Nanye’hi (pictured), a Cherokee leader, called for peace between the denizens and settlers. When the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1832 that Georgia had no authority over the Cherokee, which was a sovereign nation, President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling. Source: Tennessee State Museum website. Note: Photo could not be authenticated.

1 November 2024

Today feels fresh, just like when you turn the page of a paper calendar and greet a new month.

November in the United States marks a time to attend to Native history and a time to consider both present and future.

In my family, to mark the present, we give our grand-children Osage or Lakota nick-names and teach them Native words for the creatures in their picture books.

True, I have to look up most translations, and I am joyful to show the little ones a buffalo (Mahto: Lakota) a dog (Shokah: Osage) a spider (Ektomi: Lakota) or a raccoon (Meeka: Osage). 

I share little stories I’ve discovered of Native peoples who lived (or continue to live) where our grown children and grand-children now call home.

For example, when the cicadas creep from the earth to mate in certain summer cycles (in Chicago), I remind the little ones Indigenous folks found ways to eat the protein-rich bugs.

Today I start a visit to the American South, and recall what I learned many years ago when studying histories of Native peoples in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The Cherokee are likely the folks best known in these parts. 

After settler contact, the Cherokee took purposeful steps to reframe outsiders’ perceptions that Indigenous individuals were lazy and illiterate.

Many adopted settler dress and built homes fashioned like log cabins, while others learned English and some were educated in Western schools.

In the early 1800s, Sequoyah, with shrewd insight, spent years developing a writing system for the Cherokee language. His final project is called a “syllabary” because each symbol he created represents a “syllable.” 

The written language spread and was introduced through mass media in 1825 with the first Native newspaper: The Cherokee Phoenix.

Like many of the Cherokees’ countrymen and women—the Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and so on—their soil, streams, wildlife, plant life and gold were coveted by settlers. 

The Cherokees’ plight found a sympathetic ear with the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the tribe’s favor in 1832, thus restricting the settler government from seizing their lands in Georgia. 

Turns out the Cherokees’ attempts at “civilization” posed a threat to the narratives invented by settlers, whose desires were fueled by the popular—and false—notions that Indigenous people lacked the brain power to be educated, much less civilized.

The Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokee was ignored by President Andrew Jackson and by his successor, Martin Van Buren, each who ordered troops in the 1830s into Southern states to wrench Indigenous denizens from their homes and force-march them more than five thousand miles to Oklahoma, according to the National Parks Service. 

I am reminded of this as we drive through Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, home today to more than 130,000 Native Americans in North Carolina. 

I celebrate the month by honoring the past, present and future of denizens in today’s post, and I will send postcards to friends and families, reminding them of the denizens who called the regional home for––at least—14,000 years.

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