Representing Cherokee Dispossession

On February 21, 1828, the Cherokees published the first issue of the first newspaper in America to contain writing in an indigenous native language. The paper was called Cherokee Phoenix—Tsalagi Tsu-le-hi-sa-nu-hi, or something like "I will arise" in the Cherokee language.

Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 196

On August 1, 1838, Chief John Ross "assembled his Cherokee followers and led them in a pledge that, despite the loss of their homeland, the Cherokee Nation would never die."

Hoig, The Cherokees and Their Cheifs, 171

It is useless to attempt to describe the long, wearisome passage of those exiled Indians.

Wahnenauhi (Mrs. Lucy L. Keys), "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 207

Granma and Granpa wanted me to know of the past, for "If ye don't know where your people have been then ye won't know where your people are going." And so they told me most of it.

Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 40

"Grandpa," I said, suddenly excited. "Grandpa, I can hear them. They're singing."

Conley, Mountain Windsong, 218

I regarded this new birth as not just the end of our suffering but also as the dawn of a new day—the first day of our new life in the promised land.

Twist, "The Promised Land," in Boston Mountain Tales, 143

"Full Circle: The Connecticut Casino"

. . . all the gold stolen from the Cherokees in Georgia

seeming to return now to the Pequots in Connecticut, . . .

Smith, The Cherokee Lottery

Maritole:

"The baby who had been born was crying.

"Luthy took my arm. 'It's a new voice that won't grieve for our old land in North Carolina.'"

Quaty Lewis:

"Some night I'd listen to the wind in the pines. Only there weren't pines here. I looked around. They were oaks, a different kind of oak than we'd had in North Carolina, but they would sound the old truth of the pines."

Luthy:

"As for the trail—it's over—Tanner and my boys are alive."

Maritole:

"Maybe someday love would come."

Glancy, Pushing the Bear, 228, 229, 233

How to represent in writing the dispossession of the Cherokees—in particular, the experience of "Nunna daul Tsunyi . . . 'the trail where we cried,'" the Trail of Tears, on which, from the summer of 1838 until March 1839, of some thirteen thousand people (black slaves and intermarried whites among them), more than a third, perhaps four thousand people, died (Mankiller and Wallis 46)?

Difficult as it surely is to represent this climactic event of Cherokee dispossession, it is not very difficult to say how it came about. Even in an age wary of "facts," the facts in this instance are very little contestable. Set out as a "Chronology of the Cherokee Removal," they can be listed, as Theda Purdue and Michael Green have done, in little more than two pages of text. Except as noted, what follows is based on Purdue and Green (176-79):

Around 1700 the Cherokees first encountered Europeans in the persons of British traders.

In 1776 the American Colonists invaded Cherokee towns.

After the American Revolution, the Treaty of Hopewell (1785) pledged peaceful relations between the new United States and the Cherokee Nation.

In 1800 Moravian Fathers from Germany established a mission among the Cherokees to further their Christianization.

In 1802 in exchange for a land cession from the state of Georgia, the U.S. government promised to extinguish Creek and Cherokee title to lands in the state of Georgia.

From 1808 through 1810, one of the first major migrations of Cherokee people west of the Mississippi occurred.

In the Creek War of 1813-14, the Cherokees fought on the side of Andrew Jackson and the United States against hostile Creeks.

In 1821 Sequoyah invented a syllabary by which the Cherokee language could be written, and in 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix began publication in English and in Cherokee.

Also in 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected President, and in 1828 and 1829, the state...