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Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East (Real Voices, Real History Series)

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Cherokee Voices is a collection of first person accounts of Cherokee life in the east in the 18th and 19th century. The accounts are taken from journals, letters, official records, and other primary sources and describe a wide range of events in Cherokee daily life and historical events. Included are speeches by Nancy Ward, the famous Cherokee Beloved Woman, and Ostenaco and Little Carpenter, two famous 18th century Overhill Cherokee leaders. Eyewitness accounts of a Chickamauga attack on travelers on the Tennessee River, a Cherokee ball game, a Cherokee dance, descriptions of council houses, life in a Cherokee Mission, front row seats at treaty talks, and other first person accounts make this book more interesting than your typical dry textbook of Cherokee history. Rozema's book would be useful for schools for assigned reading by students to learn what the Cherokees were really like. It would be helpful to teachers or anyone else wanting to get a quick, interesting and unique perspective of Cherokee history and life.

If found this book to be extremely interesting, full of little known information about what the ancestors of our Cherokee nation felt, said and acted upon. Reading the letters and treaties made by these tribal men proved an eye opening experience for me. Also includes excepts of reports about terrible betrayals of the white men charged with keeping their Cherokee "brothers" safe. Through actual documentation, it shows the systematic taking of the Cherokee lands by stealth or force. It reveals a very intelligent people willing to make changes to be at peace with the whites, but shows the failing of the Cherokee to understand the whites did not truly desire friendship, only peace to give them time to find ways to encroach on land that was not theirs to take. Long before the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee were continually removed from their land, their borders reduced and their people dispossessed from being one of the first American peoples to lay claim to it. The book reveals the good and the bad about the Cherokee in those times. Well worth the money.Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East (Real Voices, Real History Series)