Cherokee

The Cherokee, Tsalagi in their own language, are an Iroquoian-speaking people of the southern Appalachians whose towns once lined the river valleys of present-day North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Virginia, a homeland of some 40,000 square miles. Forced west in the 1830s on the removal known as the Trail of Tears, they are today one of the largest Indigenous peoples of North America, organised in three federally recognised tribes.

Cherokee is a Southern Iroquoian language, distantly related to the languages of the Haudenosaunee around the Great Lakes. An oral tradition recorded in the nineteenth century tells of an ancient migration from the north, while some scholars argue that the Iroquoian languages arose in Appalachia itself; linguists date the split between Cherokee and the northern languages to roughly 3,500 to 3,800 years ago. Archaeologists link Cherokee ancestors with Middle Woodland peoples of western North Carolina around 200–600 CE and with the Pisgah phase of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture, about 1000–1500. Kituwah, on the Tuckasegee River, is remembered as the mother town. Hernando de Soto's expedition recorded a "Chalaque" people in 1540.

Cherokee society was matrilineal. Children belonged to the mother's clan, one of seven; women owned the houses and fields, couples lived near the wife's family, and women elders approved those who rose to leadership. Towns were largely autonomous, grouped into the Lower, Middle, Valley and Overhill settlements, with a "white" organisation of elders for peace and ritual and a "red" one for war. Maize was central, celebrated in the Green Corn Ceremony.

From the 1690s the Cherokee traded deerskins with the English colonies and fought as British allies in several wars, while smallpox in 1738–39 killed perhaps half the people, by one contemporary account. Disputes during the French and Indian War led to the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1760. During the American Revolution, militias destroyed more than 50 Cherokee towns, and Dragging Canoe, whose mother was Natchez-born, fought on with his followers until 1794.

In the early nineteenth century the Cherokee built a national government with a capital at New Echota and a written constitution of 1827. Sequoyah's syllabary, introduced in 1821, spread so fast that Cherokee literacy soon outpaced that of their white neighbours, and the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix began publishing in 1828. Some wealthy Cherokee also held enslaved Africans on plantations.

After gold was found on Cherokee land in Georgia in 1829 and Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Georgia pressed for expulsion. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832) the Supreme Court upheld Cherokee sovereignty, but President Andrew Jackson did not enforce it. A minority "Treaty Party" signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, against the will of Principal Chief John Ross and a petition of over 15,000 Cherokee. In 1838–39 troops forced more than 16,000 people west on the Trail of Tears. The National Park Service and the Cherokee Nation estimate that around 4,000 died, nearly a fifth of the nation; the scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker writes of upward of a quarter of those on the trail. Treaty leaders were killed in 1839, and the Civil War later divided the nation again.

The Cherokee Nation, based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, reported 477,673 citizens in 2026 and has no minimum blood quantum; descendants of Cherokee Freedmen were confirmed as citizens after a long legal dispute. The United Keetoowah Band, also in Tahlequah and descended largely from the "Old Settlers" who moved west from 1817, has about 12,000 members. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, descended from those who avoided removal, has over 8,000 people on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina. In 2020 the Supreme Court's McGirt ruling treated roughly half of Oklahoma, including Cherokee lands, as tribal land for criminal jurisdiction, and the language, now on Unicode, is taught in immersion programmes.

Our maps draw an approximate Cherokee territory in the southern Appalachians in 1492, 1500, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715, in one year labelled Tsalaguwetiyi in Cherokee syllabary. Neighbours include the Catawba and the Shawnee.