Portal:Oklahoma/Selected article/January, 2008



The Cherokee are a people from North America, who at the time of European contact in the 1600s, inhabited what is now the Eastern and Southeastern United States. Most were forcibly moved westward to the Ozark Plateau. They were one of the tribes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, they are the most numerous of the 563 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.

Of the southeastern Indian confederacies of the late 1600s and early 1700s (Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, etc), the Cherokee were one of the most populous and powerful, and were relatively isolated due to their hilly and mountainous homeland. Beginning at about the time of the American Revolutionary War in the late 18th century, divisions over continued accommodation of encroachments by white settlers, despite repeated violations of previous treaties, caused some Cherokee to begin to leave the Cherokee Nation. Many of these dissidents became known as the Chickamauga. Led by Chief Dragging Canoe, the Chickamauga made alliances with the Shawnee and engaged in raids against colonial settlements (see Cherokee–American wars). Some of these early dissidents eventually moved across the Mississippi River to areas that would later become the states of Arkansas and Missouri. Their settlements were established on the St. Francis and the White Rivers by 1800.

The Trail of tears displaced the Cherokee's 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).

In Oklahoma, the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up the tribal land base. Under the Curtis Act of 1898, Cherokee courts and governmental systems were abolished by the U.S. Federal Government. (read more . . . )