The Cherokees, Sequoyah and the Trail of Tears

One of Chad Berry’s early slides during his Feb. 8 talk on Appalachia and its people acknowledged that Berea College, like East Tennessee, is located on lands originally occupied by what is now the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians and two other large Native American tribes: the Shawnee and the Yuchi.

The Berea College administrator and history professor spoke about Sequoyah (1770-1843), the Cherokee Indian born in Madisonville, Tennessee in Monroe County. He said Seqouoyah and other Cherokees heard federal officials call them savages because they had no written language, no private property and no political system. So, Sequoyah created a Cherokee syllabary, enabling the Indian tribe to eventually publish the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper in both Cherokee and English.

The Cherokees created a private property system that differed from their traditional view of land. After examining the U.S. Constitution, they created their own constitution that is even more democratic. Even so, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that targeted the Five Civilized Tribes in the Southeast, including the Cherokees.

The passage of the act was motivated by the discovery of gold in the Southeast, Berry said. In addition, according to Wikipedia, an increasing number of white settlers wanted Indian-occupied land cleared so they could use it to grow cotton. Except for the Cherokees who hid in the Smoky Mountains, some 100,000 Indians in the Southeast were forced to march to Oklahoma in the 1830s and 1840s. Some 15,000 died from starvation, disease and exposure during the difficult “Trail of Tears” journey.

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: The Cherokees, Sequoyah and the Trail of Tears