47 Fun Facts About Cherokee Nation

Which institution of higher education has its main campus in Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital?

Northeastern State grew out of the Cherokee Female Seminary: after statehood, Oklahoma bought the tribe's school building in 1909 to train teachers.

Which US state is home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians?

North Carolina is home to the Eastern Band, whose ancestors stayed behind, some hiding in the mountains, when most Cherokee were driven west in 1838.

Which Oklahoma city lies partly inside the Cherokee Nation's reservation?

Tulsa lies partly inside the reservation, and after courts affirmed it in 2021 the tribe's own court took on hundreds of criminal cases the state once handled.

Which 2020 Supreme Court ruling on the Muscogee led courts to affirm the Cherokee reservation was never disestablished?

McGirt v. Oklahoma first led state courts to vacate old convictions, but in 2021 Oklahoma's top criminal court refused to apply it to convictions already final.

The Cherokee Nation's newspaper, the first published by Native Americans in the US, is named after which mythical bird?

The phoenix named a weekly printed in English and Cherokee, and it stopped in 1834 when the US government failed to pay the tribe's annuity.

Who was the first person to learn Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary?

His young daughter learned it first and helped him prove it to Cherokee leaders; within a few years most Cherokee could read and write in the new script.

Which humorist, born a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in 1879, died in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska?

Will Rogers first found fame with a rope-twirling act that led to the Ziegfeld Follies, long before his fatal flight with aviator Wiley Post.

What did Indian Territory's leaders propose at the 1905 Sequoyah Convention?

A separate state, to be called Sequoyah, won a territorial vote in 1905, but Congress refused to act, and Indian Territory joined Oklahoma as one state in 1907.

To which country did Sequoyah travel late in life seeking Cherokees who had migrated there?

Mexico is where Sequoyah died on that search, by most accounts in 1843, and he never returned to Indian Territory.

The Cherokee language belongs to which language family?

Iroquoian links Cherokee to northern languages, and an old Cherokee migration story tells of the people journeying south from the far north.

After the Cherokee adopted a written constitution in 1827, what did Georgia's legislature do?

Declared Cherokee laws void: Georgia extended its own laws over Cherokee land, and later handed that land out to white Georgians by lottery.

Which clan did a Cherokee man's child by a white woman traditionally belong to?

No clan at all: clan membership came through the mother, so such children were born outside the clans, and only an 1825 law made them part of the tribe.

Nanyehi, known in English as Nancy Ward, held which honoured title among the 18th-century Cherokee?

Beloved Woman was the title she won at the Battle of Taliwa by taking her fatally wounded husband's place in the fight, and it gave her a voice on the council of chiefs.

The Cherokee capital New Echota, used until removal, was named in honour of what?

Chota, an old Overhill settlement once seen as the Cherokee capital, gave New Echota its name, and New Echota in turn named the 1835 treaty that ceded the homeland.

The discovery of what near Dahlonega in the late 1820s drew thousands of prospectors onto Cherokee land in Georgia?

Gold drew so many miners that the rush was called the Great Intrusion even at the time, and it increased the pressure to remove the Cherokee.

Which US president signed the Indian Removal Act into law on 28 May 1830?

Andrew Jackson had fought alongside Cherokee warriors against the Red Sticks in 1813-14, yet as president he made removing eastern tribes a national objective.

What phrase did Chief Justice Marshall use for the Cherokee polity in the 1831 case against Georgia?

Domestic dependent nation was Marshall's label, and because the Cherokee Nation was not a 'foreign state', the court said it could not bring its case against Georgia there.

In 1832 the Supreme Court vacated missionary Samuel Worcester's conviction for what?

Living on Cherokee land without a state licence earned Worcester four years of hard labour, and Georgia ignored the Supreme Court until he accepted a pardon in 1833.

In 1893, how was the Cherokee Outlet, land the US had bought from the Cherokee Nation, opened to settlers?

By a land run: settlers raced across the Outlet to stake claims, yet most of those who took part never secured one.

Which US general commanded the 1838 roundup of Cherokee people for removal to Indian Territory?

Winfield Scott told his troops to show 'every possible kindness', yet the roundup into stockades proved harrowing, and an estimated 4,000 Cherokee died during removal.

Which Treaty Party leader and newspaper editor was killed in 1839 for signing away tribal land?

Elias Boudinot had edited the nation's newspaper until 1832, when his pro-removal views cost him the job three years before he signed the treaty.

Major Ridge was assassinated in 1839 by members of which group?

The Ross faction men who killed him held that giving up communal land was a capital crime, and Major Ridge had signed away the homeland in 1835.

In 2022, the US Mint honoured former Cherokee Nation chief Wilma Mankiller on which coin?

The quarter honours a chief whose family was moved from Oklahoma to California under a federal relocation program when she was a girl.

The National Holiday, held each Labor Day weekend, celebrates the signing of what on 6 September 1839?

The reunited tribe's founding charter was its 1839 constitution, binding Cherokees who had moved west years earlier to those driven out on the Trail of Tears.

Stand Watie, a Cherokee brigadier, holds what distinction from the American Civil War?

Last Confederate general to surrender, Stand Watie gave up on 23 June 1865, a year after his cavalry captured a Union steamboat.

The 1866 treaty with the US required the Cherokee Nation to grant its freedmen what?

Tribal citizenship, with all the rights of native Cherokees, went to freedmen, and the same treaty let the US settle other tribes on Cherokee land.

Which 1898 law extended allotment to the Five Tribes and broke up their governments before Oklahoma statehood?

The Curtis Act, which ended tribal courts, was written by Charles Curtis, a Kansas congressman of Kaw descent who later became US vice president.

From 1919 the US appointed Cherokee chiefs for terms so brief the practice earned what nickname?

Chief for a Day fit the brief federal appointees, but one of them, J. B. Milam, appointed in 1941, served until his death in 1949 and set out to rebuild the tribal government.

William Wayne Keeler, chief of the Cherokee Nation, was also president of which oil company?

Phillips Petroleum's future chief executive was first appointed chief by President Truman in 1949, then in 1971 became the tribe's first elected chief in decades.

Wilma Mankiller, first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee, was later awarded which national honour?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom came in 1998; she had first become principal chief in 1985, when her predecessor left to run the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

What does the surname Mankiller, Asgaya-dihi in Cherokee, refer to?

It is comparable to a captain or major, or a shaman able to avenge wrongs by spiritual means; schoolmates teased her about it.

Which Cherokee actor, who played the Huron warrior Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, received an honorary Oscar in 2019?

Wes Studi, a Vietnam veteran who took up acting after he came home, became the first Native American actor to receive an Oscar.

To be a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a person needs a direct ancestor listed on what?

The Dawes Rolls were drawn up so the US could break communal land into individual allotments, yet they still decide who can be a Cherokee Nation citizen.

In February 1863, during the Civil War, what did the Cherokee National Council vote to do?

Abolish slavery: the 1866 treaty with the US later recorded that vote and barred former slaveholders from ever being paid for the people they had freed.

In a 2021 ruling on Freedmen descendants, which two words did the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court strike from its constitution?

By blood had been used to shut Freedmen descendants out of full rights, and striking it let them run for tribal office.

Same-sex marriage was legalised in the Cherokee Nation in December 2016 by what means?

An opinion by the tribal attorney general, Todd Hembree, held that the tribe's 2004 ban on same-sex marriage violated the Cherokee constitution.

Who became Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 2019?

Chuck Hoskin Jr. was re-elected in 2023, and in 2021 he called on Jeep to stop using the Cherokee name for its SUV.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee descends mainly from Cherokee who avoided removal along which river?

The Oconaluftee Cherokee were allowed to stay under earlier treaties, and Chief Yonaguska's adopted white son, William Holland Thomas, helped them hold on to land.

The word Keetoowah, in the name of the United Keetoowah Band, refers to what?

An ancient mother town and mound, Kituwa lies in the old eastern homeland, and the Eastern Band bought the site back in 1996.

The Cherokee Female Seminary in Tahlequah, opened in 1851, was modelled on which Massachusetts college?

Mount Holyoke College alumnae were its first two teachers, and after fire destroyed the first seminary building, it was rebuilt near Tahlequah.

The 1906 Five Tribes Act was expected to end the tribes, but what did one clause do?

Kept tribal nations in existence: that clause later helped the Supreme Court rule in 2020 that a reservation in Oklahoma had never been disestablished.

Which people joined the Cherokee in the 18th century and, like Cherokee Freedmen, have descendants in today's tribe?

The Natchez took refuge among the Cherokee and other nations after wars with the French, and Natchez descendants are enrolled in the Cherokee Nation today.

The Cherokee removal of 1838 came after which other Southeastern peoples had already been forced west?

The Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw had already been forced west, while many Seminole in Florida were still fighting the US Army to avoid removal.

In 2019, Kimberly Teehee was appointed the Cherokee Nation's first-ever delegate to which body?

The U.S. House of Representatives delegate was promised in the 1835 treaty that led to removal, yet the post went unfilled until 2019.

In the 1880s, the Cherokee Nation leased its western Cherokee Outlet to which group?

A cattlemen's association rented the Outlet for grazing until Congress cancelled the lease and pushed the tribe to sell the land to the government.

The Durbin Feeling Language Center in Tahlequah, announced in 2020, is housed in a converted what?

The plan puts all of the tribe's language programmes under one roof, with five nearby houses for native speakers.

Nancy Ward, the 18th-century Cherokee leader, is credited with bringing which practice into the Cherokee economy?

Dairy farming is the credit, and she also spared a captured settler, Lydia Bean, from execution and cared for her in her own home.