Talk:Chickamauga (people)

Needed additions to this article
Is there a Chickamauga language? Is there a Chickamauga traditional religion?

Gringo300 21:20, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * No, the Chickamauga language is the Cherokee language. The Chickamauga traditional religion is the same as the traditional Cherokee faith systems. CJLippert (talk) 18:14, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Copyrighted material removed
I removed text that was copied verbatim from:
 * http://www.chikamaka.org/chikamakas.htm
 * http://www.chikamaka.org/about.htm

This text is presumably copyrighted by the site's authors, and not licensed under the GFDL or compatible license. If so, it cannot legally be copied into Wikipedia. If you would like to copy this text in, you should get permission from the site owners to publish it under the GFDL or to put it in the public domain. (And add a note to the talk page that you did so.) But this is an encyclopedia, not a self-promotional site, so this text would have to be re-written anyway. It's probably better to add the information from this site to Wikipedia, instead of copying word-for-word. Thanks, Beland 23:18, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

Text from Chikamaka
Someone had recreated an article at Chikamaka which had been a redirect to this page. Perhaps that should be the correct location for this article. I don't know--but it seems pointless to have separate content in two articles. If any of this information is verifiable, feel free to add into this article. older ≠ wiser 21:17, 17 February 2006 (UTC) The Chikamaka are also known as Chickamauga, which is a corruption of the word that means "Boiling Pot". Some people think the Chikamaka have ceased to exist. That is not true. ="Cherokees of the Old South a People in Transition" by Henry Thompson Malone, The University of Georgia Press Athens=
 * The Chikamaka are Native American people.
 * The Chikamaka People have continued to exist since the more well known time of Dragging Canoe.
 * Some went west into Indian Territory and into Texas and Mexico.
 * Others stayed in TN, KY, AL, GA and the historic homeland.
 * The name Chikamaka or Tsikamaka is documented by the Moravians who loved the people and lived among them.
 * You can read about this spelling (Chikamaka) in the book
 * There is an active group of Chikamaka people who gather regularly for meetings and ceremonies in what is now known as Grundy County, TN.
 * They also have a website www.Chikamaka.org[] which gives a brief history of the people and mentions some of their ancestry, words and culture.
 * They also have a website www.Chikamaka.org[] which gives a brief history of the people and mentions some of their ancestry, words and culture.

Some cuts
"The Shawnee contingent included the famous Tecumseh (Tecumtha), who was not yet a warrior, and Dragging Canoe provided an example for many of the ideas later developed more fully by the future Shawnee leader who came to lead a massive alliance of tribes."


 * Source? Never heard of Tecumseh as Cherokee/Chickamauga, rather working to make alliance of many nations.  Needs citation.

"The area into which the Chickamaugas moved was on the southeastern edge of the hunting grounds shared by the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Chickasaw, among others. It was the buffer zone between the Muskogees (commonly called the Creek Confederacy) and the Cherokees. A few decades earlier, the entire Tennessee Valley had been Muskogee, but loss of numbers due to European and African sickness had forced them south."


 * Source? Esp for "a few decades earlier"?

"Among the later towns established by the Chickamaugas, the most important was Willstown in DeKalb County, Alabama, which eventually became one of the most important centers of the Cherokee Nation. Others included, but were not limited to, the town of Coosada in Jackson County, inhabited by members of both the Coushatta and Kaskinampo peoples who joined the Chickamaugas, Creek Path near Guntersville, Alabama, where the Great Indian War and Trading Path crossed the Upper Creek Path (two extremely important aboriginal trails, the first north-south and the second east-west), Turkeytown in Cherokee County, Alabama, where another major path crossed the Coosa River (which eventually became the largest of the Lower Towns}, and Coldwater, near Muscle Shoals."


 * Source? I thought these towns were founded by so-called "Lower Cherokee" forced west after the lower towns were lost to South Carolina.  Creek Path at least was home to relatives to John Norton (Mohawk chief) of Keowee ancestry.

"It should also be noted that Chicamacomico, Algonquin for "dwelling place by the big water", is the name of a small town and channel near Cape Hatteras, and that there is also a river in Maryland bearing that name."


 * Don't see relevance of this sentence. Explain?

"Tecumtha went on to lead the greatest alliance of Indian nations in American history at about the same time as the War of 1812. Though that national council of the Cherokee Nation at that time refused his entreaties for alliance, a contingent of warriors followed him of their own accord, eventually settling after the war in the Ohio area in a town they named Chattanooga, one of three so-named, the first being the above-mentioned city in Tennessee plus another in Oklahoma."


 * Relevance to Chickamauaga? Seems more Shawnee and Cherokee.
 * Pfly 06:16, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

Recent additions
There seem to be several misconceptions and confusing takes on this, but it is not a difficult concept. Tecumseh has very little to do with the Chickamauga until Chief Doublehead died. The core of the faction was following Doublehead and Dragging Canoe prior, but Doublehead brought in the Creeks and Shawnees more than Dragging Canoe.

The Chickamauga or Chickamaka roughly translates to 'boiling pot' because it was a faction that split from traditional Cherokees for mainly political reasons. The Chickamaugas were originally led by Dragging Canoe and Doublehead, who were both half-breeds. In addition, several Shawnees and Creeks banded together due to the overwhelming amount of encroaching settles. Tecumseh was not leading the Chickamaugas at least until Doublehead was assassinated in 1806. They generally resided in the Lower Towns initially but they were fairly migratory due to the constant state of war they remained in. Since they were allies and possessed members of many tribes in their faction, they had access to Shawnee territory, Cherokee territory, and Creek territory. Draging Canoe led them to several victories and when he died, Chief Doublehead led them 10 years after. The leaders of the Chickamakas had essentially led a resistance for close to 30 years against all encroaching Europeans and closer to 40 if you include their presence within Tecumseh's Confederacy.

The Chickamaugas were present in the defense of the 'Battle with No Name' in 1803 on the present day Indiana side of the Wabash River which separates Ohio and Indiana. Tecumseh had already had a deep connection with the Chickamauga as far as warfare goes, but he was definitely Shawnee. One could say that he was part of the Chickamaugas, but the Chickamauga's were more a resistance movement with members from several different tribes in the Eastern half of the nation. Tecumseh is believed to have had a Cherokee child however, but it is not formally documented to my knowledge. It is called the 'Battle with No Name' because it is the largest Native American victory in battle against the United States and they suffered very little casualties. After Chief Doublehead's assassination, the Chickamaas slightly disbanded, but Tecumseh was there to pick up the pieces in his own formed alliance known as Tecumseh's Confederacy.

All of the documents referring to the towns of the former Chickamauga after 1779 use the term "Lower Towns" after the treaty of 1794, whether the sources are US or Cherokee.

It is also a fact that the Shawnee band of Tecumtha and his brother Tsitsika (not Tenskwatawa, though he may have lived there) lived with and fought alongside Dragging Canoe during his war, and such is cited by several sources, including Brown (Old Frontiers) and the much more recent A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh. Several of the sources note that Tsitsika was killed in an action, under Doublehead if I recall correctly, and Mooney states his Tecumtha's mother died there as well.


 * Dragging Canoe died way before Tecumseh was anywhere close to leading the Chickamauga.***

The Lower Towns in the east were destroyed during the time of the "Chickamauga" wars, and the settlement of the towns mentioned took place during the wars and they contributed warriors to the raids and other actions.

The Chickamauga WERE Cherokee. They were NEVER called Chickamauga by other Cherokee; that was how the whites referred to them to distinguish those fight from the "good" Indians, whom they nonetheless attacked.

I've double-checked all of the information I've added with E. Raymond Evans, who was once archaeologist and ethnohistorian for the Eastern Band of Cherokee as well as editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies.


 * You're right about the term "Lower Towns". I'm sorry, I mistakenly thought the Savannah River Lower Towns were destroyed much earlier.  Confusing to have two sets of towns both known today as Lower Towns.  I began to look into the history of Willstown, because I thought it was much older than the 1770s.  I didn't find clear answers though.  It seemed as if the founding by a red-haired mixed blood Cherokee as described in "Old Frontiers" is disputed by some.  Then there seemed to be archaeological research indicating settlements in Wills Valley dating back many many centuries.  I gave up for now for lack of clear answers.  In any case, even if Willstown existed in some form in earlier times it could still have been "re-founded" by Chickamauagas migrating south.


 * I know the Chickamauaga were Cherokee. I began to try to edit the article to make that clearer, but didn't have the time to do it well and canceled.  It seems misleading, I think, for the article's name to be "Chickamauga (tribe)".


 * On Tecumseh, I wouldn't argue with the idea that he visited and lived with Cherokee/Chickamauaga people, and fought with them, and was inspired by Dragging Canoe. The only point I found surprising was what seemed to be the claim that Tecumseh was not just an ally, but was Cherokee by birth / kin / clan.  The article currently seems to say he was of a Shawnee band from Florida that migrated and joined the Chickamauga Cherokee.  That's something I'd never heard, but it could be.  It would be interesting to know more about the Shawnee of Florida who joined the Chickamauga / Cherokee.  I know the Shawnee lived along the Savannah River in the 1600s and became known as the Savannah Indians to the English.  I don't think I have ever learned what became of them.


 * But on Tecumseh specifically... the wikipedia page Tecumseh says he was born in Ohio Country. It also goes into some detail on disputes over his ancestry:  "Most traditions state that Tecumseh's mother Methoataaskee was Creek or Cherokee, but biographer John Sugden believes that she was a Shawnee of the Pekowi (Piqua) division. Some of the confusion results from the fact that some Creeks and Cherokees were eager to claim the famous Tecumseh as one of their own; many Creeks named children after him. There is some evidence to suggest that Tecumseh's paternal grandfather (Pukeshinwah's father) may have been a white British trader."


 * Anyway, I didn't mean to cause trouble on this article. Sorry for my mistakes! Pfly 00:11, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

More on recent additions
The band Tecumtha was with got around, as did several bands of Shawnee. They were on the Savannah, moved to Florida, back up to the Ohio Valley, then some of them came back down to fight with Dragging Canoe. Everything I've ever read says that Tecumtha's mother was Cherokee, but that could just be legend. On the other hand, nearly all of the leaders of the Cherokee, though full members of the tribe or nation, were born elsewhere: Attakullakulla was born among the Onondaga, while his wife, Dragging Canoe's mother, was one of the Ani-Natsi, or Natchez, as the French called them. Origin doesn't seem to have mattered as much as adoption.

Since there is a river in Maryland as well as a channel and town in North Carolina named "Chickamacomico", I believe that the name Chickamauga, and possibly Chattanooga as well, may be of Shawnee origin. Chickamacomico is Algonquin, and the Shawnee are the only Algonquin-sepaking people to have ever inhabited Tennessee, so I think it likely they may be the source of the name.


 * A quick note -- the Westo were called "Chichimeco" by the Virginians when they lived in the general area of Maryland and Virginia, in the 1600s. Maybe the placename Chickamacomico comes from them?  Pfly 15:08, 6 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Perhaps. As near as I can remember, the "Westo" are usually identified as Yuchi, though I do recall a couple of writers have identified them as a band of Cherokee.  If that is the case, it does likely prove the point about the word being of Algonquin origin.


 * There's an interesting theory about the Westo being a surviving band of Erie (tribe), of Iroquoian origin. But I don't think anyone really knows.  Also, I mistyped.. it was the Spanish who called them Chichimeco.  I don't know where the term came from though.


 * Then there's the Chickahominy (tribe) of northern Virginia and the river named for them, Chickahominy River. Seems like a lot of placenames start with Chicka--. Anyway, nice work on this article.  Pfly 02:23, 12 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the kudos! 12 October 2006 (RCH)

Final major rewrite
I recently added much more further information, some of which I'd known before and other which I learned while fact-checking my memory, and completely reformatted the article. Since this article now resembles the original only in subject name, now, fortunately, with more factually reliable content, I have only left those references listed which I myself used, those four plus email and phone conversations with Raymond Evans.

New added material
From John P. Brown's "Old Frontiers".


 * From time to time I check here for minor copyedits type fixes. It's too bad that the Muscle Shoal article has little to no history.  As I understand it, Muscle Shoals played an enormous role in the history of Euro- and Indian-American history.  There seems to be nothing about that on the page.  If I get the chance and inspiriation I'll try to add something there.  Btw, I keep learning new things reading edits here.  Like that there was a Toqua town in Chickamauga country, diffrerent from the Toqua near old Chota?  I didn't know that. Pfly 07:32, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Muscle Shoals, as the article says, was a great place for ambushes, and after the wars, a place for Doublehead, who lived at Coldwater at the head of the Shoals, to collect passage fees. The George Colbert who ran the ferry at the foot of the Shoals, a half-breed Chickasaw, was Doublehead's nephew.  The Toqua in the Chickamauga area was at the mouth of the river/creek, and in the 19th century, several important Cherokee lived there.  Some industrialist went through hoops to get an iron-forge built there, but I can't remember if that ever came to fruition.

Many of the names of Cherokee towns were reused several times, such as Ellijay, Itsati/Chota, Tellico/Tahlequah, Ustanali, Stecoyee, Toqua, etc. Besides the last named, towns in the Chickamauga area with the same names as ones in the Overhills were Isati/Sawtee, Tuskegee, and Citico. There was a town called Tennessee a few miles from Great Hiwassie just as there was on the Little Tennessee, and Great Hiwassie was named for another town near the headwaters of that river.

POV
This article seems to have had a shift in POV over the past couple of months. Even the opening paragraph seems a touch biased. --BradBeattie 00:11, 18 October 2006 (UTC)


 * What do you mean by 'biased'? The previous article was almost completely ahistorical and was meant to further the interests of a group in Grundy County, Tennessee that calls itself the "Chikamaka"  (http://www.chikamaka-cwy.org/) and claims to be descended from "Chikamaka" who stayed behind after Removal, even though Chickamauga as such had ceased to exist for over forty years and had never been considered anything BUT Cherokee by either themselves or other Cherokee.  Before you start criticizing accuracy or objectivity, read the sources; I have listed several.  I did not, in fact, put bias into the article, I took it out.


 * In addition, I cleared the article with the former co-editor of the Journal of Cherokee Studies (an official publication of the Eastern Band of Cherokee) anthropologist and ethnohistorian Raymond Evans, to make sure of its accuracy. --Natty4bumpo 17 October 2006 (it's still Tuesday, even in Toronto).


 * I'm not sure either.. maybe leave a note on BradBeattie's user-talk page asking what he thinks would be needed in order to remove the POV tag? Pfly 15:44, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Hey there. I guess the POVing was a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the opening phrasing "a term used by whites". I've removed the POV flag, but that line still looks a little iffy to me. What whites specifically? --BradBeattie 20:58, 19 October 2006 (UTC)


 * I changed it to read "colonial and early Americans", although that's not completely accurate either. The term was mostly used along the frontier and later by Moravian missionaries, but government papers usually, though not always, referred to them as Cherokee.  --Nattybumpo 19 October 2006

More rewrite
As anyone who visits this page often can tell, there have been a number of changes even after the so-called final major rewrite. This is because I remembered even more sources I had accessed in the past and wanted to bring this article in line with the facts as laid out in those other sources and to bring to it good consistency, flow, and interest as well as accuracy.--Nattybumpo 27 October 2006

The recent big change
On further consideration, I realized that this article had grown well beyond that encompassed by the subject, which is a misnomer in any case, for the reasons given therein. I have therefore created a new article under the title "Chickamauga Wars" and moved all my material thence.--Nattybumpo 27 October 2006

Addition about the Chickamauga myth of the 1990's
When Indians became popular again in the 1990's there was a resurgence of claims by various persons that they were descendants of, primarily, Cherokee who had managed to escape Removal. While this is certainly possible in a very few isolated cases, most stories of Indian ancestors among descendants of people who have lived east of the Mississippi for generations, other than those from reservations, are nothing but stories. One of the bigger groups making these claims was known as the "Free Cherokee", who had no validity whatsoever. The '90's Chickamauga myth started when a group in the Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Elk River, Tennessee, areas broke away from the "Free Cherokee", calling themselves the "Chickamauga". I know this because I knew the people who were involved at the time.--Nattybumpo 31 October 2006


 * I am an enrolled tribal member of the Cherokee Nation which is headquartered in Tahlequah, OK and I have met several people who have claimed that they were "Chickamauga". This is something that was kind of viewed as a joke here in Oklahoma because we kind of looked at it as though they were saying "Well, I'm Indian but, I just can't prove it!" or the infamous line "Well, my grandmother was a Cherokee princess!".  T. White 13:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Pulling contents into a new independent article
As the original article grew into the what now is the Chickamauga Wars (1776–1794), I am creating a stub article back to the group called the Chickamaugas. I am not going to go into the "who is legitimate and who is not" but I am going to provide links to the lists of state recognized and unrecognized tribes. CJLippert (talk) 18:11, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * It doesn't really have anything to do with who is legitimate and who is not. It is a fact that there was never at any time a separate tribe called the "Chickamaugas".  That designation was merely a convenience for whites, particularly those in what became East Tennessee and along the Cumberland River, to distinguish between hostile Cherokee and non-hostile Cherokee.  This article should not exist anymore than should an article dealing with Santa Claus as if he were a factual person. The very existence of this article is a discredit to Wikipedia. Chuck Hamilton (talk) 02:03, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Origin of the idea of a Chickamauga "tribe"
The idea that a separate tribe known as Chickamauga was invented by John P. Brown for his 1938 book Old Frontiers. With the advent of Native Americans becoming popular in the 1970's, persons with no previous history of claiming Indian ancestry latched onto the idea of the "Chickamauga" as a tribe from which they could claim descent. This trend became especially popular in the 1990's after gambling was legalized for federally-recognized tribes.

When a representative of the Moravian Brethren, Brother Steiner, met with Cherokee leader Richard Fields at Tellico Blockhouse in 1799, the former Lower Cherokee warrior whom he had hired to serve as his guide and interpreter. Br Steiner had been sent south by the Brethren to scout for a location for a mission and school they planned to build in the Nation, ultimately located at Spring Place on land donated by James Vann. On one occasion, Br. Steiner asked his guide, "What kind of people are the Chickamauga?". Fields laughed, then replied, "They are Cherokee, and we know no difference." (Allen, Penelope. "The Fields Settlement". Penelope Allen Manuscript. Archive Section, Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library.)

It is for this reason that the article which formerly existed here was changed to a redirect page. There is not now nor has there ever been a tribe called the Chickamauga. Chuck Hamilton (talk) 03:13, 1 July 2010 (UTC)