Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0807854573
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807854570
- Pub. Date:
- 04/14/2003
- Publisher:
- The University of North Carolina Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0807854573
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807854570
- Pub. Date:
- 04/14/2003
- Publisher:
- The University of North Carolina Press
Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook / Edition 1
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Overview
Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook is your introduction to this vibrant world. The book is organized around seven geographical hubs or communities within the original Cherokee homeland. Each chapter covers sites, side trips, scenic drives, and events. Cherokee stories, history, poems, and philosophy enrich the text and reveal the imagination of Cherokees past and present.
The Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, is the main interpretive center for the Cherokee Heritage Trails. Among the many other featured sites are Kituhwa Mound, origin of the mother town of the Cherokees; Junaluska Memorial and Museum, with a preserved gravesite and medicine plant trail; and Unicoi Turnpike Trail, part of the Trail of Tears and one of sixteen national millennium trails in the United States.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807854570 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2003 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Brett H. Riggs is a research archaeologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Read an Excerpt
Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook
By Barbara R. Duncan Brett H. Riggs
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2003 University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5457-0
Introduction
An Introduction to Cherokee History and CultureIt's always been my belief that we were put here in the beginning. This is our land. This is where our Creator wanted us to be, because this is where he put us. All the things here have helped us survive-the natural resources, the plants. That's how we have lived; without those things we wouldn't be here. He's blessed us with this land, and in return we should respect it, we should take care of it. -Marie Junaluska
The Cherokees say that they have always been here in the southern mountains, that the Creator put them here. The first man and first woman, Kanati and Selu, lived at Shining Rock Wilderness, near present-day Waynesville, and the first Cherokee village was at the Kituhwa Mound, near present-day Bryson City. They say that their language and their traditions were given to them by the Creator. [ill I-1]
Many contemporary Cherokee people believe, as Christians, in the creation story in Genesis. Walker Calhoun said, "When Adam and Eve was without a garden, the Creator told them to fill the earth with people. And God told Adam to take care of the earth."
Many Cherokee people also believe that the Creator placed them here in the mountains, and they continue to tell Cherokee creation stories. They tell how the water beetle, Dayunishi, brought mud from below the waters to make the earth, and how the great buzzard shaped that earth with his wings, making the mountains of Cherokee country. [sdb I-1]
Archaeological evidence shows people living in the southern Appalachians more than eleven thousand years ago; we know them through their distinctive stone tools and their beautifully made, fluted spear points. During this time, at the end of the last Ice Age, the climate was colder, the southern Appalachians were covered with spruce and fir, and mastodons and other extinct species foraged the upland landscape. Even today, Cherokee stories tell of strange, giant animals that once roamed the mountains, hearkening back to the end of the Ice Age. Cherokee elder Jerry Wolfe recalls, "My dad always said that when the Cherokees came into this country, into these mountains, that it was dangerous. It was a dangerous place because of all the monsters that lived here." [ill I-2]
About ten thousand years ago, the climate grew warmer, and people adapted to a changing environment by developing new tools and new, more diverse patterns for hunting, fishing, and gathering plant foods. Archaeological sites yield different and distinctive styles of spear and dart points, and weights and sinkers for fishing nets as well as fishhooks carved from bone. People carved stone bowls from steatite (soapstone), and created mortars and pestles for grinding seeds and nuts, some of which were cultivated. People began making baskets at least ninety-five hundred years ago, and their woven, twined cords left impressions on clay hearths that survived the ages. An extensive network of trading paths followed rivers and mountain ridges.
Over the millennia, people in the southern mountains developed villages, agriculture, pottery, bows and arrows, and more elaborately carved stone pipes. According to scholars, Cherokee language, part of the Iroquoian language family, became a separate, distinct language at least thirty-five hundred years ago (1500 B.C.). [ill I-3]
More than a thousand years ago, people in the southern mountains began developing a distinctively Cherokee way of life, with patterns of belief and material culture that survive to this day. They began to focus on growing corn, whose name reflects its importance: selu, name of the first Cherokee woman. They built permanent, well-organized villages in the midst of extensive cornfields and gardens throughout the fertile river valleys of the Cherokee country. In these villages, homes ranged around a central plaza used for dances, games, and ceremonies. At one end of the plaza, the council house, or townhouse, held the sacred fire, symbol of the Creator and embodiment of the spirit of the town. Often the townhouse stood on an earthen mound, which grew with successive, ceremonial rebuildings.
At the heart of this culture was the idea of balance, or duyuktv, "the right way." Men's hunting and fishing, for example, was balanced by women's farming. The rights of the individual were balanced with the good of the whole, resulting in great personal freedom within the context of responsibility to the family, clan, and tribe. The size of the townhouse reflected the size of the village because all the people of the village-men, women, children, and old people-had to fit in the townhouse in order to make decisions together. On an individual level, the physical, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of oneself were to be integrated and balanced. Thus one became a "real person,": Ani-Yvwiya.
Every aspect of daily life and the physical world had spiritual significance. Ceremonies and customs maintained balance for the individual and the community. Men fasted and prayed before hunting, and then offered thanks in a ceremony after killing an animal; on returning to their village, they shared the meat, used all parts of the animal, and often danced to honor the animal. When gathering plants, only the fourth was taken, and a gift was left in return. Even today stories of the Little People emphasize the importance of reciprocity. Their permission must be asked before picking up anything from the woods-a stone, a feather, a leaf-and if their permission is given, a gift must be left. Entire villages fasted and purified themselves in order to give thanks before eating the new corn crop. Every day began with the going-to-water ceremony, when everyone entered a stream near their village, faced east, and prayed to the seven directions: the four cardinal points, the sky, the earth, and the center-the spirit. They gave thanks for a new day, and washed away any feelings that might separate them from their neighbors or from the Creator, emerging cleansed physically, mentally, and spiritually. [ill I-4]
Cherokees developed and cultivated corn, beans, and squash-"the three sisters"-along with sunflowers and other crops. In addition to farming, Cherokee women continued gathering wild foods from woods and fallow fields: nuts, wild greens, fruit, and berries. Men continued hunting wild game and fishing.
Cherokee women owned their houses and fields, and passed them from mother to daughter. Cherokee women also passed their clan affiliation to their children, both male and female. A man's most important relatives were his mother, maternal grandmother, and his sisters-the women of his clan. Until he married, he lived in their houses, and when he married he moved to his wife's house. People of the same clan did not marry each other. The clans also enforced unwritten laws regarding homicide and other social infractions. If someone was killed, his or her clan was owed a life from the clan of the killer. When this life was paid, balance was restored, and no further retribution took place. Clan members sat together at dances and ceremonies, in special sections reserved for their clan. Although oral tradition suggests that at one time there may have been as many as fourteen clans, each with its own special skills and responsibilities, today seven Cherokee clans survive: wolf, deer, bird, paint, long hair, wild potato, and blue. [ill I-5]
The existence of gorgets carved from marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico suggests the extent of Cherokee trading practices. Worn around the neck, these round shell ornaments, about four inches in diameter, were elaborately carved with spirals, crosses, rattlesnakes, water spiders, and birds. Many of these creatures play an important role in Cherokee stories. Cherokees also traded mica throughout eastern North America, and received copper and pipestone from the Great Lakes region and plants and shells from the Atlantic coast.
Chunkey stones, marbles, and ball sticks indicate favorite games of the time. Smooth chunkey yards were found in villages. Stickball games were played on large cleared fields. [map 2]
Archaeological evidence, early written accounts, and the oral history of the Cherokee themselves show Cherokees as a mighty nation controlling more than 140,000 square miles with a population of thirty-six thousand or more. Unified by language, traditions, and its clan system, the Cherokee nation had no centralized government or written laws. Towns governed themselves by democratic consensus, and each had its own priest, war chief, and peace chief. Cherokee people were athletic, with some men as much as six feet tall. Everything they needed they created from their environment: food, medicine, clothing, shelter, weapons, musical instruments, jewelry, and goods for trade. They practiced empirical science by observing the world around them, and then they used that knowledge combined with spiritual inspiration and practical application to create a society that used resources in a sustainable way.
Into this ever-changing but ever-balancing world came people from Europe and Africa. In 1540, Hernando de Soto's expedition passed through the margins of Cherokee territory. Their gifts, their diseases, and their greed foreshadowed the patterns of the next three hundred years of Cherokee history. In search of gold and slaves, this army of "500 Christians," as they described themselves, executed any who would not provide them directions to the next settlement. Strangers without accurate maps or sufficient food, they raped, murdered, and demanded tribute as they crossed through the rugged mountains. According to the Spanish chroniclers on the expedition, Cherokee villages provided food: seven hundred turkeys from one village; twenty baskets of mulberries from another; and three hundred hairless dogs-supposedly a delicacy. The Cherokees, however, say that this was a joke. They say they gave the Spaniards opossums, which Cherokees do not eat because of that animals' scavenging habits. De Soto's chroniclers commented on the impressive weaponry of American Indians, noting that the Spanish men did not have the strength to pull their bows. Cherokee warriors could fire six or seven arrows in the time it took to load and fire one arquebus, the unreliable Spanish flintlock. Their arrows had enough power to entirely penetrate the body of a horse from hindquarters to heart. Chroniclers also marveled at the abundant game, wild foods, and cultivated crops among Native Americans of the Southeast. They, and a later expedition led by Juan Pardo in 1567, traded beads, knives, buttons, and other goods for food. Some African slaves escaped these expeditions and continued to live with Native tribes. [ill I-6]
The Spaniards also brought devastating diseases. Like other Native Americans, the Cherokee people had no resistance to European diseases, which quickly became epidemic. Because diseases traveled ahead of de Soto's expedition, the Spaniards found some villages deserted, their entire population dead. Some scholars now estimate that 95 percent of Native Americans were killed by European diseases within a hundred and fifty years of Columbus's landing, thus enabling conquest and giving the appearance of an empty land.
After these first expeditions, with their brief contact, the Cherokees had only sporadic exposure to Europeans. They met the British in Virginia in 1634. By 1650, they had begun growing peaches and watermelons, acquired through trade. But it wasn't until the 1690s that that the Cherokees began making regular contact with any Europeans. In 1693, Cherokee leaders traveled to Charlestown to complain that Cherokee people were being sold as slaves to the British, a practice that continued for thirty years after their meeting. [map 3]
In the eighteenth century, the Cherokees felt the full impact of Europeans in their territory. Peaceful cultural exchange, trade goods, new technology, intermarriage between Cherokee women and British traders, and trips to England by Cherokee leaders were the positive results. Negative results included three major smallpox epidemics, each killing one-third to one-half of the Cherokee population at the time; repeated "scorched earth" military campaigns destroying dozens of Cherokee towns; and the loss of 75 percent of the Cherokee territory through treaties. The Cherokees began the century living in towns built around mounds, celebrating festivals, sharing wealth, and balancing men's and women's roles. By the end of the century, many of the old towns had been destroyed or ceded, and the federal government was pressing a Civilization Policy to make Cherokee men farmers instead of hunters and warriors, and to make women spinners and weavers rather than the successful farmers they had been. [ill I-7]
The Cherokees began the 1700s far outnumbering the colonists, even though their population had been drastically reduced by epidemics. They ended the century vastly outnumbered, with colonists crowding tribal lands. From an estimated population of thirty-five thousand in 1685, about seven thousand survived in the mid-1760s. This population, still spread throughout the southern Appalachians, was concentrated in the Lower and Middle Towns (along the Little Tennessee River), the Valley Towns (along the Hiwassee River), and the Overhill Towns (along the Tennessee River).
During this time, the Cherokees helped the colonists by eliminating the Yamassee and Tuscarora, their neighbors and enemies, who had been the buffer between themselves and the Europeans. They also brought deerskins for trade. From 1700 to 1715, nearly a million skins were shipped from Charlestown to Europe, and the trade increased for more than fifty years. The trade brought white traders-mostly Scots-into Cherokee country; the traders often married Cherokee women.
A Cherokee man might trade fifty deerskins in a good season, and according to exchange rates set in 1716, these would buy a gun (35 deerskins), sixty bullets (2 deerskins), twenty-four flints (2 skins), one steel for striking flint (1 skin), and perhaps an axe and hoe (5 deerskins each.) Cherokee women actively participated in the trade, to the surprise of the British. The corn raised by Cherokee women, and their baskets, were in great demand, and in turn they received cloth, iron pots, weapons, plows, hoes, and bells. Exchange rates set eighty-four bushels of corn as the price of a calico petticoat.
During this period of trade, Cherokee men began hunting with guns as well as continuing to use bows and arrows. The Cherokee began keeping and breeding horses about 1720, soon developing large herds. Because traders used horses to carry their packs, the Cherokee word for trader was the same as the word for horse, sogwili.
Cherokee women, in addition to their already extensive agriculture and woodland gathering, began growing apples (from Europe), black-eyed peas (from Africa), and sweet potatoes (from the Caribbean.) By mid-century, they were keeping horses, chickens, and hogs. They resisted raising cattle because the slow nature of cattle, they thought, would be imparted to anyone who ate beef, and because cattle were so destructive to gardens that they required fencing. By the end of the century, however, Cherokee households included cows as well. Cherokee Beloved Woman Nancy Ward said that she saved Lydia Bean, a white woman, from being burned at the stake because she knew how to make butter and cheese and would teach the Cherokee women to do so.
Nancy Ward and other Cherokee women attended every treaty signing in the eighteenth century. At first they asked where the white women were, but they soon learned that only white men made treaties. They continued to send greetings to the queen and to white women in Europe, while the British ridiculed the Cherokee "petticoat government."
Peaceful trade and intermarriage went on from 1700 to 1760. From 1760 to 1794, however, the Cherokees were at war. Events throughout this period gave rise to stories about Indians scalping settlers on the frontier, stories that became part of the American myth of this country's origins, a myth since dramatized in novels, Wild West shows, medicine shows, radio, and finally television and movies. These stories live on in the oral history of white frontier families as well. In reality, Cherokee actions against settlers were either part of military action directed by the British, or retaliation for murder according to Cherokee laws controlling homicide and its punishment through the clan system. Historical documents further show that Cherokee violence against settlers was matched by the violence of individuals of European descent and by their military forces. Both sides committed atrocities.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook by Barbara R. Duncan Brett H. Riggs Copyright © 2003 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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