Language: Cherokee--more properly spelled Tsalagi--is an Iroquoian language with an innovative written syllabary invented by a Cherokee scholar. 22,000 people speak Tsalagi today, primarily in Oklahoma and North Carolina. Though it is one of the healthier Indian languages of North America and the one in which the most literature being published, Tsalagi is still in imperiled condition because of government policies as late as the fifties which enforced the removal of Cherokee children from Tsalagi-speaking homes, reducing the number of young Cherokees being raised bilingually from 75% to less than 5% today.
History: The best-known episode in Cherokee history was also the worst: the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation of the Cherokee Indians from their ancestral home in the southeast to Oklahoma. The Cherokee people were an urban, Christian, agricultural, intermarried society who had supported the United States against other tribes. In the end this was all for nothing. Though prominent Americans like Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster spoke against Removal, and though the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, President Andrew Jackson sent in the army. Fifteen to twenty thousand Cherokee Indians were rounded up and herded to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-1839. Driven from their homes without being allowed to collect their possessions first, even their shoes, the Cherokees were no better equipped for an 800-mile forced march than people today would be. Between four and eight thousand Cherokee people died of exposure, starvation, disease, and exhaustion along the Trail of Tears. If you understand this, both the extent to which the Cherokees had adopted American standards of civilization before the Removal and the ultimate futility of it, you will go a long way towards understanding the Cherokee mentality and also the attitudes of other Indian peoples towards us.
Gardening: The Cherokee had one large garden in which they grew beans, corn, squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers. They also had small individual gardens. The women tended the gardens after the men cleared the fields and helped plant the crops. The men provided the meat for their families. They used traps, bows and arrows, blowguns, and darts to help kill game. Deer was the most important animal the men hunted. They also hunted for bear.
Lacrosse was a sport played by the Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creek tribes. The game was played in two teams with 60 players on each team. Two sticks were held by each player to catch and throw a ball. Each stick had a small thong basket at one end. No player was allowed to touch the thong leather lacrosse ball, except with the stick or basket. The object of the game was to score points by scooping up the ball in the basket and sending it through a pair of goal posts. The first team to score twenty goals was the winner.
