The Assimilation Process’ Role in the Movement

From Captive Slavery to Chattel Slavery

In Cherokee Society

Imagine being in the Carolinas, Georgia, parts of Tennessee, Alabama, Virginia, or Kentucky during the seventeenth or eighteenth century.  There is a Cherokee war party coming back to their village with captives among its midst.  The warriors turn their captives over to the women who remove all clothing from the prisoners and place wet clay on each head to protect the scalp from the torch fire.  The women beat the prisoners with dry cane and take them to a stake where each prisoner in turn is tied with a vine which allows approximately fifteen feet of movement.  The women then taunt the prisoner with words and torches while the warrior captive sings songs about his past deeds to show defiance of the torture.  An occasional European may not sing these songs but perhaps the occasional African would find this similar enough to his culture to sing his warrior songs to show defiance of the torture as well.  When the prisoner is close to death, he is revived for a short time then the women take his life and finally his scalp.   This was a common sight for traders and other Europeans that spent time among the Cherokee during this period. Because the Cherokee functioned under the premise that family members could not rest until a death among them had been avenged, warriors would not leave the battlefield until every member of their clan that had been lost in the previous skirmish had been avenged by taking another life to replace it.  To prove the death and revenge, a scalp or other body part would be taken, although this revenge was not always taken on the battlefield.  If captives were taken, it was up to the women of the clan to decide their fate.  This is an example of how little value captured men were to Cherokee society except on an occasional ad hoc basis to replace a dead relative whose position needed immediate replacement.  Women could expand the gene pool and children could be assimilated into Cherokee society.

The Cherokee as well as most Indigenous or First Nation Peoples of the United States of America participated in some form of slavery before and after European contact.  The Cherokees, in particular, moved from what had originally been a captive slavery system which used only certain captives as replacements for missing or deceased members of the clan/tribe before and during the early phases of European contact to a chattel slavery system.  Chattel slavery is commonly defined as a human that was considered property connected to land that was bound to service without wages with no human rights and put the woman’s child or children in bondage as well. They moved this chattel system with them on the Trail of Tears which was the name given to their removal by the federal government from their holdings in the southeast to Oklahoma and Arkansas where it remained until after the Civil War.

 The Cherokees had a system of slavery that was based primarily on capture and did not continue the condition of slavery based on the mother’s or father’s condition of servitude as the chattel system of slavery did.  Women and children were often incorporated into the clan that captured them while men often suffered the fate mentioned earlier if they were not kept as Atsi Nahsa’I or one who is owned.

 The men, women and children who were spared this torture because their labor was needed became Atsi Nahsa’I.  Although some of these individuals did marry into membership within the clan and therefore into the larger society, most of them were not included with full privileges of the Nation.   The Cherokee had a need to explain the world around them.  The clan defined who an individual was as a person, who he or she was related to, who he or she could marry, and created the Cherokee group identity more strongly than common language or culture did.  If an individual became a slave who did not gain clan affiliation because of marriage, he or she remained outside of the system that made a Homo Sapiens a human.  If a creature was not human but looked like one, it became an anomaly.  As with other anomalies such as bears who were of the four-footed clan but sometimes walked on two feet and used the front two paws in a similar fashion to humans, the unfree human or Atsi Nahsa’I must be tolerated and explained.  The existence of the unfree humans outside of the group solidified the commonalities among the clans.  Atsi Nahsa’I had no protection or rights within the system but existed as part of the universe.   This initially justified captive slavery and was later used to explain the use of African Americans by Cherokees as chattel slaves.

As European culture began to influence Cherokee culture, there began a shift from the traditional captive slavery system to a commodity slave system.  Indigenous peoples that were exposed to whites and began to acculturate by the exchange of merchandise and tools often some Cherokees were persuaded to provide slaves for the traders.  This led to more frequent raids and skirmishes.  Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, in Carolina, the Indian trade  was the most profitable until rice began to eclipse it.   The very rise of rice, tobacco, and later cotton as a means of potential profit caused the rise in the need for workers.  Since slavery was becoming the most cost-efficient means of labor for landowners, it became vital to procure workers by any means necessary. The Cherokees went to Charleston in 1693 to discuss with the Colonists that were involved in overseeing Indian Affairs their victimization by the Catawbas, Congarees, and Savannahs in the continual capture and sale to white traders as slaves.   First Nation peoples were found by whites unsuitable for the growing chattel slavery system due to several reasons: knowledge of the land which accommodated ease of escape, suicide, lack of tolerance to European diseases particularly malaria which was a major contributor to First Nation peoples’ demise, and once they had escaped, the ability to blend back into their own societies.  These problems led white land owners to look for an easier solution to their labor problem, Africans.  This caused some interesting dilemmas for First Nation peoples in general and the Cherokees specifically.

The interaction between First Nation peoples and Africans/African Americans has been seldom explored by historians.   The governmental reporting of mixed Indian African ancestry was often placed in the category of black or mulatto  instead of more clearly reporting any delineation between Native American blood and African/African American blood.  Once white landowners found First Nation peoples unacceptable as slaves, they began their dependence on slave traders who captured and sold them Africans and later African Americans to support trade for European goods.  The Cherokees participated in Indian slave trade with whites but due to the decline of that  trade as mentioned previously, the Cherokees found African slave trade more attractive and profitable so that by 1775, they traded almost exclusively in Africans.   This began a change in attitudes for Cherokees towards Africans who had been accepted by Cherokees through intermarriage or as unfree captives.

This change in attitudes within the Cherokees were caused from pressures within their own culture as well as outside pressures from European/Americans to assimilate or be destroyed.  Part of the assimilation process was to accept the model of European/American culture that was beginning to surround them.  The most successful model available and held up as the quintessential ideal was the plantation slaveholder with Christian/Deist morals. Additionally a debate occurred amongst European scholars and Colonial scholars about the place of the “copper peoples” of the New World.   There were two major debates about First Nation peoples: scholars disagreed about whether First Nation peoples were one of the lost tribes of Israel either Shem or Japheth and did First Nation peoples buy the argument that they were or did First Nation peoples offer some other explanation for their existence?  The advantages to Cherokees, who if they did not believe the connection, took preferential treatment from it, were mainly mixed bloods (progressives) and desired to have a divine connection to the missionaries’ God.  This enabled those Cherokees to become part of the flock that had as its inheritance (according to the missionaries) history and prophecy from which the Cherokees had suffered privation.  In addition, this inheritance called to other Christians to show consideration and beneficence, and to show recognition and respect to Cherokees that had been part of God’s plan, become lost and then returned to become His chosen people once again.   Most full-bloods (traditionalists) rejected Christianity and assimilation efforts for Cherokee traditional lifeways.

The fuel for this debate was fed by an anonymous author’s pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Origin of the Cherokees published in 1762 at Oxford.   This pamphlet was constructed with classic quotations and how to properly interpret biblical passages as they related to contemporary issues.  The three main arguments were that the Cherokees were painted with tattoos and paint resembling descendants of Meshek.  They lived in a manner that was similar to postulations about descendants of Meshek.  Anthropology was in its infancy and was used to correlate the styles of living that would reflect the descendants of Meshek to the Cherokee.  Secondly, the Cherokees must be white because they are the descendants of Meshek, son of Japheth and grandson of Noah. Finally, that because Cherokees were the descendants of Meshek, they along with other First Nation peoples would fulfill the prophecy of Ezekiel and destroy the Europeans.   Although this series of debates seems irrelevant within today’s context, these were driving forces that were shaping the thought processes of both Europeans/Americans and Cherokees.  It was molding the ways that Cherokees perceived themselves and African/Americans and how European/Americans perceived Cherokees and their relationships with African/Americans.

This struck fear into many European/Americans who were already contemplating the possibility of rebellion by a united front of First Nation peoples and Africans/Americans. The European/Americans who were engulfed by this paranoiac fear consequently worked by any means possible to keep First Nation peoples and Africans/Americans separated.  This fear was not entirely unreasonable for in the southeast First Nation peoples and slaves outnumbered whites.  In Carolina whites were in a minority ratio of three or four to one.  To further feed this fear, First Nation peoples’ uprisings and slave insurrections constantly kept whites off balance.  The sense of impending rebellion encouraged legislation that gave whites social control over First Nation peoples and slaves.  The whites began creating and further restricting slave codes which included legislation for the return of slaves found on First Nation peoples’ lands.  The return of slaves to their owners by First Nation peoples when they were found off their lands and the promise of a reward for the return.  The whites’ ability to play one faction against another and keep First Nation peoples and Africans/Americans divided at any given moment emphasizes the sophistication of Europeans’/Americans’ political and social prowess.

Whites achieved fissures between First Nation peoples and African/Americans by signing treaties with the First Nation peoples to return runaway slaves to the states, offer bounties for slaves return and create governmental policy and legislation as mentioned above that was designed to “create an aversion in them to Negroes” as expressed by Carolina’s governor Lyttelton in 1738.     The government also used slaves during the Indian wars and First Nation peoples were used to quash slave rebellions.  The  frequency of clauses included in various treaties over time to return captured slaves to the state indicates that often law or bounty was enough incentive for First Nation peoples to return slaves “to their rightful owners.”   The use of Africans/Americans against First Nation peoples, the dwindling of First Nations’ sovereignty, and deteriorating relations between Europeans/Americans and Cherokees led to much tension between these neighbors.

One example of aggravated deteriorating relations between Europeans/Americans and Cherokees was a series of rumors that grew between Carolinians and Cherokees.  From 1670 through 1750 Cherokees and Carolinians had unstable volatile relationships that were built on paranoia of conspiratorial plots against one another. There was a panic in the Carolinas in 1751 caused by rumors from both sides.  The Cherokees believed that the Carolinians were gathering forces to obliterate or enslave the Cherokees.  Carolinians believed rumors that Cherokees had already killed some settlers and were ready to attack other settlements. These rumors were born out of fear, uncertainty, and ambivalences on both sides.  Mutual need caused diplomatic moves that helped to end the panic and diminish (temporarily) the obscure relationships that existed on both sides.
Slave owners discovered that their slaves were not only learning English but were learning Cherokee dialects as well becoming familiar with the topography of Cherokee lands. Although no Maroons who were runaway slaves of African or mixed bloodlines in the West Indies or South America during the 17th and 18th centuries who congregated together to form settlements that allowed for their protection from punishment and propagation nor Maroon colonies were created on Cherokee lands as they were created in Jamaica or Brazil, there was enough evidence of sexual relations that the term mustee was created for the offspring of African and First Nation peoples.

Tolerance for Africans by Cherokees before the nineteenth century is illustrated by evidence that the Cherokees had little use for slave labor before this time and seldom pursued bounties for runaway slaves.  In 1794 there were approximately one hundred people of African descent in Cherokee country.  These were a mixture of booty, Atsi Nahsa’I, runaways and free blacks.   Full bloods who could afford slaves used them to replace the agricultural work that had been traditionally done by women but was being forced on the men by the National, State and missionaries.  Mixed bloods saw merit in chattel slavery when they looked at large-scale crop systems encouraged by acculturation with the ultimate goal of assimilation into Southern culture.  As Cherokee men became accustomed to the role reversal of overseeing agricultural production due to governmental and Christian insistence, the need for additional labor became apparent.  White men who married Cherokee women had free land and paid no taxes to the U. S. government or the state due to matrilineal and matrilocal customs which made the husband a tribal member.  Mixed bloods who desired to mimic their white plantation-owning fathers and neighbors saw advantages to chattel slavery over more traditional methods.  The pressure of the newly formed United States government, state governments, missionaries, acculturated mixed bloods and a small group of merchants caused the stratification of Cherokee society.  The split which eventually became known as the Traditionals who desired to remain loyal to tradition and the old ways and customs not wanting to become dependent on European/American goods or customs and the Progressives who wanted to assimilate with Southern culture and form a middle class.

The Traditionals became equated with backward savages by Europeans/Americans as well as the Cherokee Progressives and the Progressives became equated with civilization.  The Progressives and whites married to Cherokee women used the goals and values of Southern aristocracy which included chattel slavery that became the backbone of the plantation system of the Southern states.  The Progressives and white males established cash crop systems and used slave labor to increase production  By 1808, there were 583 slaves in Cherokee territory.  James Vann, a Cherokee Progressive, was reported to have owned almost 100 slaves and many of the Progressives owned over ten.  Nonetheless, eighty-five to ninety percent of the Cherokee Nation did not own slaves.

The largest shift in Cherokee attitudes towards Africans/Americans happened during the 1820’s.   This was due to the tri-part influences of economic, social, and the new idea of race. In the infancy of anthropology and sociology in France and the rest of Europe, theories that were being extolled began playing a major role in the concepts about race and stratification by race in America and to the Cherokees.  Jack Civills or Sevells typified the attitudes of Cherokees toward Africans prior to 1794.  He was an African freeman who lived among the Cherokees from the 1780’s until his passing in 1805.  He originally married a Cherokee woman who perhaps died or left him.  However, this marriage allowed him citizenship in the Nation.  He then married a white woman which Indian Agent Lovely found as “too forward.”   Civills was an owner of a tavern and trading post which held whites as well as Cherokees in his debt.  Lovely tried in many ways to bring Jack back to his “proper place” in society but due to his citizenship in the Nation, he was protected by tribal laws until his death.

By 1825, the younger generations that were raised under Missionary schooling and ideology did not support mixing African and Cherokee blood.  John Ridge, another Progressive who later became a crucial political power in the relocation and the signing of the Treaty of Echota through the office of principal chief, was quoted as stating that Cherokees and whites co-mingling was a result of the sanction of marriage but any co-mingling of African and Cherokee blood was not doubt the illicit relations between some slave owners and their female slaves long before Cherokees had become civilized.   This shows total disregard for oral history by the Progressives such as Ridge that had originally allowed for diversity in color and demeanor in humans as well as the Progressives’ desire to be associated with the whites rather than others of “color.”  To further support the separation of race, the Tribal Council passed legislation prohibiting sexual relations or marriage between Cherokees and Africans.
In 1819, the first in a series of legislation within the Cherokee Nation was passed that restricted previously enjoyed freedom among the slaves in the Cherokee Nation.  The first restricted trade or barter with slaves without permission from their owner.  The second removed the ability to own personal property which could include land from slaves.  However, manumission was never legislated by the Cherokee Council.   From 1822 there were several instances that record individual manumission including one that was recorded in the Cherokee Supreme Court.

Slaves became such a part of the Progressives lifestyles that they became the center of domestic disputes, inheritance disputes, seized by creditors, and loaned or rented contractually.   Cherokee slave traders went as far as New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston to purchase slaves at auctions and bring them back to Cherokee country to be sold to Cherokees and their white neighbors.  It was Federal policy before removal to advocate plantations among the Cherokee.  Subsidies were put in place to promote an immense progression in agricultural economy which demanded more slave labor.   There was trouble on the horizon for all the Cherokee people primarily from the State of Georgia (who did not recognize Cherokees as citizens because they were considered by the state to be persons of color)  and the newly elected president, Andrew Jackson.

Andrew Jackson addressed the young Congress after his election on the Cherokee Question by stating that the Cherokees had no legal claim to the lands that they were claiming because the “tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase.”   Further he tells the Congress of his concern that the Cherokee men have not readily adapted to European farming techniques.  He saw this as a character flaw of “weakness and decay.”   Jackson’s Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, supported Jackson’s conclusions and pushed for the “humanitarian” removal West.

Those who argued against removal including both Europeans/Americans and Cherokees argued that the Cherokees had made great strides in imitating European agricultural practices.  Reverend Samuel Worcester who had lived with the Cherokees for several years wrote to Reverend E. S. Ely, who supported removal, that the Cherokee “have built them houses and cultivated lands with their own hands. . . .There may be a few families among the mountains, who depend mostly on the chase for support, but I know not of one.”

According to Andrew Jackson and several of his supporters of the time, he removed the Cherokees (as well as other First Nation peoples) to the west for humanitarian motives.    The very fact that the Cherokees reported there were over one thousand slaves by 1835 shows that the Cherokees had assimilated many European agricultural practices  which refutes Jackson’s earlier argument that Cherokees had not assimilated European/American farming techniques.

To illustrate the argument against Jackson and Cass, the Census of 1835 shows that the average number in the Cherokee household was six to seven and the average number of cultivated acres for households was from eleven in North Carolina to thirty-six in Alabama.  The percentage of households that sold corn was ten in North Carolina, thirteen in Alabama, thirty-eight in Georgia, and fifty in Tennessee.  The average price of those sales was $46 in North Carolina, $588 in Tennessee, $63 in Georgia, and $235 in Alabama.  Percentages of slaveholding households were highest in Alabama and Tennessee with averages varying from seven to nine slaves per household  with sixteen percent holding that average in Alabama and 12.5 in Tennessee.   There is evidence from various sources that in 1809 the Cherokee Nation had a total of 583 slaves but by 1824 slave numbers had increased 119% to 1,277.   In a letter from John Ridge to Albert Gallatin dated February 27, 1826 he notes that there are “1,377 African slaves. . .the Cherokee Nation will contain 15,480”  in North Carolina.  By the 1835 survey, the census counted 1,592 African slaves for a total in the Cherokee nation of 16,542.

There is ample evidence that has recorded that in addition to corn, the Cherokees produced gourds, melons, cucumbers, squash, cymlins, beans and red peas during the colonial period.  In addition, the Cherokee produced pumpkins, sunflowers, cabbage potatoes, peaches, leeks, garlic, wheat, rye, oats, sweet potatoes, apples, butter, cheese, and cotton.   Additionally, the evidence is overwhelming for the surplus agricultural productions on average of over fifty percent.   The evidence of the “large amounts of surplus corn available, the number of slave residents, the numerous corn cribs, and the many livestock pens in these areas support the assumption that farms located there had commercial orientations. . .produced surplus for sale.”   Further evidence points to only eight percent of the heads of households being slaveholders.   There is documentation that slaves were kept in lamentable conditions despite the evidence that Cherokees were compassionate in their treatment of their slaves.  The real problem was there were fewer resources to share between the Cherokees and their African/American slaves which continued to dwindle as removal loomed closer. This leads to the conclusion that Cherokees were producing domestic foodstuffs for private consumption and public sale which debunks Jackson’s theory that the Cherokees had not sufficiently adapted to European agricultural ways.

Young Wolf was an example of those Progressives who were changing their ways from Cherokee tradition to European/American acculturation.  He changed his views from nationalistic to cessionist—those who wished to cede lands belonging to the Cherokee Nation to the United States government  within ten years (1808-1818).  He then enrolled for emigration to the West but never went and lost his National citizenship.  Young Wolf was part of a conspiracy with other young Cherokees who were in the same situation of enrollment to emigrate to the West and losing their Cherokee citizenship to cede lands that had not previously been ceded without knowledge of the Cherokee National Council and government  but was discovered along with others by the Council and was indited by the Cherokee National Council in 1821.

 Young Wolf had made several breaks from tradition by this time including a Last Will and Testament.  His will caused much dissention between his remaining family members and caused the will to be challenged in the Cherokee Council.  One of the reasons his will was brought before the Cherokee National Council was Young Wolf’s decision to will much of his property to his son instead of his sister’s daughters or even his own wife or daughters (this would have also been unusual but would have passed the property through a female line which was traditional).  He left his son “a Negro man named Ceasar.  Also I leave a yearly income for Dennis in the Turnpike Company. . .Also I leave to my son Dennis my house and plantation and all the Farming tools.”   He requested that his brothers and Charles Hicks execute his will instead of leaving that task for his wife or her brothers, another break with tradition.  He barely left his wife enough to survive with (one heifer and one mare) and turned almost his entire properties to his one male heir.  The Council ruled that the misunderstanding between the daughter Ann, the son Dennis and the mother (who had not turned over the slaves to her children) must be resolved and the mother must turn over the slaves willed to the children by the father.

Not all Cherokees stayed on their National lands until they lost their citizenship like Young Wolf.  Several groups decided to take the governments offer to relocate willingly to the new Indian Territories that became the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma.  For example, during an early removal, Chief Tahlonteskee and 1,023 of his people living in Alabama wanted to move west to the Arkansas River.  Out of this number there were listed sixty-eight African slaves.   In 1830, the Arkansas Gazette reported that two hundred Cherokees and their slaves had arrived by riverboat.   Many of the early immigrants were compensated for the land and property including livestock left behind.  They traveled in style, warmly dressed, sturdy wagons with personal items, healthy horses and oxen or cattle as well as their slaves were a stark contrast to the forced removal in the winter of 1838-1839.

President Jackson planned to remove several First Nation peoples and supported the Indian Removal Act of 1830 which allowed for compensation for early voluntary removal.  Many Cherokees fought removal in U. S. courts but the ultimate action was removal during the winter of 1838-1839.  Court was not the only place that the Cherokee reacted to pressure from governments.  The Cherokee had a series of revitalization movements both secular and sacred which occurred when their societal boundaries were in danger of disintegration.

Historian Russell Thornton lists four disruptions and changes that contributed to revitalization movements as the development of the formal Cherokee Nation (state building); the removal to Indian Territory, including events prior and subsequent to the forced removal; the U. S. Civil War and its aftermath; and the beginning of the allotment of Cherokee lands.
 

Creating a strong central government patterned after the United States government within the Cherokee Nation was a result of the changing social structure from egalitarian to stratification and Andrew Jackson’s Cherokee policies.  This state building included a centralized government dissolution of clan revenge practices, matrilineal descent practices, the further entrenchment of Christianity, literacy in both Cherokee and English, large-scale agriculture and chattel slavery, as well as voluntary westward migration.  The Traditionalists reacted with reviving old religious practices and lifeways.

White Path’s Rebellion was an attempt to remove all European ways including chattel slavery and plantation agriculture and return to those ancient Traditionalistic ways.  The Keetoowah Society was an attempt by full-bloods after removal to rebuild a nationalistic movement to counteract the elite planter mixed-bloods who had formed the Knights of the Golden Circle society dedicated to preserving slavery.   The Nighthawk Keetoowahs were formed by Redbird Smith in a split over acculturation and assimilation of the original Keetoowah members and Smith and his followers to return to a much older traditional way of life.
When the Trail of Tears or forced government removal of the Cherokees from the southeastern United States happened, slaves were treated the same as their masters.  If their masters and their families were forced out into the night with no blankets or shoes, so were the slaves. Once they were removed to Indian Territory, they were placed under the care of Indian Agents.  Despite many changes, the Progressives rebuilt their plantation lifestyles in Oklahoma territory. The government’s idea was to move those Nations who were slaveholders directly west in anticipation of the Missouri Compromise which would legislate states that would not allow slavery and those states that could allow slavery.  The Progressives and moderates who already felt loyalty to the South wanted to preserve the planter elite lifestyle as evidenced in the formation of the Knights of the Golden Circle society in the new territory.

Many of these Indian Agents had been or were slave owners as well as southern sympathizers and encouraged active participation by the Cherokee with the Confederacy. Indian Agent for the Cherokees, George Butler considered the Cherokees more civilized because there were several slaveholders among them.  Several different First Nation peoples fought on both sides of the Civil War, yet  Indian contributions are often ignored.  First Nation Peoples chose sides based on similar motives to their white counterparts while some were solicited as Nations to become allies by both the North and South.

Initially, John Ross did not want to become politically involved with the Civil War.  In May 1861, he declared that the Cherokee Nation should remain neutral and honor their treaties with the United States government.   By August 1861, the Cherokee Nation issued several resolutions that included the following:  “Resolved, That among the rights guaranteed by the constitution and laws [of the Cherokee Nation] we distinctly recognize that of property in negro slaves, and hereby publicly denounce as calumniators those who represent us to be abolitionists, and as a consequence hostile to the South, which is both the land of our birth and the land of our homes.”   In October 1861, the Cherokees joined the fight with the Confederacy.   The Cherokee lost approximately seven thousand warriors during the Civil War.   However, with the end of the Civil War and the Union restored, chattel slavery was removed forever from the Cherokee Nation.

Little doubt can be left that the Cherokee system of slavery moved from a capture system of slavery to the Southern model of chattel slavery.  That the change from the capture system of slavery was multi-causal which included the introduction of acculturation and assimilation of European/American ideas, mores, and values.  Survival as a Nation was split by those who saw progression to the European/American way of life with the hope of assimilation to those who wanted to remove all vestiges of European/American culture from within the Cherokee’s midst.  Despite the inner struggle which split the culture into Traditionals and Progressives, the loss of their lands and lifestyles were argued out on a much larger battlefield that placed the United States in a similar separation between North and South.  As the ultimate winner was reunification of the United States and progression of Americans through manifest destiny, the Cherokees and their system of slavery is still a part of American history that has only seen a glimmer of the light of scholarship.   The need to continue extensive research on the subject of Cherokee slavery, its relationships to the South and participation in the Civil War in order to bring its relevance to both Cherokee history and United States history patiently awaits to be fulfilled.