Tsalagi (Cherokee)

The Cherokee lived in the Southern Piedmont and central river valleys of the interior South at the time of first contact. Their territory encompassed most of what is now Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as large portions of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina almost to the sea, Georgia, and Alabama. They traded both to the Atlantic coastal regions and far out into the Central Mississippi Valley and onto the Great Plains.

Their homes were log or plank cabins in small agricultural villages for the most part, with larger ceremonial sites in central locations. Although they were a farming people, they also depended on hunting and fishing, as well as foraging for other natural foods, medicinal herbs, and other products of the wild.

The murderous genocidal policies of the Americans, combined with their general inclination toward duplicity and treachery, and assisted by the diseases they brought with them, devastated all the Indian tribes. Although the Cherokee were hard hit, they were by no means worst off. Many tribal peoples were eliminated entirely. In the popular parlance and homespun philosophy of the time, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

This quaint phrase informed most of the official decisions of the new American nation and ranks with the Nazi so-called Final Solution as among the most succinct expressions of institutionalized hatred and intolerance ever spoken by any people in modern times. This prototypical ethnic cleansing is not much mentioned in US school and history books, but until it is fully acknowledged and both restitution and atonement made, it will likely haunt the US collective unconscious along with the brutal enslavement of African tribal peoples when the ready supply of indigenous slaves was eliminated.

Indeed, the most surprising element of the facile repression of American guilt and the denial of any culpability is the sentimentalized variations on White Man's Burden and the bathetic Anglo-American lamentations over the "inevitable" decline and extinction of American Indians matched symmetrically with the depiction of African slaves as childlike creatures in need of white "guidance." A more self-serving hypocrisy is hard to imagine.

The Tsali Tsalagi Fonts

Lee Anne's re-drafting of the original Cherokee fonts used to print documents in the Cherokee language. Cherokee uses a syllabary invented by Sequoyah (Sikwoya). Oral tradition holds that the ancient Cherokee had a written language before contact with the white invaders but all traces of it were lost by the time of Sequoyah's invention. Within a few years, the Cherokee had a literacy rate of more than 95% at a time when the white population was ignorant, unwashed, and illiterate by default.
A syllabary is not an alphabet, as are used in all Western European languages, but an indication of actual syllabic sounds like the hirigana and katakana characters of Japanese. How Sequoyah was able to independently create his writing system without any pre-existing model is a mystery to this day. Perhaps he drew on the Cherokee oral tradition.
The fonts themselves are named after Tsali, a martyr of the Trail of Tears, and are drawn in a modern serif geometry. The directory contains four formats, all of which should be recognizable by their names if you can use them.
The tree, Sequoiadendron giganteum (the Giant Sequoia, formerly Sequoia gigantea), was named in Sequoya's honor.

Cherokee Information and Resources

Links to Cherokee Information and Resources.

Cherokee Legal Documents

Important documents relating to Cherokee peoples.

History of the Cherokee

A Cherokee historical page with extensive links to other sites with quite a bit of documentation.

Ani Gasaguali

An intertribal organization of Cherokee peoples.

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma

The home page of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, often thought by outsiders to be the only Cherokees left alive. They are descendents of the survivors of the Trail of Tears and many of the Old Settlers, those who emigrated to the West, primarily lands claimed by Spain in what is now Missouri and Arkansas, before the forced removal to Indian Territory, which is now the state of Oklahoma and portions o surrounding states.
In fact, there were many bands of Cherokee who either remained behind or fled the invaders and settled as far away as the Rocky Mountains, Texas, and Mexico. Many Cherokee peoples assimilated or passed for white in the society the conquerors.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina

The Eastern Band of Cherokee eluded the search parties who forced many of the Cherokee people off their land and sent them on a forced march along what became known as the Trail of Tears. There is another link at http://www.charweb.org/neighbors/na/cherokee.htm which also contains links to sites of general Cherokee interest.

Tsalagiyi Nvdagi, the Texas Cherokee

The Texas Cherokee are not Federally recognized, but are the remnants of Cherokee peoples in Texas who remained behind in hiding when the Texans tried to drive them out and murdered many members of the Tribe despite of treaty obligations.

The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma

A group of Cherokee people who are not affiliated with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

The Cherokee Indians of South Carolina

Another of the many bands of Cherokee who remained behind at the time of the Trail of Tears.

The Western Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri

Yet another band of holdouts who refused to go where the Federal forces ordered them to go.

The Southern Cherokee Nation

Another group of Cherokee people, primarily of mixed ancestry, and not currently Federally recognized.

The Cherokee of Georgia

And yet more Cherokee peoples....

Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama

One of the many bands of Cherokee who remained behind at the time of the Trail of Tears.