Carolyn Johnston - Voices of Cherokee Women

VOICES OF CHEROKEE WOMEN

ALSO BY CAROLYN ROSS JOHNSTON

My Fathers War: Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II

Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 18381907

Sexual Power: Feminism and the Family in America

Jack London: An American Radical?

OTHER TITLES IN THE REAL VOICES, REAL HISTORY SERIES

Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember: Personal Accounts of Slavery in South Carolina, edited by Belinda Hurmence

Black Indian Slave Narratives, edited by Patrick Minges

Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East, edited by Vicki Rozema

Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery, edited by Patrick Minges

Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices: 220 Years of UNC History, edited by Daniel W. Barefoot

I Was Born in Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Texas, edited by Andrew Waters

The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 16051614, edited by Ed Southern

Mighty Rough Times, I Tell You: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Tennessee, edited by Andrea Sutcliffe

My Folks Dont Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina, edited by Belinda Hurmence

No Mans Yoke on My Shoulders: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Florida, edited by Horace Randall Williams

On Jordans Stormy Banks: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Georgia, edited by Andrew Waters

Prayin to Be Set Free: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi, edited by Andrew Waters

Voices from the American Revolution in the Carolinas, edited by Ed Southern

Voices from St. Simons: Personal Narratives of an Islands Past, edited by Stephen Doster

Voices from the Trail of Tears, edited by Vicki Rozema

We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Virginia, edited by Belinda Hurmence

Werent No Good Times: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Alabama, edited by Horace Randall Williams

JOHN F. BLAIR,

P U B L I S H E R

1406 Plaza Drive

Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103

www.blairpub.com

Copyright 2013 by Carolyn Ross Johnston

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, address John F. Blair, Publisher, Subsidiary Rights Department, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103.

COVER
Earths Sky Jeanne Rorex Bridges

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Carolyn, 1948

Voices of Cherokee women / edited by Carolyn Ross Johnston.

pages cm. (Real voices, real history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-89587-599-0 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-0-89587-600-3 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 0-89587-599-3

1. Cherokee womenHistorySources. 2. Cherokee womenHistoriography. 3. Cherokee womenBiography. I. Title.

E99.C5J618 2013

975.00497557dc23

2013022218

Se liyeni, a Cherokee medicine woman from 192627, and her son Walker Calhoun

PHOTOGRAPH SUBMITTED BY JAMES MOONEY AND FRANS OLBRECHTS; BULLETIN 99, NEGATIVE 996 D 4, NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

CONTENTS

Members of the Cherokee Nation gathered at Rattlesnake Springs near what is now the town of Charleston, Tennessee. They had fled from their capital at New Echota in Georgia when threatened with violence and moved their council to Red Clay, Tennessee. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830. Eight years later, the Cherokees were driven into stockades in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama. There, they awaited the long journey. They carried live coals from their final council fire.

In 1838, William Shorey Coodey described the departure of the first of the thirteen detachments to leave on the Trail of Tears:

At this very moment a low sound of distant thunder fell on my ear. In almost an exact western direction a dark spiral cloud was rising above the horizon and sent forth a murmur. I almost fancied a voice of divine indignation for the wrongs of my poor and unhappy countrymen, driven

The Cherokees carried those live coals with them all the way over the eight-hundred-mile journey to Indian Territory.When they arrived, they lit the Eternal Flame from the coals of that last council fire.

In 1984 at Red Clay, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reunited in a joint council meeting. This was the first time the two groups had come together since the removal in 1838. Representatives of the two groups lit the Eternal Flame with torches that had been ignited a few days earlier at Cherokee, North Carolina. Cherokee runners carried the torches along 150 miles of mountainous roads. Before they returned to Red Clay 146 years after their last council meeting in the East, the Cherokees had endured the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands. The live coals represented their deep commitment to Cherokee identity.

The Eternal Flame still burns.

When Cherokees met Europeans, the Europeans assumed the Cherokees were uncivilized because they were not Christians and because the women had so much power. That power was tied to their role as producers and mothers. Cherokee women were farmers and Cherokee men hunters. Their society was matrilineal and matrilocal, which meant that women owned their residences and the fields they worked. Cherokee women were wives, mothers, producers, healers, and warriors. They possessed sexual freedom and could obtain divorce without difficulty. Still, the clans maintained strict incest taboos. In all their actions, women had to take the welfare of the community into account. Cherokees believed in a sexual division of labora division associated with complementarity and equality, not hierarchy or domination.

Cherokee women lost and gained power in a variety of ways in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intended to impress the United States government and especially Georgians that the tribe was civilized and democratic, the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 disenfranchised women politically but allowed them to retain their property rights. While such political changes were strategic moves, they also stemmed from the economic shift from hunting to intensive agriculture, and from the adoption of patriarchal values by the influential Cherokees who drafted the legislation. The Cherokees even acquired African slaves. Often, their perception was that survival as a nation hinged on selective acculturation and the appearance of civilization.

The Indian Removal Act intended to remove all southeastern Indians. Resistance was fierce. Cherokee women protested, as they were more tied to the land than were men, but they were excluded from formal political decisions. No Cherokee women were lawyers, judges, or members of juries. Cherokee women still retained covert political influence, but their formal power diminished. Approximately 10 percent of the tribe at the time of removal was highly acculturated. Cherokees often intermarried with white Americans and converted to Christianity. Yet adopting European dress or language did not necessarily imply the loss of Cherokee identity and culture. Removal and the Civil War tended to reinforce older Cherokee values and beliefs, while allotment dealt a serious blow to Cherokee womens power and to tribal sovereignty.