Voices of Cherokee Women

VOICES OF CHEROKEE WOMEN

ALSO BY CAROLYN ROSS JOHNSTON

My Father’s War: Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II

Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838–1907

Sexual Power: Feminism and the Family in America

Jack London: An American Radical?

OTHER TITLES IN THE REAL VOICES, REAL HISTORY™ SERIES

Before Freedom, When I Just Can Remember: Personal Accounts of Slavery in South Carolina, edited by Belinda Hurmence

Black Indian Slave Narratives, edited by Patrick Minges

Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East, edited by Vicki Rozema

Far More Terrible for Women: Personal Accounts of Women in Slavery, edited by Patrick Minges

Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices: 220 Years of UNC History, edited by Daniel W. Barefoot

I Was Born in Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Texas, edited by Andrew Waters

The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605–1614, edited by Ed Southern

Mighty Rough Times, I Tell You: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Tennessee, edited by Andrea Sutcliffe

My Folks Don’t Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina, edited by Belinda Hurmence

No Man’s Yoke on My Shoulders: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Florida, edited by Horace Randall Williams

On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Georgia, edited by Andrew Waters

Prayin’ to Be Set Free: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi, edited by Andrew Waters

Voices from the American Revolution in the Carolinas, edited by Ed Southern

Voices from St. Simons: Personal Narratives of an Island’s Past, edited by Stephen Doster

Voices from the Trail of Tears, edited by Vicki Rozema

We Lived in a Little Cabin in the Yard: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Virginia, edited by Belinda Hurmence

Weren’t No Good Times: Personal Accounts of Slavery in Alabama, edited by Horace Randall Williams

JOHN F. BLAIR,

P  U  B  L  I  S  H  E  R

1406 Plaza Drive

Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103

www.blairpub.com

Copyright © 2013 by Carolyn Ross Johnston

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. For information, address John F. Blair, Publisher, Subsidiary Rights Department, 1406 Plaza Drive, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27103.

COVER

Earth’s Sky © Jeanne Rorex Bridges

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Johnston, Carolyn, 1948-

Voices of Cherokee women / edited by Carolyn Ross Johnston.

pages        cm. — (Real voices, real history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-89587-599-0 (alk. paper)

ISBN: 978-0-89587-600-3 (ebook)

ISBN-10: 0-89587-599-3

1. Cherokee women—History—Sources. 2. Cherokee women—Historiography. 3. Cherokee women—Biography. I. Title.

E99.C5J618 2013

975.004’97557—dc23

2013022218

Se liye’ni, a Cherokee medicine woman from 1926–27, and her son Walker Calhoun

PHOTOGRAPH SUBMITTED BY JAMES MOONEY AND FRANS OLBRECHTS; BULLETIN 99, NEGATIVE 996 D 4, NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part 1 Stories of the Cherokees

How the World Was Made

The First Fire

Kana’tĭ and Selu: The Origin of Game and Corn

U’tlûñ’tă, the Spear-finger

Nûñ’yunu’wĭ , Stone Coat

Part 2 Encounters

James Adair Excerpt

Henry Timberlake Memoir

John Haywood Excerpt

William Bartram Excerpts

Louis Philippe Excerpt

Payne-Butrick Papers

Part 3 The Civilization Program

Memoir of Catharine Brown

Wahnenauhi Excerpt

Cherokee Phoenix Articles

Part 4 The Trail of Tears

Petitions by Cherokee Women, 1817, 1818

Catherine Beecher Letter

Evan Jones Journal

Petitions of Ross’s Landing Prisoners

Rebecca Neugin Interview

Kate Rackleff Interview

Wahnenauhi Excerpt

Daniel Sabin Butrick Journal

Lilian Lee Anderson Interview

Bettie Perdue Woodall Interview

Ida Mae Hughes Interview

Eliza Whitmire Interview

Elizabeth Watts Interview

Mary Cobb Agnew Interview

Part 5 The Civil War

Ella Coody Robinson Interview

Letters between Mary Bryan Stapler Ross and John Ross

Letters between Sarah and Stand Watie

Hannah Worcester Hicks Diary

Mary Cobb Agnew Interview

Lizzie Wynn Interview

Emma J. Sixkiller Interview

Mary Alice Arendell Interview

Mary Scott Gordon Interview

Elinor Boudinot Meigs Interview

Elizabeth Watts Interview

Part 6 Allotment and Assimilation

I Allotment

Josephine Pennington Interview

Lena Barnett Interview

Mary J. Baker Interview

Minnie L. Miller Interview

Rose Stremlau Excerpt

II Assimilation

Ella Robinson Excerpt

Annie Williams Armor Interview

Lucille S. Brannon Interview

T. L. Ballenger Excerpts

Cherokee National Female Seminary Catalog Excerpts

Cherokee Rose Buds Excerpts

Part 7 Leading Cherokee Women

Isabel Cobb Selections

Aggie Ross Lossiah Article

Wilma Mankiller Essay

Acknowledgments

Works Cited

Index

INTRODUCTION

Members of the Cherokee Nation gathered at Rattlesnake Springs near what is now the town of Charleston, Tennessee. They had fled from their capital at New Echota in Georgia when threatened with violence and moved their council to Red Clay, Tennessee. The Indian Removal Act passed in 1830. Eight years later, the Cherokees were driven into stockades in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama. There, they awaited the long journey. They carried live coals from their final council fire.

In 1838, William Shorey Coodey described the departure of the first of the thirteen detachments to leave on the Trail of Tears:

At this very moment a low sound of distant thunder fell on my ear. In almost an exact western direction a dark spiral cloud was rising above the horizon and sent forth a murmur. I almost fancied a voice of divine indignation for the wrongs of my poor and unhappy countrymen, driven by brutal power from all they loved and cherished in the land of their fathers to gratify the cravings of avarice. The sun was unclouded—no rain fell—the thunder rolled away and sounds hushed in the distance. The scene around and before me, and in the elements above, were peculiarly impressive & singular. It was at once spoken of by several persons near me, and looked upon as omens of some future event in the west. John Ross stood on a wagon and led the people in a prayer. After the thunder sounded, a bugle announced the departure of the first detachment.¹

The Cherokees carried those live coals with them all the way over the eight-hundred-mile journey to Indian Territory.When they arrived, they lit the Eternal Flame from the coals of that last council fire.

In 1984 at Red Clay, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reunited in a joint council meeting. This was the first time the two groups had come together since the removal in 1838. Representatives of the two groups lit the Eternal Flame with torches that had been ignited a few days earlier at Cherokee, North Carolina. Cherokee runners carried the torches along 150 miles of mountainous roads.² Before they returned to Red Clay 146 years after their last council meeting in the East, the Cherokees had endured the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands. The live coals represented their deep commitment to Cherokee identity.

The Eternal Flame still burns.

When Cherokees met Europeans, the Europeans assumed the Cherokees were uncivilized because they were not Christians and because the women had so much power. That power was tied to their role as producers and mothers. Cherokee women were farmers and Cherokee men hunters. Their society was matrilineal and matrilocal, which meant that women owned their residences and the fields they worked. Cherokee women were wives, mothers, producers, healers, and warriors. They possessed sexual freedom and could obtain divorce without difficulty. Still, the clans maintained strict incest taboos. In all their actions, women had to take the welfare of the community into account. Cherokees believed in a sexual division of labor—a division associated with complementarity and equality, not hierarchy or domination.

Cherokee women lost and gained power in a variety of ways in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intended to impress the United States government and especially Georgians that the tribe was civilized and democratic, the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 disenfranchised women politically but allowed them to retain their property rights. While such political changes were strategic moves, they also stemmed from the economic shift from hunting to intensive agriculture, and from the adoption of patriarchal values by the influential Cherokees who drafted the legislation. The Cherokees even acquired African slaves. Often, their perception was that survival as a nation hinged on selective acculturation and the appearance of civilization.

The Indian Removal Act intended to remove all southeastern Indians. Resistance was fierce. Cherokee women protested, as they were more tied to the land than were men, but they were excluded from formal political decisions. No Cherokee women were lawyers, judges, or members of juries. Cherokee women still retained covert political influence, but their formal power diminished. Approximately 10 percent of the tribe at the time of removal was highly acculturated. Cherokees often intermarried with white Americans and converted to Christianity. Yet adopting European dress or language did not necessarily imply the loss of Cherokee identity and culture. Removal and the Civil War tended to reinforce older Cherokee values and beliefs, while allotment dealt a serious blow to Cherokee women’s power and to tribal sovereignty.

The following pages present the Real Voices, Real History of Cherokee women. Gerda Lerner, an architect of the field of women’s history, asked, What would history look like if viewed through the eyes of women? The primary documents in this book allow a view through the eyes of Cherokee women, whose stories have been missing from the traditional narratives. Cherokee women enjoyed equality with men until the nineteenth century. Then, in the latter part of the twentieth century, they began to regain power and influence. Wilma Mankiller assumed the post of chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in 1985, then was elected in 1987 and 1991. Joyce Dugan became chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 1995.

Part 1 presents the stories of the Cherokees as the shaman and storyteller Swimmer told them to James Mooney. These stories illuminate what it meant to be female and male within Cherokee culture and how Cherokees viewed the creator and their mythic world.

The book’s second part offers a glimpse into the first encounters Cherokees had with Europeans through the primary accounts of early explorers and travelers.

Part 3 illustrates how Cherokee women like Catharine Brown responded to the United States government’s civilization program and how they interacted with missionaries.

The Trail of Tears is the subject of Part 4. It presents the oral histories and speeches of Cherokee women as they opposed removal, were driven from their homes, and were forced to walk to Indian Territory.

No sooner had the Cherokee Nation rebuilt in Indian Territory than it confronted another crisis: the Civil War, the subject of Part 5. This section features the letters of Mary Stapler Ross and John Ross, the principal chief for decades, and Sarah and Stand Watie. The two couples, who lived through the Civil War on opposite sides, represent the fierce factionalism in the tribe that had existed since the removal crisis. Also included is Hannah Worcester Hicks, who wrote in her diary of the murder of her husband, Abijah, and her constant fear of robbers and marauders. Other Cherokee women’s oral histories illuminate different experiences of that tumultuous time.

Part 6, on allotment, assimilation, and struggles for sovereignty, gives insight into the lives of Cherokee women in the post–Civil War period, when they were dispossessed of their land once again and had to face an uncertain future. It presents the voices of students of the Cherokee Female Seminary as they confronted the challenges of assimilation.

The book’s final part focuses on modern Cherokee women who became educated leaders of the Cherokee Nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they began to reclaim the power and influence their female ancestors had traditionally possessed.

The fall of 2013 marks the 175th anniversary and commemoration of the Trail of Tears. Cherokees endured great suffering in the wars with Europeans, during their forced removal from their homeland, in the Civil War, and because of the policy of allotment. Like the Phoenix, the mythical bird that rose from the ashes, the tribe rose from despair to become a thriving nation of more than three hundred thousand in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and over thirteen thousand in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Tribal members have preserved their language, ceremonies, culture, and sovereignty.

For hundreds of years, the Cherokees celebrated the Green Corn Ceremony, generally in June or early July, when the first corn ripened. This ceremony affirmed the importance of women in the community and the need for men and women to live in balance. The ceremony honored Selu, the life-sustaining Corn Mother. The Green Corn Ceremony was the occasion when rebirth occurred and old grudges were laid aside. In some eras, crimes were even pardoned. As part of the purification, people fasted and went to the water to cleanse themselves. Forty-five days later, Cherokees celebrated the Ripe or Mature Green Corn Ceremony, which again featured the balance of female and male contributions to life. Cherokees still observe the Green Corn Ceremony and retain some of the original practices.

This book addresses a central question: What does Cherokee history look like when expressed by women’s voices and viewed through their eyes?

Gwendolyn Brooks, the gifted African-American poet, once told me that her work was about either celebration or lamentation. The voices of Cherokee women reflect those themes. At times, their suffering, dispossession, and losses will lead readers to despair; however, their celebrations of Cherokee language, identity, traditions, stories, ceremonies, and sovereignty inspire hope. Images flood this landscape: Nancy Ward becoming a Beloved Woman by picking up a rifle and fighting as a warrior in the midst of battle … Rebecca Neugin being carried as a child on the Trail of Tears … Mary Stapler Ross seeing her beautiful Rose Cottage burned to the ground during the Civil War … Hannah Hicks watching as marauders steal all her food … Elizabeth Watts seeing raiders split open the beds, feathers scattering in the wind … girls at the Cherokee Female Seminary studying the same curriculum as the women at Mount Holyoke … Joyce Dugan and Wilma Mankiller becoming the first female chiefs of the Cherokee Nation … men and women celebrating the Green Corn Ceremony and dancing at the Stomp dance ground.

The coals the Cherokees carried to Indian Territory and to North Carolina still glow with fire.

ENDNOTES

¹ William Shorey Coodey to John Howard Payne, John Howard Payne Papers, Edward E. Ayer Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, quoted in Samuel Carter III, Cherokee Sunset (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 250.

² Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), 47–48. See also Jack Frederick Kilpatrick, An Etymological Note on the Tribal Name of the Cherokee and Certain Place and Proper Names Derived from Cherokee, Journal of the Graduate Research Center, no. 30 (1962), 37–41. On April 16–18, 2009, at the Red Clay Historic Area in southern Bradley County, Tennessee, the Eastern and Western Cherokees met in a joint tribal session for the second time in 171 years. In 1951, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians had persuaded the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to allow it to ignite a fire from the Eternal Flame. It carried this flame back to North Carolina and established a second Eternal Flame. In April 1984, a torch was ignited from the North Carolina flame and relayed by runners back to Red Clay to light a third Eternal Flame. Several resolutions were read and adopted by the joint council. See Curtis Lipps, Herald-News, Rhea County, Tenn., Wed., Apr. 22, 2009.

Many Native Americans felt utterly violated and compromised. It seemed as if the spiritual and social tapestry they had created for centuries was unraveling. Everything lost that sacred balance. And ever since, we have been striving to return to the harmony we once had. It has been a difficult task. The odds against us have been formidable. But despite everything that has happened to us we have never given up and will never give up. There is an old Cherokee prophecy which instructs us that as long as the Cherokees continue traditional dances, the world will remain as it is, but when the dances stop, the world will come to an end. Everyone should hope that the Cherokees will continue to dance.

Wilma Mankiller

Swimmer/A´yûñ inĭ taken by James Mooney in 1888

COURTESY OF NATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHIVES, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION (GN 01008)

Part 1

STORIES OF THE CHEROKEES

The following stories about how the world was made and what it means to be female or male have been told in the Cherokee Nation for hundreds of years. A late-nineteenth-century Cherokee shaman named Swimmer told these versions to James Mooney (1861–1921), who worked for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. He began his research in 1887 and lived with the Cherokees for several years. Mooney gained the trust of Swimmer, who revealed sacred knowledge about healing and medicine. Swimmer also told him Cherokee stories of ancient origins. Mooney published three works on the Cherokees that are some of the finest ever written on their culture.

The first story, How the World Was Made, is the creation story. It explains why a woman has only one child in a year, and also how animals, plants, and humans are related.

The second story, The First Fire, tells how the humble Water Spider spun a thread from her own body and brought fire to the people by weaving a tusti—the Cherokee word for bowl, sometimes connoting a small bowl—and carrying a live coal back in it. Like Prometheus in the Greek myth, the Water Spider is the fire bringer to humans.

The third story, Kana’tĭ and Selu, tells of the first man and woman. It emphasizes Selu’s sacrifice of her life and her gift of corn. The story of her sons, the Thunder Boys, explains why Cherokees do not live in a perfect world. The boys introduce uncertainty into an ordered world by breaking rules. The story teaches that if the people show respect and gratitude and do not break taboos, the blessings of the Corn Mother might return. In contrast to a patriarchal religious system in which deities are male and women are considered subordinate to men, Cherokees believed in female and male supernatural beings. Ceremonies, rituals, warfare, and sports helped teach who they were and where they came from.

The stories about Spear-finger and Stone Coat (or Dressed in Stone) reveal a fear of women’s terrifying and destructive powers. In addition to the powerful images of Selu and the sun as female, women’s strength is evident in the story of Nûñ’yunu’wĭ (Stone Coat). Menstrual blood was believed to be dangerously powerful, as demonstrated by Stone Coat, who is killed by the sight of seven menstruating women. Women mysteriously bled each month without dying. Cherokee women’s power derived from their ability to give and sustain life, especially through farming. However, blood was believed to be the ultimate symbol of that power. War women gained power through shedding blood and taking life in times of conflict. Selu’s blood was shed as she sacrificed her life and gave the gift of corn. Clan membership was determined through the mother’s bloodline. In the female version of the Stone Coat story, Spear-finger, U’tlûñ’tă, has the ability to change herself into any shape; she is also covered with a stone coat. Spear-finger represents a female monster that takes life.

The following stories teach that the relationships between men and women and their roles must be in balance for a community to flourish. They also identify femaleness with menstruation, childbirth, motherhood, blood, the sun, clan, corn, and agriculture. Masculinity is associated with warfare, hunting, animals, water, fatherhood, the moon, and ball play.

The earth is a great island floating in a sea of water, and suspended at each of the four cardinal points by a cord hanging down from the sky vault, which is of solid rock. When the world grows old and worn out, the people will die and the cords will break and let the earth sink down into the ocean, and all will be water again. The Indians are afraid of this.

When all was water, the animals were above in Gălûñ’lătĭ, beyond the arch; but it was very much crowded, and they were wanting more room. They wondered what was below the water, and at last Dâyuni’sĭ, Beaver’s Grandchild, the little Water-beetle, offered to go and see if it could learn. It darted in every direction over the surface of the water, but could find no firm place to rest. Then it dived to the bottom and came up with some soft mud, which began to grow and spread on every side until it became the island which we call the earth. It was afterward fastened to the sky with four cords, but no one remembers who did this.

At first the earth was flat and very soft and wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry, but they found no place to alight and came back again to Gălûñ’lătĭ. At last it seemed to be time, and they sent out the Buzzard and told him to go and make ready for them. This was the Great Buzzard, the father of all the buzzards we see now. He flew all over the earth, low down near the ground, and it was still soft. When he reached the Cherokee country, he was very tired, and his wings began to flap and strike the ground, and wherever they struck the earth there was a valley, and where they turned up again there was a mountain. When the animals above saw this, they were afraid that the whole world would be mountains, so they called him back, but the Cherokee country remains full of mountains to this day.

When the earth was dry and the animals came down, it was still dark, so they got the sun and set it in a track to go every day across the island from east to west, just overhead. It was too hot this way, and Tsiska’gĭlĭ, the Red Crawfish, had his shell scorched a bright red, so that his meat was spoiled; and the Cherokee do not eat it. The conjurers put the sun another hand-breadth higher in the air, but it was still too hot. They raised it another time, and another, until it was seven hand-breadths high and just under the sky arch. Then it was right, and they left it so. This is why the conjurers call the highest place Gûlkwâ’gine Di’gălûñ’lătiyûñ’, the seventh height, because it is seven hand-breadths above the earth. Every day the sun goes along under this arch, and returns at night on the upper side to the starting place.

There is another world under this, and it is like ours in everything—animals, plants, and people—save that the seasons are different. The streams that come down from the mountains are the trails by which we reach this underworld, and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underground people for a guide. We know that the seasons in the underworld are different from ours, because the water in the springs is always warmer in winter and cooler in the summer than the outer air.

When the animals and plants were first made—we do not know by whom—they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights, just as young men now fast and keep awake when they pray to their medicine. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and