The Cherokee of Oklahoma

Tribe: The Cherokee. They call themselves the "Ani-yu-wiya." The word "Cherokee" probably comes from the Choctaw word "Cha-la-kee," meaning, "those who live in the mountains," which in this case means the Appalachians. The Creek Indians, who spoke Muscogee and were their enemies, called them "Speakers of another language."  

Meaning of Name: "Ani-yu-wiya" means "The Principal People."

Location: They seemed to have occupied the Carolinas as early as 11,000 years ago, and the Great Lakes area as early as 1800 BC, given that they speak Iroquoian.  In roughly 800 AD, they moved or were pushed south by the other Iroquoian tribes to Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky.  They currently live all over the US, but mostly in NE Oklahoma and N. Carolina. 

Original Language: Iroquoian.

Tribal Affiliations: Chickasaw, Shawnee, the British, the Scots, the Germans, the Irish.

Traditional Enemies: Creek, Muscogee, the French, the Osage.

Traditional Style of Housing: Like several of the southern tribes, like the Creek, the Cherokee had summer homes and winter homes in two different large palisaded villages. The summer homes were rectangular, made of wooden sticks which let in much of the fresh air, and the bark-and-grass roofs were conical. The winter homes were round or pyramid-shaped, made of wood and mud, with bark roofs. They were well-insulated with rugs and wall-hangings. Both the summer village and the winter village had a plaza, a large council house, and probably storehouses, sweat-lodges and menstrual-lodges.

Traditional Attire: The Cherokee probably dressed much like other Woodland area tribes did, and some of their clothing was made from the pounded bark of mulberry trees. After they came in contact with Europeans, they adopted European-style clothing, and like many of the other tribes, they preferred turbans to feathered head-dresses. The men wore ribbon-shirts, and the women wore one or two-piece wool or cotton "tear" dresses (so-called because during the Trail of Tears, the women didn't have access to scissors and had to tear their fabric) with wide horizontal appliqued ribbons sown onto the skirts near the bottom third, with matching appliqued ribbons sewn onto the puffy long or three-quarter-length sleeves and on the shoulders. These dresses were worn with or without concho belts, which are sectional belts made of metal and leather.

Traditional Foods: wild onions, wild greens, huckleberries, watercress, crawdads, wild green beans, blackberries, squash, corn, beans, pumpkins, melons, sunflowers, corn, turtles, fish, and probably small game, deer and elk, and whatever else could be found in the areas they occupied. Like the other Native Americans, the Cherokee cannot digest milk or milk products, which makes distributing government cheese to them very insensitive. They also grew tobacco for smoking in pipes (calumet.)

Position of Women: Like most of the Iroquois-speaking tribes, the Cherokee were traditionally matriarchal, and Cherokee women seemed to have more rights than Cherokee men and non-Cherokee women.  Women owned all of the property, made most of the decisions, and had to be consulted before their husbands could make decisions regarding hunting and war.  The husbands also had no say regarding disciplining their children because they, the men, were never really considered part of the family. The kids' maternal uncles handled discipline. 

Cherokee Courtship: Who gets to marry whom depends largely on the agreements made by the grandmothers. There can be no intermarriage between clans. The price of the bride is paid in deer meat, not the offering of horses as in the Arapaho, Apache and Cheyenne tribes. If she liked the guy, she cooked the deer meat. If not, she didn't, and it could be let to rot as far as she was concerned.

Interesting Tidbits: "Cherokee" seems to be the default position of people who claim Native American ancestry, whether they are really part-Cherokee or not.... The Cherokee were
considered by whites to be the first of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole) because they were one of the few tribes who traded with the Europeans and adopted their customs, language, clothing, religion and culture. In "gratitude" for this, in 1837, the Cherokee walked the long "Trail of Tears" as the last of the same "Five Civilized Tribes" to be forced from their homes in the South so that their land could be used for white-owned cotton fields. They were resettled in "Indian Territory" which at that time was a designated area between north-east Texas and Canada, and eventually was whittled down to Oklahoma.

Traditional Religion: Nature-based, spiritual, some Protestant.

Slavery and the Cherokee: The Cherokee owned slaves who probably worked in the fields and did the more tedious chores.

Current Population: There are more than 316,000 registered Cherokee. 

Current Sources of Tribal Revenue: casinos in North Carolina and Oklahoma, real estate and corporations.

Famous Cherokee: Sequoyah (wrote the Cherokee alphabet.) People who claim to be part Cherokee include the Jonas Brothers, Kevin Cosner, Johnny Depp, Carmen Electra, Val Kilmer, Wayne Newton, Lou Diamond Philips, Elvis Presley, Billy Ray Cyrus, Tommy Lee Jones, Jennifer Garner, James Garner and Garth Brooks.