The cherokee diaspora, p.9
The Cherokee Diaspora, page 9
For missionaries, the Ridge-Northrup marriage served as an example of how interracial marriage exercised a positive moral influence on the multiracial children of those unions and produced a culturally “civilized” people. Missionaries therefore defended specific examples of Indigenous-white marriages, insisting that by choosing marriage over illicit sex, couples like Ridge and Northrup elevated the moral tenor of Cherokee communities to such an extent that “the rays of the sun of righteousness,” as missionaries were wont to exclaim, would penetrate “the gloom of heathenism and superstition.”49
The Ridge-Northrup marriage also put a new spin on the history of interracial exogamy among Cherokees in the early nineteenth century. The existence of interracial marriages between white men and Cherokee women was well known and commonly recognized (if not accepted) by early nineteenth-century Americans. However, inverting the gendered makeup of such marriages posed a challenge both to white racial sensibilities and to Cherokee matrilineal and matrilocal clan membership and kinship relationships. While Cherokees and white Americans struggled to come to terms with the cultural implications of Indian men marrying white women, those who defended such marriages emphasized how couples like Ridge and Northrup contributed to the growth of Cherokee commerce, prosperity, and “civilization.” As evidence of this, American Board missionaries claimed that marriages between “mixed-blood” elite men and white women saw couples living in relative comfort, most reportedly possessing “a farm from which it draws on support.”50 Additionally, missionaries reported that so-called half-breeds and their families lived in homes that were kept “in good order, much more cleanly than those of their white neighbors.” Most importantly, the homes of these Cherokee “half-breeds” were, according to missionaries, a vast improvement on the filth, intemperance, gambling, and prostitution that prevailed in Cherokee communities where traditional notions of communalism prevailed.51
The American Board’s binary between “civilized” and “traditional” Cherokees was simplistic and overdrawn. However, the aspirations of the rising multiracial Cherokee elite were well served by this binary, with its members exploiting it to their socioeconomic and political advantage. Prominent Cherokee families took seriously their responsibility of setting a “civilized” example for all Cherokees to follow. They encouraged missionaries to remain among the Cherokees and continue their holy labors. For example, missionaries reported that John Ross envisioned a Cherokee “reservation” where Indigenous children might receive lessons in “civilized” practices from devoted missionaries. Ross’s thinking on education in the Cherokee Nation evolved substantially during the early nineteenth century, and he eventually became convinced that Cherokee-run and operated boarding schools would best serve the educational needs of Cherokee children.52 Other educational proposals were more explicitly race-based. For example, David Vann, a prominent Cherokee slaveholder, actively sought the American Board’s support for a mission to “half-breed” Cherokees. According to John Ridge, Vann’s vision centered on mixed-race Cherokees who, while they spoke fluent English, were “in other respects deficient in education.” If a new breed of Cherokees was to emerge and play a leading role in prescribing a renewed sense of Cherokee identity, men such as Ross and Vann felt that they would lead by strengthening Cherokee ties to white American blood, education, religion, and commerce.53
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, then, the leading Cherokee families in the Southeast had allied themselves with the religious and cultural values prescribed by missionaries. The children of these leading families ultimately became the most influential political and economic figures in Cherokee society during the 1820s and 1830s. However, the apparent complicity of missionaries and prominent Cherokee families in shunning “traditional” folkways in preference for an acculturated Euro-Cherokee identity based on Christianity, patriarchy, race, and nationalism was not quite so simple.54
Those Cherokees who availed themselves of a missionary education, converted to Christianity, and entered the arenas of politics and trade were not simply pawns of American imperialism who inadvertently contributed to their peoples’ elimination. The Cherokee people, whether educated in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, New Jersey, or Connecticut, actively interpreted the lessons imparted to them. Some saw an opportunity to profit economically and politically, while others sought the rhetorical skills to rearticulate the significance of traditional beliefs and customs. Most, at least in the early nineteenth century, chose to mix together what they perceived to be the best qualities of Euroamerican and Cherokee culture.55 Their object was not simply survival, economic self-sufficiency, or the articulation of a nationalist identity—although it was all these things at times—it was to interpret the changing world around them and renew their sense of Cherokee identity in ways that would help all Cherokee people meet the challenges posed by American imperialism, religious syncretism, and Cherokee migrations.56 All people engage in processes of cultural renewal, more often than not unwittingly. For the early-nineteenth-century Cherokees, however, the remaking of a collective sense of identity was both conscious and wrenching.57
Just how unsettling this process was can be seen in the “nativist” backlash of the late 1820s. In 1824, Nunna-tsune-ga (White Path), an illiterate chief with reported links to the ancient Cherokee priesthood of the Ani-Kutani, began to raise his voice against the processes of acculturation and Christianization.58 Nunna-tsune-ga, born in 1761 in what became northeastern Georgia, was devoted to what he understood to be traditional Cherokee cultural beliefs and practices. Nunna-tsune-ga had attracted a considerable Cherokee following for his opposition to the multiracial, mission-educated, and slave-owning elites. Nunna-tsune-ga was not opposed to all forms of Cherokee acculturation and political change, but he did want non-indigenous people to show greater respect for Cherokee cultural beliefs and practices.
Nunna-tsune-ga was particularly concerned about the way mission-educated Cherokees appeared to be eschewing important components of Cherokee belief systems. As Nunna-tsune-ga understood the cultural changes taking place around him, the mission-educated mixed-bloods were contributing to the erasure of fundamental aspects of Cherokee identity. For example, the Cherokee purification customs were seriously challenged by changes in Cherokee marriage laws and practices.59 With missionary encouragement, a Cherokee woman’s control over her reproductive choices and the prohibitions that once existed on marriage within a clan were eroded by a new set of written Cherokee laws.
Nunna-tsune-ga’s opposition to such changes had been building for some time. In 1825, he was expelled from the Cherokee National Council for his vigorous opposition to written laws that he believed undermined traditional Cherokee social and cultural practices. Unperturbed, Nunna-tsune-ga continued his opposition. Most famously, he rejected the first written Cherokee constitution in 1827, seeing it as another example of the mixed-race Cherokee elite’s aping of the white man’s ways. “White Path’s rebellion” therefore represented a “conservative” response to the fast rising, and increasingly powerful, mixed-blood and educated elites.60 Sadly for Nunna-tsune-ga and his supporters, his time (and political influence) had passed. At the level of the National Council, those illiterate chiefs who held “traditional” beliefs were increasingly reduced to the status of politically impotent figureheads. By 1817, the Standing Committee of the National Council—the institution that wielded real power over Cherokee politics—was dominated almost exclusively by mission-educated mixed-bloods. And after 1819, the president of the National Council and principal chief (from 1828) of the Cherokee Nation, John Ross, saw himself as the leader who spoke for all Cherokee people. Although Ross insisted that his power to speak for the Cherokee people was rooted in the coming together of all Cherokees in National Council, Nunna-tsune-ga and his supporters viewed the rise of Ross and other singularly powerful multiracial Cherokee elites as further evidence of the erosion of traditional communal politics.61
Many Cherokees shared Nunna-tsune-ga’s anxiety about traditional Cherokee beliefs and practices being swept away by Euroamerican culture and political forms. Cherokees expressed this anxiety in a number of ways. The Booger Dance was one of the more robust and comical ways in which Cherokees made known their feelings about whites. The Booger Dance was performed during the Winter Ceremony. Male dancers disguised with masks and gourds performed absurd sexual pantomimes and were given names by audience members such as Black Buttocks, Big Testicles, and Sooty Anus.62 The Booger Dancers thus portrayed both black and white outsiders as lewd, ridiculous, and menacing. Such performances made the Cherokee peoples’ feelings about the changes occurring around them abundantly clear.
A Syllabary for a Diasporic People
Despite such performative displays of defiance, by the 1820s the world that traditionalists like Nunna-tsune-ga and the Booger Dancers once knew not only seemed tainted by outside influences, but seemed to be on the verge of disappearing forever. Over the next century, “traditionalist” cultural revivals continued to punctuate social and cultural life throughout the Cherokee diaspora. In his own time, however, Nunnatsune-ga was not alone in lifting his voice in opposition to American imperialism and what he saw as the Cherokee elite’s sycophantic embrace of acculturation. One Cherokee, Sequoyah, was particularly determined not only to resist American imperialism but to show to the world the genius of his people.
John Howard Payne, an actor turned author turned amateur ethnologist, collected one of the most detailed narratives of Sequoyah’s life.63 In the 1830s, Principal Chief John Ross granted Payne permission to compile a history of the Cherokee people’s culture and customs. At the time, this work earned Payne the suspicion of both federal and Georgia authorities. Officials feared that Payne’s ethnological endeavors were a cover for his agitation against the federal government’s efforts to remove Cherokee people from the region that comprised their southeastern homeland. With this cloud of suspicion hanging over him, Payne nevertheless persisted. On one October evening in 1835, he sat in a room “full of Indians” and listened to an account of the life of George Gist (or Guess), better known as Sequoyah.64
Payne was in Cherokee Country that October to attend a session of the Cherokee National Council. During the proceedings, Payne witnessed the communalism that endured—and that Cherokee “traditionalists” like Nunna-tsune-ga believed was on the decline—in Cherokee politics. Payne was spellbound as he sat and listened to incredibly detailed stories about George Gist. Payne later synthesized the accounts he heard that night, transforming the various stories of Gist’s life into a coherent narrative of a Cherokee hero. Payne’s narrative began with a chronicle of Sequoyah’s early life. It quickly progressed to tall tales of a Cherokee hero, a hero who gave to the Cherokee people the greatest gift of all: the Cherokee syllabary.65
The Cherokee syllabary was an example of cultural syncretism. It was also a Cherokee response to the creeping cultural hegemony of Euroamerican settler society.66 Where English literacy provided the increasingly powerful, but numerically small, multiracial Cherokee elite with the ability to communicate and transact business with Cherokees and non-Cherokees living far from their own townships or farmsteads, the syllabary reportedly gave ordinary Cherokee people a feeling of cultural empowerment and connectedness. The Cherokee National Council recognized just how important Sequoyah’s “transcendent invention” was when it agreed to strike a medal in his honor in 1824. In 1832, when Sequoyah finally received his medal, Chief Charles H. Vann celebrated Sequoyah’s genius, praising Sequoyah for giving the Cherokee people the ability to communicate over vast distances, transact business, record legal proceedings, and preserve Cherokee history in writing. In Vann’s words, the “old and young find no difficulty in learning to read and write in their native language and to correspond with their distant friends with the same facility that the whites do.”67
Who was this Cherokee genius? In travel narratives, government documents, and personal correspondence, his name was recorded variously as Sequoyah, George Guess, and George Gist. Over the course of the nineteenth century, he became a Cherokee folk hero known to thousands as Sequoyah. Born in the early 1770s, Sequoyah was the son of a white man and a Cherokee woman. Sequoyah was raised by his mother, his father having abandoned mother and child shortly after Sequoyah’s birth. Sequoyah grew up among the Overhill Cherokees in what became the state of Tennessee, where his mother taught him to milk cows, herd livestock, harvest the family’s seven to eight acres of cornfields, and skillfully ride a horse. Sequoyah’s birth and upbringing thus took place in two worlds in transition. The world of the Euroamerican settlers was expanding and growing increasingly powerful, and the settlers were becoming impatient with the natives, seeing them as impediments to American civilization’s westward expansion. Life in the Cherokee world was also changing, altered by trade, colonial politics, disease, and warfare. The Cherokee people struggled to keep their sacred fires burning and to maintain some semblance of balance and harmony in a world that appeared to be on the verge of splintering into unrecognizable fragments.68
That Sequoyah’s life came to represent something more than another episode in colonial exploitation was a testimony to the adaptive skills of Sequoyah’s mother and the strong sense of Cherokee identity she imparted to her son. Rather than being swept away by Euroamerican settler colonialism, Sequoyah and his mother became active participants in the changing world around them. They sold, sometimes on credit, “a variety of small articles of goods” to hunters and itinerant traders passing their home.69 As Sequoyah grew into a young man, his entrepreneurial instincts led him to diversify his economic activities. He capitalized on the Cherokee fashion for ornamenting the body with silver “ear-rings, nose bobs, armlets, bracelets, gorgets & fine chains” by manufacturing and selling these items. The ornaments that Sequoyah made and sold were not your run-of-the-mill consumer items. Using his considerable artistic talents, Sequoyah learned to engrave his name, in English, on these items. In so doing, Sequoyah cemented for himself a position of increasing visibility in Cherokee social and economic life.70
Figure 9: Sequoyah, “Inventor of the Cherokee Alphabet,” n.d. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.
Sequoyah then channeled his various skills into the invention of a Cherokee system of writing. According to an elderly Cherokee man named The Bark, Sequoyah became incensed by the wonder with which many Cherokee people held the “white man’s” ability to communicate without talking. Seeing “nothing in it [the white man’s literacy] so very wonderful & difficult,” “one day he [Sequoyah] went so far as to declare that he was of opinion that he could find out a way by which the Cherokee could detain and communicate their ideas just as well as the white people could.” The Bark explained that Sequoyah drew inspiration from the biblical stories of Moses, stories he had learned from Christian missionaries. Determined to become the literary Moses of his people, leading them to a promised land in which Cherokee people had the power to communicate their ideas, beliefs, and experiences in writing, Sequoyah set to work placing Cherokee “marks in the stone.”71
Just as the biblical Moses was a heroic figure to Judeo-Christian people throughout the world, so Sequoyah through his invention became a hero to Cherokee people everywhere. The choice of heroes tells us much about a culture. For the Cherokee, increasingly under assault from the American republic’s expansionism, Sequoyah represented Cherokee defiance, adaptability, and ingenuity. While the average Cherokee marveled at the ability of the white man to communicate without speaking, Sequoyah resisted such awe. “The white man is no magician,” Sequoyah allegedly exclaimed to a small group of his friends. He continued, “It is said that in ancient times when writing first began, a man named Moses made marks upon a stone.” Sequoyah scratched some marks on a stone to prove to his Cherokee friends that he too had the power to communicate without speaking. Thus began the Cherokee hero’s quest to create a form of writing that could unite all Cherokees.72
Like all historical heroes, Sequoyah ignored the doubters. He toiled selflessly to create a Cherokee system of writing, and through his “long and silent study,” he devised what became the Cherokee syllabary.73 Once his “alphabet” was complete, Sequoyah gradually introduced his invention to Cherokee legal practitioners, leading politicians, children, and adults. The turbaned Cherokee genius slowly won approval for his system of written communication from all sections of Cherokee society. And so his legend began to grow. Sequoyah, the man who gave the Cherokee people their own written language, was now said to have descended from a family of high rank on his mother’s side.
The legend of Sequoyah thus emphasized the maternal inheritance of the hero’s genius. Additionally, and in keeping with traditional Cherokee conceptions of gender roles and inheritance, the campfire storytellers who helped to embed the legend of Sequoyah in Cherokee culture also recognized the traditional concept of leadership imparted to the hero by two of his famous uncles, Tallantusky and Corn Tassel (who was also known as Rayetaeh, Kaellahnor, Udsidasata, Onitossitah, Old Tassel, Old Corn Tassel, and Kahn-yah-tah-hee). Tallantusky was the warrior chief who counseled warfare against the encroaching settler frontier at the turn of the century, and who eventually joined with other Lower Town chiefs to lead the Cherokee in establishing new settlements west of the Mississippi River. Corn Tassel was the brother of Sequoyah’s mother and the principal chief of Old Echota, a town famed among the Cherokees as a place of refuge. Both were reputed to be influential figures in Sequoyah’s formative years.74
This genealogical detail suggested that Sequoyah was exposed to two distinctly different examples of how one might lead a Cherokee life. One possibility would be to migrate and resettle on land west of the Mississippi, while retaining a clear sense of self and community as Cherokee. An alternative might be to relocate to a Cherokee farmstead in the South, as scores of Valley and Overhill Cherokees did prior to the Trail of Tears, and assert a strong Cherokee identity based on a sense of connection to the territory of one’s ancestors. In his own lifetime, Sequoyah absorbed these various influences and approaches to the re-articulation of Cherokee identity. He was no stranger to travel, but at the same time he recognized the political and economic value of a strong sense of territoriality. Sequoyah ultimately mediated these two approaches to Cherokee identity by channeling his energies into the creation of the Cherokee syllabary.
