Original subtitles

I have a great deal of interest in history. I don't think that everyday

Americans can

even begin to understand our contemporary issues without putting them

historical context.

A lot of people have this notion that Indians live in teepee, and there were

feathers, and all of them were buffalo robes.

Everything that seemed to portray Indians, that's not true of our people.

There's no such thing as dancing with wolves in the southeast.

Dancing with Dobermans or whatever else.

Now, the metaphor dancing with alligators doesn't work in the

Dancing with wolves is only a recreation of last of the Mohicans. The same

savage and noble savage are present there.

You know, to a large extent, the concept of the savage is used to justify the

taking of the land.

From the Plains Indian Wars, you get spectacles of Indians, and that was

what became part of American consciousness about Indians.

The experiences of the five tribes in the Southeast were not part of that

history at all.

A lot of history about tribes has been written by soldiers or by ministers or

people external to the communities, and so you don't get the other side.

We must begin to develop our own material or even our own

movies, our own videos, whatever is necessary to educate our people.

We are the Choctaw, the Muskogee Creek,

the Seminole, the Chickasaw,

and the Cherokee.

We are the children of the mound builders and heirs to a civilization

followed a drifting river trade route from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to

Canada.

The town of Tahlequah in northeastern Oklahoma.

has only a recent place in our history.

Born from the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but it is a symbol of our survival.

Today it is the capital of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, a fitting place for

representatives of our tribes to come together to discuss our histories and

future.

I'd like to talk about contemporary issues because I don't want to have

think we're frozen in time 200 years ago.

And I don't like that image. People can deal with us if we're in museums, but

they can't deal with us today.

Wilma Mankiller is the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

It's always been my opinion that the true history of American Indians has

been told.

One reason I believe is the dynamic, it changes.

Our people have always been adaptive to change, and through this process it's

very difficult to capture.

The true history of our people.

Ken York lives on Choctaw tribal land in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

He teaches the Choctaw language at Mississippi State University.

I think histories, if they are to be representative, have to develop. It's a

record of people who didn't go away, that were still there and living

to values and traditions that have always been there forever.

Alan Cook.

is a Muscogee Creek historian from Holdenville, Oklahoma.

I think that if you wed a living historical account to a living culture,

then you're producing a narrative that makes sense to Indian people.

Gary Whitedear is a Choctaw artist and historian from Ada, Oklahoma.

In a sense, we're all consumers of history.

And we go to the history store and we buy a dozen eggs of history.

But when we get home and we open that carton, we find that there are only ten

eggs in there. And what happened to the story of the Cherokees, of other Indian

people? What happened to the stories of women? Where are those voices?

Sarah Parker is Cherokee Narragansett.

She is a professor of American Studies at the University of California at Santa

Cruz.

One of the things that we come up against so frequently is the idea that

Indian tribes, including peoples in the Southeast...

were nomadic, that they moved from place to place.

If you look at the history of southern Appalachia and Cherokee residency there,

there's records of people inhabiting that region back at least 10 ,000 years.

Imagine the deep cool of a primal forest.

We were there.

Imagine the wild rapids of a spring flood.

We were there.

Imagine a flock of a million passenger pigeons so large that it blackened the

sky. We were there.

Know this about the land.

It was not India, and it was definitely not empty.

We welcome the great floods of the Mississippi River to restore and deepen

agricultural lands each summer.

And with the wealth that nature provided, we built large cities, like

near modern -day St. Louis, a planned city of 10 ,000 built around 100

ceremonial and burial mounds.

All the Southeastern tribes, our old customs were to bury our people

in mounds, great mounds, and to also...

bury things with them.

We all go back to where we started. And our tradition tells us that we spend our

life starting on Mother Earth. We're born on Mother Earth. We pass on and

our bones are reinterred in Mother Earth.

And so this cycle of life is really like the cycle of the human spirit.

The mounds and relationship to the study of astronomy was such that the entrance

of the buildings would always face the east.

We call that Hashi Akucha, which is where the sun rises. And the rays, of

course, bring warmth.

The warmth of the rays hits Mother Earth, and plants, animals, and even

beings begin to grow. There are people in the South today, many of them wealthy

folks, doctors and lawyers and even politicians, who are in the dirty

of digging up our Indian people.

And the reason they're digging up our Indian people is because of the things

they were buried with, pots and projectile points, spear points, and so

There seems to be a growing black market for these items, so they are dug up and

they're being sold.

We believe that the Earth is our mother. And in order to recognize that, certain

people built mounds.

And they do this to recognize the mother.

During pregnancy, you see the mother change.

So in recognizing what we call Tik 'in Hashi, the Women's Month,

there were times when they built mounds, and they were small mounds.

It was more of a recognition of the female rather than burial or ceremonial.

For hundreds of years, scientists refused to believe that these great

could have been built by Indians.

They attributed the mounds to Viking explorers, to the lost tribes of Israel,

even to the notion that our country had once been populated by a race of

supermen. white men who built the mounds before they founded the great

civilizations of Mexico.

Scientists finally decided that the mounds had been engineered by Native

Americans, but that the Mississippian culture had collapsed and disappeared in

the 1500s.

But we have always known that these were our relations.

Our oral histories tie us to the mound builders and beyond.

The migration to where we are now.

perhaps to thousands of years, I'm not sure.

But it took a long time for our people to get here.

Every time they would make a stop, they would put the sacred pole in the ground.

But the next day, as an example, this pole would lean towards the direction

people are supposed to go. The pole would give them direction, and the

would march again.

And people brought everything with them, including the bones of their ancestors.

And the feeling, the understanding that I get from that is that they would never

return to their place of origin as far as the migration is concerned.

When they reached what we now know as the River, they planted a pole in the

ground.

It's our understanding that a thorn came, a biblical proportion.

And yet, the next day, this pole stood straight up.

And since that time, we've always been where we are today, our ancestral home

land in Mississippi.

Our people, when they built the mound, they put the sacred pole down and the

spirit gave them the song. And as long as they sing the song, the sacred pole

would always stand straight towards the heaven.

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We tattooed our bodies and etched our art into copper and seashell ornaments.

We celebrated the relationship of our clans to native animals in beautifully

carved domes.

We played a spectacular game of stickball on huge fields near our

grounds, the first American baseball.

On the eve of European exploration, we lived in stable villages, in cane and

plaster or log homes.

We had peace communities.

We held a wide expanse of land in common with many tribes for hunting and

fishing.

And this the Europeans never understood.

From the beginning, they could not see what was here and did not understand

our sense of place did not end at our porch steps.

They brought their God and their belief in property and their dog of war.

Bartolome de las Casas kept a diary when Hernando de Soto's expedition passed

through the southeast in 1539.

The Christians, with their horses, swords, and spikes, began to carry out

massacres and strange cruelties against the Indians.

They attacked towns and spared neither children, the aged, nor pregnant women.

The people were fed to dogs, skewered, and burned alive.

All this is my own eye's witness.

The cries of so much spilled blood reach all the way to heaven.

The people who are descendants of the group that lived around Oritna Mobile

that they were treated very harshly by the Spaniards, almost immediately.

They were very demanding.

They wanted not only food and shelter and clothing, but also the women.

And, of course, did not go very well with the leadership at the time.

And you have to understand, one of the leaders in one of the villages was also

woman leader.

One of the chiefs that was mentioned in the chronicles and was highly respected

was Tuscaloosa, a black warrior.

He somehow knew that De Soto was here not in cause of friendship and peace.

He would send runners.

to other villages that they were going to visit.

And they prepared an attack, a surprise attack, on Hernando de Soto's

expedition.

The Choctaws did some damage. They injured a lot of Spaniards. Of course,

were a lot of Choctaws that died.

Afterwards, the Chickasaws took care of Hernando de Soto.

War stories often hide the more ruthless but less documented threats to our

survival.

The seduction of trade and the intermarriage of Indian women and white

turned our world upside down long before settlers stole our land.

The women, especially after about 1760, were

squawks. They were denied.

the position and the power and the autonomy that they held within their own

nations by these incoming whites who simply did not understand

a balance between male and female.

There were many women who struggled to retain their traditional power, even

after they moved into the white world.

But their lives have become a mix of myth and tragedy.

For generations, American schoolchildren have read the romanticized tale of

Pocahontas, daughter of a powerful chief of the Powhatan Confederacy, who

supposedly threw herself in front of the execution of English colonist John

Smith and pleaded with her father to spare his life.

John Smith wrote and rewrote his story many times, but no native account was

ever reported.

Almost no attention is paid to the role of Pocahontas as a diplomat.

who married the Virginia tobacco planter John Rolfe.

They traveled to England with a message of peace and cooperation on behalf of

her father.

She dressed like an English aristocrat and was embraced by the royal courts of

Europe, but she was not seduced by the wealth or glamour. She had every

intention of returning to the rolling hills of the Potomac with her husband

infant son.

But Pocahontas died of smallpox on the day she set sail for home.

She was only 22.

No one life is crisscrossed with the conflicting experiences of being an

woman in the colonial era like that of the Cherokee legend, Nanyayha, who we

know as Nancy Ward.

In the Cherokees' battle against the Creeks at Talawa in 1755, her husband

slain during that battle, and Ward picked up his gun and fought in his

apparently spurred the Cherokees on to victory.

Years later, she married a white settler, and when the Revolutionary War

out, she played an important role as peacekeeper between the colonists, the

British, and the Cherokee.

During a bitter cold winter, 1780 -1781, Ward fed and

clothed General Washington's troops who had gotten lost over yonder in the

forest. She had provided an awful lot of corn and other food to the settlers

over the years and was repaid for her kindnesses by having her

home and her town burned to the ground.

Like many Cherokee of her generation, Nancy Ward was trapped between two

cultures and often chose European ways.

She built a large corn and cotton plantation and was among the first of

successful Cherokee planters to own African slaves.

Ever since our contact with DeSoto, I think there's been a battle, a struggle

within the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee people, over whether we should totally

assimilate. and whether that was the best route for our people, or whether we

should partially assimilate, or whether we should retain our culture and sense

of who we are.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, a handful of families in each tribe

intermarried and traded comfortably with Europeans.

They abandoned tradition and were more comfortable speaking English than their

native languages.

They owned plantations and slaves and sent their children to school in Paris,

London, or Charleston.

In the upside -down history of the time, they emerged as leaders of our tribes

because they could speak English and were comfortable in the halls of

But in 1812, with tribal lands overrun by settlers, A movement for the defense

of land and culture caught fire among the thousands of Muskogee Creek who had

continued to live traditional lives.

Led by Red Eagle and Manawi, the movement came to be known as the Red

because of the crimson paint on their war clubs.

The Red Sticks banned the use of guns for hunting because the commercial

in Deer Heights had destroyed the native hunting grounds.

They also opposed slavery and sheltered runaway slaves from plantations

throughout the South.

They waged war on frontier settlements.

In the spring of 1814, General Andrew Jackson led an army against them at

Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama.

Using clubs and bows and arrows against Jackson's well -armed troops, they were

wiped out.

To count the dead Creeks, Jackson soldiers cut off their noses, collecting

pile of 557.

The Red Stick movement had been crushed.

The Muscogee Creek Nation was forced to open the last of its ancestral lands to

white settlement.

Over and over during the decades after the Revolution, our people moved west,

away from their oldest towns in search of peace.

Even though the leaders of the new United States repeatedly assured us that

homes were safe and that we had a sovereign claim to the land of our

Both Congress and the Supreme Court described the tribes of the Southeast as

distinct, independent political communities.

It may be regarded as certain that not a foot of land will ever be taken from

the Indians without their consent.

The sacredness of their rights is felt by all thinking persons in America.

Thomas Jefferson.

The Indians, wrote Secretary of War Henry Knox, being the prior occupants,

possess the right of soil.

It cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent or by right of

conquest in case of a just war.

But along the western edges of American settlement, a very different reality was

in the making.

As the Revolutionary War progressed, the Continental Army had no money. They

were absolutely flat broke.

They had no way to pay their soldiers.

So they promised recruits in the Continental Army portions of land.

Neither the new settlers nor the newly formed states cared for the lofty words

of the founding fathers.

They became a battering ram in our forests and inflamed the divisions

our people.

Into this world of turmoil, a great leader emerged, a fiery red star,

a Shawnee warrior born in the Ohio Valley, but comfortable in the

the Great Lakes.

Cherokee councils in Tennessee, or the Muskogee camps of the Red Sticks.

Tecumseh and his brother, known as the Prophet, traveled throughout our nations

at the beginning of the 19th century, arguing that the great forests and river

valleys were the common estate of all Native Americans, not any single tribe.

The way, the only way to stop this evil is for all red men to unite.

in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first and should

be now.

For it was never divided, but belongs to all.

No tribe has the right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers, who

demand all and will take no less.

Sell a country.

Why not sell the air, the clouds, the great sea, as well as the earth?

Tecumseh.

The last hope of a unified Indian nation collapsed when Tecumseh died in battle,

fighting the United States in the War of 1812.

Each of our tribes was left to face an expanding America alone.

One of my very favorite stories in Cherokee history is the time in 1811,

1812, around that time.

when a prophet supposedly came to the Cherokees and told the Cherokees that if

they didn't give up white ways and go back to the old Cherokee ways, that

they would die.

And of course, no one died.

And so that the people began to think that the prophet...

uh was you know not truthful he lost lost favor with the tribe what they

realize and i think what we realized from this distance is he was talking

death of the spirit rather than physical death

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This house was probably a very, very bad place to be on the morning of May

24th of 1838.

On that day, there was a knock at the front door, and as... The people who

in this home opened the door. They saw U .S. soldiers standing outside the front

door with guns pointed at them, saying, out, you, walk to a stockade, which had

been built just over the hill here.

And so with no time to take any of their possessions, any of their blankets, any

food, any of their personal mementos with them, they were marched out with

whatever they happened to have on at that moment and walked several miles to

stockade. Something you would put pigs in, cows in.

Jess Bushyhead's great -great -great -grandfather was one of those routed

day. The U .S.

Army commander gave specific orders that if the troops were to arrive at a home

like this and the children were home but the parents were out in the fields, to

take the children, kidnap the children, and that way they would force the

parents to come in.

The idea of forcing us from our homeland and removing us west of the Mississippi

River was not a new idea.

It had been simmering since before the Revolution.

But it was our land.

And we were, they told us, the civilized tribe.

The principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in the early 1830s and later was

man named John Roth.

He was 1 -8 Cherokee. He had blue eyes.

He was obviously very fluent in English. He owned a large plantation just south

of Chattanooga. John Roth very firmly believed in the American judicial

He looked at the founding documents and believed that the U .S. actually would,

you know...

pay attention to ideas about justice.

But Georgia also strongly opposed having the Cherokee Nation a sovereign

nation within the boundaries of what became the state of Georgia, which is

interesting because these states grew up around the Cherokee Nation and the

other southeastern tribes, and then they bitterly resented having a separate

sovereign entity within the state.

The southern states hated the fact that Indian nations had become a refuge for

runaway slaves, but at the root of their hostility was a lust for land.

The place where we're standing is the hilltop overlooking Rattlesnake Springs.

This is where, in the summer of 1838, the United States Army and the Georgia

troops involved in the Roundup collected...

what at one point amounted to almost 13 ,000 Cherokee. They were living out here

without any shelter, without any regular supplies of food.

There were horses, cows, dogs, chickens. It was just a big mess.

It was a concentration camp.

In and out of court for five years, John Roth and our lawyers were convinced

that our sovereignty would be upheld and a way would be found to stall the

removal policy.

Part of our tribal people, I think, sort of felt very strongly that we should

stay in the southeast and fight to the death for the right to remain in the

southeast. And part of our people felt that we should participate in removal

accept a removal policy and move on to Indian Territory.

The Cherokee leadership in Washington was sending letters and messages back,

don't worry, we're going to be able to stop this, we have friends in Congress,

we have friends in the U .S. Senate, we're going to be able to overturn this,

we'll be able to stop it and prevent the soldiers from doing it.

And then as dawn broke on May 24th of 1838, they found out the reality was

very, very different.

The Supreme Court finally ruled that we could not be forced from our lands.

But President Andrew Jackson simply turned his back on the court.

He had built his reputation as an Indian fighter and an advocate of forced

removal. He did not hesitate.

This is Blythe's Ferry in 1838. This is the way the Cherokees got across

the Tennessee River.

My great -great -great -grandfather was one of the conductors. There were 13

conductors, each one responsible for keeping alive 1 ,000 Cherokees.

In 1838, it was a wooden boat, steam -powered most probably. It was a little

smaller then, and they were able to cross in small groups, family by family,

person by person, wagon by wagon, horse by horse, sometimes almost sinking the

ferry with the weight of the oxes and the horses.

Their spirits were also sinking, too, because as they're crossing the river,

they're realizing that that is the Cherokee Nation, and they're leaving it

the last time.

They'll never see the homeland that they were born in again. They'll never see

the land where their fathers were buried.

And all they have to look forward ahead of them is an 800 -mile trek over

land to the Indian Territory.

this trip became known as the Trail of Tears. And so this ferry is the actual

beginning of the Trail of Tears.

By the time the last contingent of Cherokees arrived in Indian Territory in

1839, April of 1839, only one -fourth of our entire tribe had died, either while

being held on the stockades or during the removal itself.

And the net effect is that we ended up in Indian Territory, what is now

Oklahoma, with many people dead, with the tribes bitterly divided politically

over the issue of removal.

of all of our economic system, our social system, our cultural system,

everything we'd ever known had been left behind.

And so our people were devastated.

What has always amazed me, however, is how our people dealt with that, rather

than sitting around and wringing our hands over our situation.

By the mid -1840s, we began to rebuild again and rebuild our families, rebuild

our community, and rebuild a tribe and rebuild a nation here in Indian

Territory.

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Thank you.

We built the first towns in Oklahoma.

We revived our schools and newspapers.

We built new farms and began to thrive.

These were not our ancestral lands, but Andrew Jackson had promised.

that finally this land would be forever secured and guaranteed to us.

No political communities can be formed in that extensive region except those

which are established by the Indians themselves.

A barrier has thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of

our citizens.

Andrew Jackson.

People are shocked that in the 1840s that most of these tribes were running

own school systems, not only for men, but school systems for the education of

women.

And we were printing our own newspapers in Cherokee and in English.

And in the 1840s, there were still people in this country debating the

whether we had souls or whether we were human.

We should have known that there was no security on the prairie.

Eventually, the settlers caught up with us.

In 1887, just 50 years after the Trail of Tears, the most well -meaning

humanitarians and the most crass land speculators created an unholy alliance

steal our new nations and destroy, once and for all, our tribal identities.

It came to be known as the Allotment Act.

The idea was painfully simple.

Subdivide our tribal lands into small parcels of 40 to 160 acres and assign

parcel to each family.

Put the rest of the lands, tens of millions of acres which we held in

the market and open them up for white settlement.

The Oklahoma land rush was on.

In one brief, blinding flash, tribes throughout the United States lost their

land.

The Indian must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American

that he will say I instead of we, and this is mine instead of this is ours.

J .D .C. Atkins, Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

What happened to us at the turn of the century and the loss of land?

when our land was divided out and individual allotments had a profound,

irreversible effect on our people, more profound than the closing of schools or

courthouses or anything. When we stopped viewing land ownership in common and

viewing ourselves in relation to owning the land in common, it profoundly

altered our sense of community.

and our social structure, and so that had a tremendous impact on our people,

we can never go back.

The central component of the traditional order, the ceremonial ground, was not

protected from the allotment process, so that today you have probably at least

30 ceremonial grounds that are out there on private land generally.

Alone and spread out on the land, without citizenship or the protection of

treaties, we had almost no chance of survival.

In fact, the whole idea was to strip away our tribal identities and remold us

into small family farmers.

I remember my grandfather saying one time that the Indians wanted to maintain

the tribal domain, but to his perception, it was all lost anyway. It

have done any good. They were corrupted by a mentality.

that the white people finally, or the federal policies and the white social

pressures and so on, finally created in them that they took away this regard

that the Skokie people had for the group, and they were on the road to

individualists.

It must have been the case, even in our classic late Mississippian periods,

when we were all running around with copper air spools, supposedly, that

was... Probably only about 10%, a core group anyway, that you would call or

to call culture bearers, folks that really had the spirit of that

mindset that I'm talking about.

And the other 90%, I happen to believe, in varying ways, waiting for fast food

industry to hit America.

Today, when our elders die, we lose precious links to our past which can

be regained.

But we have a strong will to survive, and there are flickers of revival.

The landscape has been transformed, but it still lives in the memory of the

people, and it still inhabits our minds and I think our hearts, too. And

it's so important to understand how place resonates

in Native American cultures.

This is my grandfather's allotted land, and there's a lot of history here. I can

go sit on the porch and look across the road there and see flowers that bloomed

in my grandfather's yard.

And so history is not something distant from me. It's a part of who I am and a

part of my everyday life. Many of the great events in Cherokee history happen

not far from here.

And I can walk to the spring any day when I'm a little bit troubled by some

major event or problem. I can walk to the spring where my grandfather walked

to make turkey medicine or where I walked to when I was a child to gather

for household use.

And so there's a lot of history about this place. I'm very tied to this land

to this place. It's very much who I am.

All the songs and dances in Oklahoma that had been put to sleep in my general

area, called put to sleep, for 30 or 35 years started coming back.

The Choctaw songs and Chickasaw songs and so forth, for a long time they had

gone away or gone underground because of religious persecution.

So we started hearing these songs again and seeing these dances again as they

started coming out.

I kept an ear out for these things and got to a point to where now people rely

on me to an extent to know those songs and know those dances.

What they call, I guess in English, like a chanter to an extent that I'm able to

help carry these things on.

A lot of our Southeastern dances, too, you will notice.

There's a locking of arms and elbows, a holding of hands.

Our people dance as a group together.

That community of spirit, that communalism, that desire to be part of a

whole, taking your identity and cues from your traditional

community.

that's very much in evidence in our songs and dances, and even in our

There's been a recent interest in revival of our stickball games.

The settlers, when they first came, thought that the game was too brutal,

course people died in those games, so the missionaries especially tried to...

Get the Choctaws from playing the game. This is an Indian form of baseball.

This thing right here.

This is our form of baseball.

You know, they say baseball is an American sport. This is our form.

lot of other tribes still playing this game.

In the southeast, all these tribes have this game.

And Cherokee people and Chickasaw people and Creek and Seminole and Choctaw, we

all have this in common.

Once you play it one time, you get hooked on it. I mean, I love this game.

Thank you.

I am absolutely convinced that we've survived because we've managed to hang

to language and we've managed to hang on to ceremonies that we've had since the

beginning of time.

What we need to do to affirm ourselves as Native people is to take some of the

values, the values of interdependence.

caring for other people, even though it's hard to do that in a society that

just care about yourself.

Take care of yourself, build your own house, and don't worry about anybody

Take the old value of interdependence or the values of making sure that

spirituality and the truest sense of the word is incorporated into every aspect

of your life.

And I think it's that spirit that the only thing we really have to rely on has

been handed to us like a live and precious coal that each generation has

that decision. Do they want to blow on that coal and keep it alive, or do they

want to throw it away?

To me, and it's not just the Southeast, but all Indian culture, but maybe using

that metaphor for the Southeast as a fire, our cultures, our languages, our

histories. It's like a big ceremonial fire that was kicked and stomped and

scattered.

And then this 200, 300 year night followed that. But out in the darkness,

see these coals glowing.

And I think our role in our generation, whether it's in tribal government or

wherever we find ourselves, and Chickasaw people, Cherokee people, Creek

Seminole people, Choctaw people, is to be coal gatherers, to gather those coals

back up together and assemble them again at one point.

And breathe on them again that we might be able to spark a flame around which we

might warm ourselves.

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