PIECE BY PIECE – HISTORY COMES TOGETHER BY WAY OF MANY SOURCES
When I visited the archaeology museum in Ghost Ranch, NM, I was amazed by one of the exhibits – called puzzle piece jar. A large pottery jar had been pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, using 176 jar fragments that had been found scattered across 7 locations in one site.
When I started piecing together the history of the American Indians in Oklahoma, the process felt a little bit like that. The first place I gathered information was at the Cherokee Museum in Tahlequah, OK. Up to that point, I had no idea I would be learning about the Cherokee in Oklahoma. I knew Cherokee Indians had lived in North Carolina, because I learned about them in grade school. I visited Cherokee, NC, a town on the reservation home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation as a child and again as a young adult. I saw the outdoor drama, “Unto These Hills,” which tells the story of the Cherokee people in the Western mountains of North Carolina.
What I learned in that museum in Tahlequah, OK is that the first European explorer to encounter the Cherokee people was Hernando De Soto who entered Cherokee nation in 1540. At that time Cherokee Nation encompassed what is now Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. For a long time after that first encounter, the Cherokee people maintained their traditional way of life. Over time, however, Cherokee leaders began to encourage the adoption of European-American ways and culture. They gave up their hunting and gathering lifestyle for a lifestyle based on trade and growing crops not just for subsistence, but also for the accumulation of wealth. Elite members of the five so called “civilized tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) even held African slaves, even though American Indians had been enslaved along with Africans at one point in their history (this was the first time I knew that African slaves accompanied Indians from these tribes on the Trail of Tears, and that among the Cherokee People there has been a long struggle for descendants of these slaves to gain acceptance as members of the modern-day Cherokee Tribe).
Beginning in the early 1800s Cherokee peoples allowed missionaries to work among them and teach Christianity. Because they already believed in a monotheistic God who was creator of all things, despite an initial reluctance, many Cherokee embraced Christianity or forms of spirituality that brought together their traditional beliefs and the beliefs brought to them by the missionaries. It was one of these missionaries, a Presbyterian named Samuel Worcester, who helped establish the first Cherokee newspaper. Of course, that would not have been possible without the stunning achievement of Sequoyah, a Cherokee from Tennessee, who created a syllabary and a writing system for the Cherokee language in order that the Cherokee language might be used in the same way the European languages were transmitted by way of “talking leaves.”
What Worcester did was to use his connections to get funding for a newspaper office and supplies. Then he created a metal type for each of the 86 characters of the syllabary, so the language could be printed, distributed, and learned widely among the Cherokee people. Because they lived in such a wide area, he believed that Cherokee literacy in the Cherokee language would help promote a more unified Cherokee Nation. Around this same time, Cherokee leaders adopted a formal government with three legislative branches and a written constitution.
In all these ways, Cherokee Nation sought to establish itself as an equal partner with the United States. All of these cultural accommodations they did in the interest of survival. And for a while, it seemed that they might be treated as people who had a right to their ancestral land and the life they had built there. Under the terms of a 1819 treaty, in which the Cherokee ceded some land, the United States guaranteed that remaining Cherokee land would be off-limits to white settlers forever. Less than 20 years later, the Georgia state government claimed jurisdiction over the entire Cherokee territory, annulled the national laws, annexed the land, and began distributing plots by lottery. The Cherokee land had simply become too valuable, first for farming, and then for prospecting, after gold was discovered there. Moreover, everything the Cherokee people had done to acculturate to “American” patterns of land use, had made the land even more valuable to those who were pushing for expansion into Indian territory.
Cherokee Nation took its case against the state of Georgia all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, lawyer William Wirt argued that the Cherokee constituted an independent foreign nation, and that an injunction should be placed on Georgia laws aimed at eradicating them. In 1831, the Supreme Court found the Cherokee did not meet the criteria for being a foreign nation.
At around the same time, another case involving Cherokee Nation and land rights made its way to the Supreme Court. The U.S. government had arrested missionary Samuel Worcester and nine others ostensibly on the grounds that they had violated the 1819 treaty by living on Cherokee land without a permit. The others involved in the case accepted a pardon, but Worcester refused a pardon and remained in jail, enabling Cherokee Nation to take the case to the higher court. In 1832, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in favor of Worcester, finding that the Cherokee constituted “distinct political communities” with sovereign rights to their own territory. In his ruling, Marshall stating explicitly that the state of Georgia had no authority to force the indigenous people off their land.
This was a major legal victory, but President Andrew Jackson had no intention of abiding by the ruling of the high court. In May of 1830, he had gotten Congress to approve the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the president to designate lands west of the Mississippi for tribal use.
Throughout the 1830s increasing pressure was put on the Cherokee people to leave their ancestral home and relocate to what is now Oklahoma. A few did leave, but in late 1837, President Martin Van Buren sent federal agents to drive the remaining Cherokee people off the land and into detention camps, where they remained through the summer of 1838. That October, weakened with hunger and sickness, they were forced to travel, most of them on foot, to their new “home.” Under the supervision of federal troops, and accompanied by at least three missionaries who had worked with them over the previous 20 years, they marched for more than four months, through bitter winter weather, to what is now Eastern Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 out of a population of roughly 16,000 died along the way from exposure, starvation, illness, or physical exhaustion. This march, known as the Trail of Tears, was one of many trails of tears, as the removal of American Indians from their ancestral lands happened in many places throughout the United States.
Samuel Worcester travelled to Oklahoma independently, met the Cherokee people there, and continued to work with them as they established schools, community life, and a new center of Cherokee Nation government in Tahlequah, OK. That is how I came to be visiting a Cherokee museum in Oklahoma, a museum housed in the old building occupied by the Cherokee Supreme Court, across the street from the Cherokee jail, and down the road from the site of the first two Cherokee schools established in Oklahoma.
The stories of tribes and nations like Cherokee Nation come to us today from many sources: eyewitness accounts of those who witnessed the trail of tears; letters and journals from missionaries and their spouses; records of court proceedings and congressional hearings; tribal records both written and verbal; presidential records; newspaper accounts, and more. There are many pieces missing in this brief overview of one indigenous nation’s history, but I hope the pieces I have been able to put together offer some insight into our nation’s history as well.
