Native American Heritage Month: Cherokee
Hey, folks! Today, I decided to do a little something special for this month. I'm making an essay on the second largest and one of the most well-known tribes/nations. The Cherokee Nation!
Let's begin...
The Cherokee Nation is "the largest of the three federally recognized tribes in the United States" (Wikipedia sourced). The population is more concentrated in Oklahoma, as that is where Tahlequah resides and where the Trail of Tears lead them. The Trail of Tears was "the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of approximately 60,000 people of the Five Civilized Tribes" (Wikipedia sourced), which means that they were forced out of their homes, unprepared and without food, water, and proper clothing, and made to go on one of the most unforgiving trips in history. They had to survive the stabbing cold and lost thousands along the way to Indian Territory, the territory picked out by the white settlers.
They were not the only tribe weeded out of White American society, as others were, too. This included the tribes of Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca and Ho-Chunk/Winnebago nations as well. This act of Indian Removal was put in place by Andrew Jackson, who gave the Native Americans a choice: either be the average white man or leave and go to the territory reserved for you. The latter would, evidently given by the amount of deaths, be very treacherous and ultimately scarring for the tribes.
The Cherokees who decided they wanted to stay had to adapt to the white culture. This included owning slaves and plantations. They did this before the act, which the president didn't think to be enough and went along with his own plan anyway, and, along with some of the other tribes that suffered this deadly journey, eventually were deemed as apart of the Five Civilized Tribes due to their willingness to adapt to white society and culture.
The Cherokee Tribe was the first of the tribes to invent their own written "alphabet" called the Cherokee Syllabary. It was made by the half-white half-Cherokee man Sequoyah, or, perhaps better known by his white-given name, George Gist/Guess. This is particularly important because, though he could fluently speak English as well, he was illiterate for most of his life. He couldn't read or white and, when asked to give his name on an item he was selling a customer, he couldn't do it.
Sequoyah wanted to create something that mimicked the "talking leaves" as he called it when, in the military, he saw the white soldiers communicating through written means. He didn't care so much about the language or the letters; he wanted to make something unique to his people that could be used by any Cherokee to read and write with. Before he created this syllabary, most folktales were passed down orally, and a lot of them changed tremendously through the generations. Also, it was hard to communicate long distance in their own language without having to resort to learning how to read and write English.
Today, Sequoyah is regarded as one of the greatest people in Cherokee History for creating a written language for his people. Like I said, the fact that he didn't know how to read or write but was able to make a whole entire syllabary for his people (after many years, but still created nonetheless) is very extraordinary.
Today, the language is dying. Tsalagi is spoken by a very small population of people. According to Wikipedia, there only about 1,520 to 2,100 speakers in 2018 and 2019. In the midst of COVID, a lot of speakers died. Centers are working hard to preserve and teach the language to the younger generations in hopes of keeping it intact.
There are reservations of the Cherokee that preserve the heritage. They still do traditional dances, eat traditional foods, and wear traditional clothing. You can do some research on them yourself by looking up keywords like "Cherokee Nation" or "Cherokee Tribe" and follow that with whatever you want to know specifically about them.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me, as I really love educating people about this.
Love ya'll,
nobodyimportant out—
