Removal and the Cherokee Nation

This chapter provides an overview of removal-era Cherokee history. It recounts the rise of the Indian removal policy and the state of Georgia's campaign to compel the Cherokee Nation to negotiate a removal treaty. It describes Cherokee resistance to removal and the experience of the "Trail of Tears." It also offers a brief narrative of Cherokee Nation history after removal, while explaining the emergence of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The chapter ends by describing several ways in which Cherokees and non-Indians employed the memory of removal in writings from the late nineteenth century. These writings established themes later broadcast by twentieth century commemorations.

Epilogue

In 2012, small white signs began appearing next to monuments and roadside markers related to Cherokee history in western North Carolina and southeastern Tennessee. In red letters, printed in both the Cherokee syllabary and English, they stated simply, “we are still here.” I first noticed one of the signs on my commute to work. It showed up one day next to a North Carolina roadside marker indicating the boundary of Cherokee territory established by a land cession in 1802. The state marker was a typical colonial monument. It commemorated the transfer of territory from an indigenous people to the new settler nation, invoking Cherokees in order to account for their erasure. The new sign, however, deftly reworked the old, reminding passersby that this place is still Cherokee ground and that the Cherokee people remain present....

The National Trail

In the early 1980s, the National Park Service began exploring the idea of creating a national trail dedicated to Cherokee removal. The planning and designation of this national trail became a catalyst for a variety of public history projects across the South. While the Park Service, itself, devoted scant resources to the initiative, the national trail became a framework in which local groups of commemorators pursued dozens of public history ideas. This final chapter describes the creation of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, paying particular attention to the ways in which the federal project influenced public memory in local communities. The national trail idea led local commemorators to emphasize their communities' Cherokee history, even when that Cherokee history was quite negligible. This chapter examines the expansion of removal commemoration since the 1980s as an expression of a contemporary American obsession with issues of history and memory. It also places the national trail in the context of recent "history wars," public debates over the interpretation of the American past.

The Tourists

In the 1920s and 30s, tourism in southern Appalachia created a new public awareness of the region's Cherokee history. With the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), the Cherokee community in Western North Carolina became a significant tourist destination, and this development encouraged promoters to work the Cherokees more thoroughly into their conceptions of the region's past. Tourist literature and performances began to highlight certain Cherokee historical episodes, among them the story of removal. This chapter traces the Cherokee community's growing involvement in the regional tourism economy during the interwar period, while examining mountain tourism's representations of Cherokee history. It describes the roles played by Cherokee history in promotions for the GSMNP, before closely analysing two particular commemorations: a campaign in Knoxville, Tennessee, to erect a monument to Cherokee removal and a pageant mounted by the Eastern Band of Cherokees to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the tribe's removal treaty.

‘Have the Scotch no Claim upon the Cherokees?’ Scots, Indians and Scots Indians in the American South

This chapter traces intermarriages between Scots and Indians and the families they established in the matrilineal indigenous societies of the American Southeast. It examines the roles played by Scots in the deerskin trade and in the British Indian department, and by their children in Creek and Cherokee history. It reconstructs the historic connections between Scots and Cherokees that endured after the Cherokees were forced west by US policies of Indian removal.