Running head: STORY OF MY PEOPLE

Story of my People Susan Lovejoy ETH/125 10/24/2010 Elizabeth Kazsuk

STORY OF MY PEOPLE

My name is Mary Whitecloud, and I am a Cherokee which comes from the word Muskogee which means, Speakers of another language. The Cherokee Indians originally called themselves Aniyunwiya, which means the principle people, but today we have accepted the name Cherokee, which in our language is Tsalagi. We were farming people; our women would harvest crops of corn, beans, sunflowers, and squash. We would gather nuts, berries, and fruit to eat. The Cherokee men would hunt deer, wild turkeys, and small game, and they would fish in the small rivers. The weapons used were bows, and arrows and blowguns to shoot the game that was hunted. When fishing they would use spears, and fishing poles. There are a lot of traditional Cherokee legends, and stories. Story telling is very important to us. Some of the stories include The Deluge, a story about the great flood. There were many legends about a variety of things, and how they came to be according to my people the Cherokee. In the 1830, President Jackson began to put into effect the policy of ridding Indians of their land titles, and relocating the Indian population. When the Indian removal act of 1830 was passed, it said that no state could accomplish appropriate culture, civilization, and progress as long as Indians were still in the area where people wanted to make a town. This act that congress passed gave the president the power to start negotiating removal treaties with Indian tribes

STORY OF MY PEOPLE east of the Mississippi. Under this treaty the Indians were to give up their lands east of the Mississippi river for land in the west. We are the original residents of the American southeast region, such states as Georgia, North, and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Most of us were forced to move in the 1800s along the trail of tears in Oklahoma. Some of us who survived the death march as it was called still take up resident in Oklahoma. Some of us escaped the trail of tears by escaping into the Appalachian hills or taking up shelter with kind white people. The name Trail of tears was our name for what Americans call the Indian

removal. In the 1800s the US government, created a designated place as Indian Territory in Oklahoma, where they sent all of the Native American tribes to live at. Some of the tribes had no problems with that, but others were forced by the army to go. We were one of the largest eastern tribes, and we did not want to leave our homelands. 16,000 thousand of us were divided into 16 units with a 1000 in each unit. Three of the groups left in June of 1838 traveling by rail, boat, and wagon we stayed along the water route which was low for navigation because of it being the hottest part of the year. On November 17th we encountered a terrible storm that included sleet, and snow. We were forced to sleep in wagons, and on the ground without a fire to warm us. Thousands of us including the men, our women, and children died along this trail from the exposure of cold weather, starvation, and fevers. The

STORY OF MY PEOPLE funds that were supposed to be for are removal was kept by corrupt politicians, and the military commanders. Life for the Cherokee has been a hardship, and we have had to tolerate many different things over the centuries. In todays society we are still ridiculed for the way we live, and how we teach our kids our beliefs. But like any other culture we believe in our rights to practice our lifestyle however we please. The Cherokee still practice to this day a lot of their rituals from back in the days.

STORY OF MY PEOPLE

References

The First Strawberries, http://www.powersource.com/cocinc/articles/strwbry.htm Cherokee Indian Fact Sheet, http://www.bigorrin.org/cherokee_kids.htm The trail of tears, http://www.bradley.edu/las/eng/lotm/TrailofTears/trailparent.htm

Cherokee by blood, http://www.cherokeebyblood.com/trailtears.htm Cherokee Legends and Traditional Stories, http://www.nativelanguages.org/cherokee-legends.htm