The Cherokee Diaspora

An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

The Origins of the Cherokee Diaspora

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Cherokee people experienced an unprecedented series of challenges to their established modes of life. The matrilineal and matrilocal social structures that gave Cherokee life its meaning and purpose were increasingly exposed to an overlapping series of imperial political, commercial, military, and cultural pressures. When American forces swept through Cherokee Country during the Revolutionary War (ca. 1775–1783), they exacted vengeance on the Cherokees for their leaders' allying with the British. American troops destroyed scores of Cherokee towns, the demographic centers of eighteenth-century Cherokee life. Once the war ended, Cherokee people began the task of rebuilding their lives, although they did so on communal farmsteads that sprawled along rivers and creeks.

Major social and political changes also reshaped Cherokee life during the latter third of the eighteenth century. Established centers of political power shifted, both geographically and in terms of who held power, with an increasingly influential generation of "mixed-blood" Western-educated Cherokee leaders shaping the future of Cherokee politics. All of these changes occurred as a growing number of Cherokee townspeople became refugees and migrants within the cis-Mississippi. Elders struggled to recall a time when such a significant movement of people had occurred. While most Cherokees migrated to different sections of Cherokee Country in the Southeast, reluctantly parting from the land and rivers that anchored communal life in the southeastern portion of North America, a small number of Cherokees began seeking refuge from the ravages of colonial warfare and aggressive settlers by looking farther afield, and to lands beyond the western banks of the Mississippi River.

For the Cherokee, as for other Indigenous peoples in the American South, the latter half of the eighteenth century was both a traumatic and a transformative epoch in their collective histories. Whether they chose to relocate in different parts of Cherokee Country, rebuilding their towns or clearing land for farmsteads, or trekked beyond the Mississippi and to Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, or colonial Mexico, Cherokees continued to nurture kinship relations. Holding on to old memories and remembering kinship ties was no easy task during a time of colonial warfare, shifting settler frontiers and borderlands, and an increasingly mobile, migratory existence for many hundreds (and ultimately thousands) of Cherokee people. The cumulative impact of colonial encounters with Spanish, French, and British settlers, traders, and colonial officials therefore opened a new chapter in Cherokee history. In a sense, the Cherokee both became victims of aggressively expansive settler societies, and became Indigenous agents of settlement and re-settlement themselves. This unnerving epoch magnified the significance of intratribal rivalries, led to political and military conflicts with other Indian tribal leaders and warriors, and placed the regenerative qualities of Cherokee social structures and cultural beliefs under intense pressure.

In the decades between the French and Indian War (1754 –1763) and the Treaty of Washington in 1819, when Eastern Cherokee leaders declared their determination to resist further cessions of land and remain in the Southeast, the Cherokee diaspora was born. During these tumultuous decades Cherokee chiefs ceded 58,555,280 acres of land in Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina either to British colonial governments in North America or to the federal government of the United States. For a people whose homeland once included portions of present-day southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama, the loss of land and loss of access to the rivers and streams that sustained Cherokee towns and farms was life altering. How Cherokees responded to the challenges of the eighteenth century spoke volumes for the resilience and innovative qualities of the Cherokee people and their leaders. As the following chapter reveals, the Cherokee were becoming a dispersed people during the latter half of the eighteenth century and this dispersal was occurring on a geographical scale that seemed unprecedented to them. The language of nationalism therefore became a useful rhetorical device that enabled an increasingly diasporic population to locate a cultural and political "home," helping Cherokee people to keep their sacred fires burning and imagine an identity that was deeply rooted in history, language, tradition.

Prelude to Dispersal

Cherokee Country covered over 40,000 square miles and included seven matrilineal clans. As I outlined in the introduction, these clans structured social and cultural life, administered justice, established red (war) and white (peace) chiefs, and helped regulate communal agricultural and economic activity. While matrilineal clans and matrilocal kinship systems played a critical role in structuring eighteenth-century Cherokee life, towns and the development of regional identities proved equally important to Cherokee political and sacred life. Archeologists observe that Cherokee towns were scattered through one of three geographically and linguistically distinct locations: the Lower Towns in what became the states of North Carolina and Georgia; the Upper, or Overhill, Towns in Tennessee and northwest North Carolina; and the Middle Towns along the Tennessee River and western North Carolina. Within these geo-linguistic divisions, Cherokee scholars also identify the Valley Towns that extended from southwest North Carolina to northeastern Georgia.

Recent archeological, anthropological, and historical research highlights the importance of town and regional identities among the eighteenth-century Cherokees. Scholars observe that following the decline and gradual abandonment of the Mississippian era chiefdoms from the fifteenth century, Indigenous people experienced a period of social instability and migration. This movement of people, which coincided with environmental changes associated with the Little Ice Age between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and with the initial waves of European colonists and traders entering North America, culminated in what archeologists and anthropologists refer to as "coalescent societies."

Archeologist Christopher Rodning has studied the complexities of early eighteenth-century Cherokee town life and constructed a vivid picture of the macro-regional coalescent societies among the Cherokee. Rodning's analysis indicates that after two centuries of migration, linguistic blending, and the overlapping of social structures, an identifiable Cherokee identity came into focus. Rodning contends that this was an identity composed of "multiethnic congeries." Evidence of multiethnic Cherokee populations can be seen, for example, in the way some Natchez Indians were integrated into Overhill Cherokee towns during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This type of assimilation reflected the importance of adoption in the formation and renewal of Cherokee town and clan identities. Non-indigenous observers recorded other forms of multiethnic life among eighteenth-century Indians. For instance, Israel Shreve, the farmer turned colonel in the Second New Jersey Regiment during the Revolutionary War, spent much of his service in and around New Madrid, along the Mississippi River, and in the Ohio Valley. He observed the enduring strength of multiethnic Indigenous towns, noting in his diary on March 13, 1789, that the Delawares, Shawnees, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and French settlers lived peaceably in close proximity to one another at Lance La Grasse. At a time of war, Shreve recorded being greeted by as many as fifty-eight Delaware, Cherokee, and Chickasaw men, and "a Number of Women both on foot and horseback."

Shreve may well have exaggerated the degree to which people of different ethnic backgrounds intermixed; after all, rumors of Cherokees scalping and "Destroying & Massacuring Several Families" in settler townships along the western frontier, in the mid-Atlantic, and on Virginia's western border had highlighted feelings of anxiety among whites since the late 1750s. Nonetheless, geography and gender did play an important role both in binding people together in a community, and in differentiating social identities. Where Cherokee men engaged in diplomacy, flexed their warrior muscles and used their martial skills to protect Cherokee towns from violent settlers, Indigenous women also used their diplomatic savvy and acted as mediators between whites and American Indians. The Cherokee Ghighau (Beloved Woman, or Most Honored Woman) Nanyihi (Nancy Ward) played an active diplomatic role. Nanyihi acted as head of the Cherokee Women's Council and sat with peace and war chiefs during council meetings. Nanyihi used her position as Ghighau to attempt to preserve peace and harmony between Cherokees and whites. In other instances, intermarriages were designed to mediate Cherokee–white political and economic relations, with the white male spouse being incorporated into the Cherokee's matrilineal and matrilocal kinship system.

Cherokee towns were structured around clearly defined social roles and political obligations. Sociologist Duane Champagne has argued that these structures revolved around "symbolic structure," or a "society-wide institution of roles and relations based on respect, [and] charisma tradition." In turn, these structures, institutions, and relations gave meaning to regional identities, as well as clan affiliations. Built into this clan- and town-based system was a certain degree of social and cultural adaptability. Within Cherokee towns, for example, leadership roles were regularly contested, and dwellings and public structures were invested with specific social significance — mounds, for instance, were sites of ceremonial significance, while structures such as menstrual huts designated a space with a clearly defined gendered function. Additionally, a combination of cultural and linguistic continuity was blended with innovativeness to renew and keep meaningful social relations and clan identity. For instance, the sacred fire that occupied an important ceremonial place in chiefdom-era culture continued to be incorporated into ceremonial culture in eighteenth-century Cherokee towns. Indeed, to the eighteenth-century Cherokees fire represented warmth, life, and the light of home.

Eighteenth-century Cherokee towns became important sites of political decision-making. These towns produced strong and charismatic chiefs, such as Wrosetasetow (Mankiller) of Great Tellico; Moytoy, or Amo-adawehi (whom the Scottish adventurer Alexander Cuming titled "Emperor of the Cherokee"), an Overhill chief who succeeded Wrosetasetow in prominence; and Old Hop (Kanagatoga) of Chota. But Cherokee towns were more than sites of colorful regional politics; they also anchored a deeply felt attachment to the land at a time of increasing contact with non-indigenous traders and colonizers. Historian Dixie Ray Haggard notes of this period, "Each Cherokee village had a binary governmental structure which blended religious and civil matters together. This system consisted of a red, or war structure and a white, or peace structure." Furthermore, towns were comprised of "households" that included members from each of the seven matrilineal clans. While eighteenth-century Cherokee towns were politically autonomous, clan kinship proved critical to binding Cherokee people from different towns and regions together, providing them with a coherent, if malleable, sense of common political identity.

Given that Cherokee towns anchored Cherokee identity and politics to specific geographical spaces by the early eighteenth century, travel beyond the safety of the local township, if it occurred at all, was usually conducted for temporary purposes. For example, warriors, hunters, and diplomats traveled as far west as the base of the "Mexican Mountains" (what we know today as the Rocky Mountains), while Cherokee diplomats journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean at least twice during the eighteenth century on diplomatic trips to England. These transatlantic diplomats – who included Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter), Oukah-Ulah, Clogoittah, Kallannah, Tahtowe, Kittagusta, and Ounaconoa in 1730, and the "Emissaries of Peace" Outacite (or Ostenaco, also known as Man-Killer), Woyi, and Cunne-Shote in 1762 – were as much objects of the English public's curiosity as they were emissaries for their towns and clans. Surviving evidence suggests that travel westward or across the Atlantic Ocean was almost exclusively the province of males. Significantly, no oral or written evidence survives to suggest that these various journeys resulted in the permanent settlement of Cherokees in foreign lands. However, by the middle decades of the eighteenth century, some Cherokee travelers did indeed become emigrants, rekindling their sacred fires in new locations and settling on lands unknown to their ancestors, altering the town and clan basis for Cherokee identity, and prompting what historian Wilma Dunaway calls "ethnic reorganizations" among the Cherokee.

The social, cultural, and political changes that gave rise to the Cherokee diaspora thus began dispersing Cherokees throughout the cis-Mississippi and even farther afield during the latter half of the eighteenth century. These changes were set in motion by an interrelated set of factors. Cherokees adapted to the pressure of settler colonialism — be it in the form of warfare; connections to transatlantic systems of trade (in slaves, guns, and myriad other commodities); or disease transfer, as occurred in 1766 with a devastating disease outbreak. In particular, Cherokee economic activity narrowed, with men focusing their hunting expeditions on surplus hunting for trade purposes. In politics, the gradual centralization of Cherokee leadership, and the eventual adoption of laws and a written constitution modeled on that of the United States, proved to be innovations that ultimately transformed the sociopolitical structure of Cherokee life.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that while the decades between the French and Indian War and the emergence of the American republic bore witness to social dislocation and territorial displacement, most Cherokee people continued to live on land between the Appalachian Ridge and the eastern banks of the Mississippi. Here Cherokee town and farm life was punctuated by growing waves of aggressive settlers. At the outbreak of the French and Indian War, a Lower Town Cherokee Headman allegedly exclaimed that his people "look on all the White people to be the same as themselves as they tred [sic] on the same ground." By the time of the signing of the Treaty of Long Island in July 1777, the violence and bloodshed of the previous two decades had fundamentally altered such cordial perceptions. For instance, Onitossitah (Corn Tassel), an Upper Town Cherokee peace chief, upbraided the white colonists for the way in which "you marched into our towns; ... killed a few scattered and defenseless individuals; spread fire and desolation wherever you pleased; and returned again to your own habitations." Just one year after the American colonists declared their independence from the British Crown, Onitossitah thus issued his own declaration, announcing his disapproval for the aggressiveness of the Americans, and insisting that "We are a separate people!"

An important, albeit understudied, way in which Cherokee people nurtured a distinctive sense of themselves in the cauldron of colonial politics, trade, disease transfer, and warfare, was through the articulation of migration narratives. Cherokee migration narratives served three broad functions: first, they explained where the Cherokee people came from and why their towns were structured in the ways that they were by the eighteenth century. Second, migration narratives reminded Cherokees that no matter how far they traveled from the bright light of their town's sacred fire, they would remain connected to the Cherokee people through the clan kinship system. Indeed, rekindling sacred fires in new towns or, increasingly after the Revolutionary War, on farmsteads, provided Cherokees with both a sense of continuity of identity and a feeling of being part of a community they could call home. Finally, Cherokee migration narratives used human movement to emphasize the spiritual significance of the land and nearby rivers or streams to a person's role, and thus identity, in Cherokee society. For example, these narratives portrayed men as engaging in the work of hunting or acting as protectors by assuming the role of warrior. For such men, travel was both a regular part of their life and integral to Cherokee understandings of masculinity. But the travels these men embarked on were never migratory; they were not geared towards the establishment of new and permanent communities far from the game they hunted, the fields that the women of their clan cultivated, and the towns in which their wives and daughters played pivotal roles by manufacturing basketry, preparing meals, and overseeing clan adoption ceremonies.