Chapter 2

THE PRINCIPAL PEOPLE

TRADITIONS OF HARMONY AND SHARING

▲ ▲ ▲

▲ ▲ ▲

“THIS IS WHAT the old men told me when I was a boy.”¹ These words announce the telling of a Cherokee myth to a listener. Because an elder usually tells a story to a younger person, the sentence emphasizes the connections between generations. The teller shares stories and knowledge that he or she was told by elders years before. The listener is young, as the teller once was, and now needs to learn. Through understatement, the teller indicates the inherited role of each subsequent Cherokee generation to learn about Cherokee culture and pass it on, in turn, to Cherokee children for their personal development and for the practical use and benefit of the people.

Early on, Cherokee children learn that they are Ani-Yunwiya, the principal people of the earth. Other peoples exist, including not only whites but, previously, members of nearby ethnic groups such as the Creek and Shawano. Other kinds of people have existed; for example, the Cherokees traditionally believe in little people and immortal ones who share the mountains with them but are rarely seen. These peoples have their homes and town council houses below mountains though they may, on occasion, help a lost Cherokee find the way home. All these people should be respected. Nonetheless, the Cherokees call themselves the principal or real people, and for centuries the Cherokees were the dominant ethnic group of a vast part of southeastern North America, occupying western North and South Carolina, eastern and middle Tennessee, and northern Georgia and Alabama. Though they occupied only a portion of this land, Cherokee hunting grounds extended to 40,000 square miles.² So the proud title is based in fact.

Several theories have attempted to explain the origins of the Cherokee people. European colonists and nineteenth-century U.S. citizens believed that all Native Americans, including the Cherokees, descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel, the tribe of Shem, one of Noah’s sons.³ In particular, a prominent nineteenth-century missionary to the Cherokees, Daniel S. Butrick, stated that he had found evidence of this heritage.⁴ This claim of ancestry was an attempt to counter the growing racism of white (Christian) colonists against the Cherokees and give them a status equal to Europeans. It was the explanation Cherokee sympathizers used to rationalize why Native Americans should not be enslaved as were Africans. However, because anti-Semitism was not uncommon among white colonists, the theory was of limited value over time and did not greatly lessen white hostility toward the Cherokees.⁵

Late nineteenth-century anthropologists recognized the linguistic similarity of the Cherokee language with that of the Iroquois of New England and Canada and theorized that the Cherokees broke away from the Iroquois and moved south to establish their own territory. Twentieth-century archaeologists speculated that since artifacts and dwellings did not show a dramatic change from the Mississippian to the Qualla (or Cherokee) phase, the historic Cherokees may have descended from the Mississippians in the region rather than migrating from the north.⁶ Contemporary scholars think that the scenario may have played out a bit differently. Using multiple research methods such as linguistic analysis, archaeology, and DNA mapping, scholars now think that the Iroquois and Cherokees were once one people who occupied present-day Virginia.⁷ At some point, probably late in the Archaic period, and for reasons that are unknown, the Iroquois and Cherokees split and moved apart, with the Iroquois going north and the Cherokees south. The Cherokees first established themselves in the Carolinas.⁸ The ancient settlement of Kituwah, located on the Tuckasegee River and just downstream of the Oconaluftee Valley, is considered one of the seven mother towns of the Cherokees.⁹ Once settled in the southern Appalachians, the Cherokee people developed a distinctive language, mythology, and lifeways, and, once established, they spread throughout more and more of the Southeast.

TOWNHOUSE COMMUNITIES

The Cherokees adopted several settlement patterns, but all were based on town life.¹⁰ The largest towns were organized around preexisting Mississippian ceremonial mounds; Kituwah may have been one of these. These towns were no longer palisaded like Mississippian towns, but they were arranged around a large rectangular earthen mound on which a town council house stood. Townhouses were similar in construction to winter Mississippian and Cherokee homes—square-shaped, with thatched walls and roofs and a central clay hearth. But they were much larger than homes to accommodate the gathering of the town’s people inside.¹¹ By the mid-eighteenth century, townhouse architecture consisted of eight-sided buildings that could accommodate large numbers of people and seat them according to their clans along seven of the sides, reserving the last side for entrance.¹² Outside, in front of the mound was spread a large, flat field for ball playing and for dances and ceremonies. Homes surrounded the mound and field. In addition, a summer townhouse, rather like an outdoor covered pavilion, and summer structures attached to each home would have been present in each community.¹³ Smaller communities did not have mounds, so they were organized around townhouses (or council houses), and “very small communities of hamlets and farmsteads … may have looked to a distant community center based on kinship or clan ties.”¹⁴ Beyond these small communities were the “fields, [fishing] weirs, trails, orchards, meadows, and woods” that the Cherokees used for hunting, fishing, and agriculture.¹⁵ The relative sizes and prosperity of the towns, hamlets, and farmsteads fluctuated according to soil fertility, the abundance of game, the political dominance of the Cherokees among the other Native peoples, periodic population loss from smallpox epidemics, and the threat of attack from other Native groups or, increasingly in the eighteenth century, from colonial settlers.

Cherokee lifeways and culture flourished before European traders arrived. Between 1450 and 1700 the Cherokees practiced a diverse subsistence living that provided them with food, shelter, and clothing but also structured their society by gender, clan, and kinship. The primary value of Cherokee life was harmony achieved by “a balance of opposite forces, such as war and peace, men and women, and plants and animals.”¹⁶ Importantly, harmony was more prized than material wealth; the land and its bounty were made available to humans to use as they needed but not to gather in excess. In this society that practiced communal labor and redistribution of goods to all to meet subsistence needs, individual wealth was not a goal and did not command community esteem or political power.¹⁷ Instead, individuals’ contributions to community life and their ability to lead in peace or times of war for the restoration of harmony were most highly esteemed, as exemplified by the high regard of brave warriors, expert hunters, and wise healers.¹⁸ Historian William McLoughlin explains how the ethic of harmony provided a comprehensive outlook for Cherokees: “There was no secular area of life free from spiritual meaning; sports, war, hunting, agriculture, family, town, and tribal affairs were all woven together into a unified pattern of religious rules and connections involving harmony with the world above, the world below, and the world around them.”¹⁹

This social structure resonates in the Cherokee mythology and illuminates values and beliefs that have always sustained the spirit of the Cherokee people. Though many sources of the Cherokee mythology are available today, James Mooney was the first anthropologist who devoted years to collecting and documenting Cherokee history, myths, and lifeways. In the late nineteenth century, he lived in Cherokee, North Carolina, for several summers while working for the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology collecting myths, stories, and sacred formulas from individuals who experienced firsthand what life was like in the Oconaluftee Valley before the Cherokee Removal of 1838. His versions of Cherokee stories remain a good starting point for understanding Cherokee culture.

A BASIC BUT SUFFICIENT LIVING

One of the foundational myths of the Cherokees, the story of Kanati and Selu, describes the social system and division of labor in the pre-European subsistence economy. Kanati (the Lucky Hunter), was a master hunter; Selu (Corn), his wife, was responsible for growing and harvesting corn, beans, and squash and preparing food.²⁰ Each played a vital role in feeding their two children, both boys. One of these boys was their biological child, but the other was an incarnation of the blood from a deer Kanati had slain that Selu dripped into the river when she cleaned the meat. He was a wild boy, full of curiosity and mischief, who suggested devious schemes to his brother. The boys observed that Kanati always returned to their home with meat; finding game was never difficult for him. So one day the boys followed their father up the mountain and watched as he rolled a stone away from a cave entrance. A buck ran out. Kanati shot him with an arrow and then replaced the stone. After Kanati had left, the boys moved the stone away to open the cave, inadvertently freeing all the animals trapped inside. After that moment, humans had to roam the mountains to find their game.

Another day, the boys noticed that Selu was always able to prepare them a dinner of corn, beans, and meat after a short trip to the storehouse. Thinking that she was a witch, they peered between the logs of the storehouse when she went inside. There Selu rubbed her belly and sides, and corn and beans fell into a basket on the floor. She returned to the home to prepare dinner, but when she saw the boys, she could tell that they had watched her. She also knew that they would kill her, so she told them what to do with her body after she was dead. They were instructed first to clear a field and then to drag her body around the perimeter of the circle seven times. Next they should drag her body seven times inside the circle. If they stayed up all night to watch over the circle, in the morning they would have plenty of corn. But the boys, perhaps because of their youth, failed to follow Selu’s directions completely. They cleared only seven little spots instead of a large area. Rather than drag her body around the circle seven times, they did it only twice. These are the reasons why corn does not grow everywhere and why Cherokees work their crops twice each season. Even so (and most happily), the boys succeeded in watching over the corn all night, so in the morning it was ripe and ready to eat. Consequently, the Cherokees will always have corn to eat. By the way, other repercussions of the boys’ violence toward their mother came about once Kanati discovered what they had done.

This story establishes the basic subsistence pattern of the Cherokees and their gendered spheres of influence: men were hunters, and women were farmers and were in charge of the home. Both men and women fished and gathered nuts and berries, but on the whole women dominated community life and men were the major actors outside the community in hunting and in matters of war.²¹ Because women dominated the domestic scene, the clans that determined a person’s identity were matrilineal, always following the mother’s line. Family homes belonged to the wife of a marriage, and all children belonged to the mother’s clan, with her brothers having the primary masculine child-rearing role for sons rather than the father. Marriages were only allowed outside of clan ties, and if a marriage ended, the woman kept the home and the children. This sharing of key responsibilities and division of labor meant that women held equal status to men in the community. They were not dependent on their husbands for their identities or their personal well-being. Even though men were more often decision makers in matters of going to war, women were respected elders with important voices in key decisions. For example, an elder woman of a town, a “beloved woman,” would decide what to do with prisoners of war, whether they would become slaves, be tortured or killed, be accepted into a clan, or, worst of all, be forced to live without an identity outside of clan society.²² Notably, both women and men could become conjurers and healers and could hold positions of great authority and respect in a town.

A MORAL NATURAL ECONOMY

The concepts of balance and mutual respect also emerge from Cherokee myths about animals and plants. The Cherokees believe that human beings are not essentially superior to either plants or animals and must respect the lives of both. Hunters may kill animals for food, but they must say thanks for their game. The character of Little Deer makes this point clearly. Little Deer is a small, invisible deer that watches over all deer.²³ When a hunter kills a deer, he must say thanks for it immediately because Little Deer appears to observe every kill scene. If the hunter neglects to give thanks, then Little Deer will follow the hunter home by the drops of blood on the trail and give him rheumatism. It’s simple to infer the outcome of disrespect: future hunting will be more difficult and less successful for a hunter disabled by rheumatism. Similarly, someone collecting herbs, particularly ginseng, must first pass by three plants and take only the fourth in the same area.²⁴ It is not appropriate to take too many.

Perhaps the most direct connection between animals and humans emerges from the traditional story of the origin of bears.²⁵ Bears, myth tells Cherokees, once were a community of humans. But they decided that they wanted to live in the mountains, so they left their town and townhouse to become a bear clan. As they walked to the mountains they grew claws and tails, turning into physical bears. Even so, the bears maintained some of their human practices such as occasionally walking on two legs and maintaining townhouses for community events. Four bear townhouses are said to be located within different high peaks of the Smokies. At these places the bears hold a dance before disbanding to hibernate during the winter. One of the townhouses is Kuwahi, or Mulberry Place, now known as Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies.²⁶ The grand White Bear, the chief of the bears, lives below Mulberry Place. This townhouse is near the Enchanted Lake at the headwaters of the Oconaluftee River.²⁷ Although the lake is invisible to humans, it is a medicine lake for all animals and birds. If an injured animal swims across the lake, it will be healed of any wounds from arrows or from sickness. The lake preserves the balance between animals and humans. Bears, recalling their past lives as humans and retaining some sympathy for them, have also helped lost hunters from time to time, even allowing them to den with a bear over the winter. Finally, when humans kill a bear, if they cover the blood remaining from a kill with leaves, as they leave the site and look back, they will see that the killed bear will rise up, ghostlike, and return to the woods. In such an instance the bear helps humans by offering them meat but not its life.²⁸

In general, because of humans’ numbers and pride, their relationships with animals are more adversarial than their relationships with plants. Plants serve as friends to humans, providing remedies for the wounds and diseases that animals (especially insects) cause. Ginseng is a primary example of a plant that helps humans. Mooney calls it “a sentient being,” and J. T. Garrett, a Cherokee healer, explains that it helps to build immunity and is good for many purposes, including “headaches, nervous conditions, [and] vertigo,” as well as for stopping bleeding.²⁹

CLEAR-CUT JUSTICE

Another key component of traditional Cherokee life was a law of vengeance for aggression to fellow clan members and swift retaliation for aggression against the community from those who were not Cherokee. Cherokees believed that “crying blood is quenched with equal blood.”³⁰ In situations where an aggression occurred between two Cherokees, the clan of the victim would seek vengeance from the clan of the aggressor in precise proportion to the original offense. This vengeance, however, would not spark a cycle of subsequent revenge. In cases of aggression between ethnic groups or nations, retaliation was not limited to a single act of proportional vengeance. In such international conflicts, Cherokee law permitted warriors to take as many lives as possible, and of course, subsequent cycles of retaliation often occurred. Clan vengeance and community liability were duties, not choices.³¹ They constituted the only legal protections Cherokees had against aggression. In their view, if they did not retaliate, then they essentially accepted the status of game that could be killed at will by anyone. According to Mooney, when the bears stopped avenging the deaths they suffered from hunters, they became game rather than humans, and of course, this situation was unacceptable for the Cherokee people.³² Consequently, the Cherokees valued skill in physical competition and warfare. This skill was developed in anetso, the Cherokee ball game, a game like lacrosse with important community ritual meaning because it tested the bravery and physical ability of men who would need to serve as warriors. The ball game has always been a key part of Cherokee culture, involving the whole community as spectators and in celebratory events before and after matches. It survives today as one of the important features of Cherokee life.

The ball game’s cultural significance can be seen in its role in the story of Kanati and Selu after the corn goddess’s murder.³³ When Kanati returns home and finds that his sons have murdered his wife and placed her head on the roof, he becomes angry and abandons the boys, going to live with the Wolf people. Once he reaches their town, Kanati enters the townhouse where a council is in session and sits in silence until the chief asks why he is present. Kanati requests that the Wolf people go to the boys in a week’s time and “play ball” with them, meaning that he wants the Wolf people to kill the boys. The boys have secret knowledge of their coming battle and prepare for it; in the end, they prevail over the warriors, killing almost all of them. In the meantime, Kanati leaves the Wolf people and continues traveling west. The boys go to find Kanati, who is surprised to see them. He then tests them with two other mortal ordeals, and through cleverness, perseverance, and skill they survive. After each test they seek out Kanati. After the final ordeal, they find him at the end of the world, in the east where the sun rises, sitting with Selu. The couple welcomes the boys and visits with them for a week but will not let them stay for long. Instead, the boys must go to the Darkening Land, where the sun goes down (the west), to live. There, they are called The Little Men. When they talk, people hear low thunder, so they are also called the Thunder Boys.

This story of the Thunder Boys’ survival directly associates the ball game with war and vengeance. It also shows how the boys win challenges through their ability to compete in physical tests as well as through strategy and preparation.³⁴ Finally, it suggests that balance between the impulses toward war (or vengeance) and peace (or the hunting and agriculture needed for subsistence) is essential to maintaining harmony on Earth. This is the reason why the boys cannot live with their parents at the end. Similarly, the Cherokees designated separated leaders and even separate towns for purposes of war and peace. Some towns were peace towns, or towns of refuge, and criminals could seek protection from their victims’ kinsmen there; also, towns often had two leaders, one a peace chief, who led treaty negotiations, and the other a war chief, who led braves into battle.

Because it is a sport that requires collaboration among team members, the ball game also illustrates the harmony ethic of the Cherokees.³⁵ The story of the Ball Game of the Birds and Animals tells how two small individuals, the bat and the flying squirrel—“two little things hardly larger than field mice”—help the birds win over the animals, a team with powerful players like the bear, tough ones like the terrapin, and fast ones like the deer.³⁶ Though the bat and flying squirrel should belong on the side of the animals, they are rejected because of their small size. The birds accept them and help them find ways to fly. When the game begins, these unexpected heroes control the ball and score, winning the game for the birds. The story further suggests that the ball game functioned as a substitute for war, bringing members of one village together in a contest against another in a ritualized fashion.³⁷ Because a lost game was likely to lead to a rematch, this cycle of continued encounters follows the pattern of ongoing vengeance seeking—but at a far less consequential level since casualties were rare.

INDIGENOUS SUSTAINABILITY MEETS CAPITALISM

All together, these elements of traditional Cherokee culture, in place before European contact, point to some of the reasons that colonists and Cherokees had difficulty understanding each other. In the subsistence Cherokee economy, individuals were not motivated to seek personal wealth, or even surplus, as capitalist Europeans generally were. The Cherokee economy depended on a gendered division of labor but recognized the contributions of both sexes as equal and essential to survival and happiness. This view gave women status equal to but distinct from that of men. Both women and men held positions of respect and responsibility within communities and also had authority in “state” matters such as peace negotiations. The clan and kinship systems gave individuals their identities, provided for the raising of children, and governed social life as well as most legal issues. Because Cherokees did not own land individually but used it as they needed in the cultivation of corn, beans, and other staples, or through the use of collectively held tribal hunting grounds, private property, and particularly the ownership of land, was not relevant to them. Finally, Cherokee vengeance and retaliation were regarded as clan or community duties, and they were practiced outside what Europeans understood as individual liability for aggression, since a clansman of an aggressor could be made to answer for a relative’s crime and since wars against one non-Cherokee community could be provoked by the actions of another one of the same group, or even by a single individual. When disputes about white families settling in hunting grounds arose and when they led to bloodshed, acts of vengeance and retaliation were often understood differently by the Cherokees and Europeans. It is important to note that the Cherokees had contact with other societies before Europeans arrived in their villages. After contact, the Cherokees continued their existing traditions, including the ways they regarded those who were not Cherokee, responded to trade opportunities, and reacted to violence and aggression. They were not an isolated people without strategies to cope with competing peoples. Further, whether they were in fact “the principal people” would be fully tested as their identity and status shifted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Though much has changed for the Cherokees since the seventeenth century, the core values, stories, and rituals remain to unite them. In the late 1990s, Lynne Harlan, cultural director for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, illuminated the traditional Cherokee outlook and its persistence to the present: “There’s a continuum of culture that makes us one, that makes us a family. We have always been in this place together. This is where the Creator put us. The fundamental thing that makes us Indian is that spirit of community that keeps us together.”³⁸