Cherokee Indians

The Cherokee, (ah-ni-yv-wi-ya) are a people native to North America, who at the time of European contact in the 16th century, inhabited what is now the Eastern United States and Southeastern United States until most were forcefully moved to the Ozark Plateau

The Cherokee Nation was originally located over a broad territory covering much of what is now the southeastern United States. In 1838 under the direction of President Andrew Jackson, the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their lands in what is now remembered as the infamous Trail of Tears.

Cherokees were displaced from their ancestral lands in North Georgia and the Carolinas in a period of rapidly expanding white population, a situation as well as a gold rush around Dahlonega, Georgia in the 1830s. Various official reasons for the removal were given. One was that the Cherokee were not efficiently using their land, and the land should be given to white farmers. Others disputed this, although some contest to this day that President Jackson's intentions toward the Cherokee in this policy was humanitarian. Jackson himself said that the policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing the fate of "the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware" (Wishart 1995, 120). However there is ample evidence that the Cherokee were adapting modern farming techniques, and a modern analysis shows that the area was in general in a state of economic surplus (Wishart 1995).

Despite a Supreme Court ruling in their favor, many in the Cherokee Nation were forcibly relocated West, a migration known as the Trail of Tears or in Cherokee Nunna Daul Tsunny (Cherokee:The Trail Where They Cried). This took place after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, although as of 1883, the Cherokee were the last large southern Indian tribe to be removed. Even so, the harsh treatment the Cherokee received at the hands of white settlers caused some to enroll to emigrate west (Perdue 2000, 565).

Samuel Carter, author of Cherokee Sunset, writes: "Then… there came the reign of terror. From the jagged-walled stockades the troops fanned out across the Nation, invading every hamlet, every cabin, rooting out the inhabitants at bayonet point. The Cherokees hardly had time to realize what was happening as they were prodded like so many sheep toward the concentration camps, threatened with knives and pistols, beaten with rifle butts if they resisted."