both the cis-Mississippi and the trans-Mississippi West, innovative groups of Cherokee migrants reestablished political affiliations and gave new meaning to family and kinship relations. This chapter also explores the issue of Cherokee identity in relation to Cherokee diaspora.

This chapter examines the impact of the American Civil War on Cherokee identity and diaspora. A little over two decades had passed since thousands of Cherokees were forced to relocate from their homeland in the Southeast and create a new homeland in Indian Territory, the Cherokee people found themselves embroiled in the Civil War. The war became an economic, social, and legal calamity for the Cherokee Nation and gave rise to tens of thousands of Cherokee refugees. Most Cherokees considered the prospect of a large-scale war in the trans-Mississippi West as a threat to the future well-being of the diaspora’s political homeland. Others, especially wealthier Cherokees and Cherokee slave owners, believed they shared a social and economic stake in the fate of the Confederacy. This chapter considers how the American Civil War defined Cherokee identity in different legal ways in various parts of the Cherokee diaspora.

This book has explored the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and the reasons for the Cherokee people’s movement, migration, and relocation after World War II. Among these reasons were the impact of the federal government’s termination and relocation program. Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, government officials tried to complete the work of assimilation by relocating Native Americans to urban centers and integrating them into the labor force. They also sought to liquidate tribal assets. Some Cherokees worked within the American political system to change the relationship between the Cherokee people and the U.S. government. In 1971, the Cherokee Nation achieved sovereignty and self-government. Political success, cultural revitalization, and language immersion programs resulted in increased visibility for Cherokees and Cherokee culture, with significant implications for Cherokee identity. This epilogue discusses the challenges faced by Cherokees in the twentieth century, including political controversies over questions of identity and tribal membership.