This volume collects most of the writings published by the accomplished Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot, founding editor of the "Cherokee Phoenix". Mentions: Moravians, Spring Place, GA and missions.
When nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold, from a prominent white family in Cornwall, Connecticut, announced in 1825 her intention to marry a Cherokee man, her shocked family initiated a spirited correspondence debating her decision to marry an Indian. Eventually, Gold's family members reconciled themselves to her wishes, and she married Elias Boudinot in 1826. After the marriage, she returned with Boudinot to the Cherokee Nation, where he went on to become a controversial political figure and editor of the first Native American newspaper. Providing rare firsthand documentation of race relations in the early nineteenth-century United States, this volume collects the Gold family correspondence during the engagement period as well as letters the young couple sent to the family describing their experiences in New Echota (capital of the Cherokee Nation) during the years prior to the Cherokee Removal. In an introduction providing historical and social contexts, Theresa Strouth Gaul offers a literary reading of the correspondence, highlighting the value of the epistolary form and the gender and racial dynamics of the exchange. As Gaul demonstrates, the correspondence provides a factual accompaniment to the many fictionalized accounts of contacts between Native Americans and Euroamericans and supports an increasing recognition that letters form an important category of literature.
Chronicles the rise of the Cherokee Nation and its rapid decline, focusing on the Ridge-Watie family and their experiences during the Cherokee removal.
Red Clay, 1835 envelops students in the treaty negotiations between the Cherokee National Council and representatives of the United States at Red Clay, Tennessee. As pressure mounts on the Cherokee to accept treaty terms, students must confront issues such as nationhood, westward expansion, and culture change. This game book includes vital materials on the game's historical background, rules, procedures, and assignments, as well as core texts by figures such as Andrew Jackson, John Ross, and Elias Boudinot.
“He is wise; he has something to say. Let us call him ‘A-tse-nu-sti,’ the messenger.” This is the story of Reverend Samuel Austin Worcester (1798-1859), “messenger” and missionary to the Cherokees from 1825 to 1859 under the auspices of the American Board of Foreign Missions (Congregational). One of Worcester’s earliest accomplishments was to set Sequoyah’s alphabet in type so that he and Elias Boudinot could print the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix. After removal to Indian Territory, he helped establish the Cherokee Advocate, edited by William Ross, and issued almanacs, gospels, hymnals, bibles, and other books in the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw languages. He served the Cherokee in numerous roles, including those of preacher, teacher, postmaster, legal advisor, doctor, and organizer of temperance societies. His story is the Cherokee story, and in the foreword to this new edition, William L. Anderson discusses Worcester’s life among the Cherokee.
""Mixed Blood" Indians looks at a fascinating array of such birth- and kin-related issues as they were alternately misunderstood and astutely exploited by both Native and European cultures. Theda Perdue discusses the assimilation of non-Indians into Native societies, their descendants' participation in tribal life, and the white cultural assumptions conveyed in the designation "mixed blood." In addition to unions between European men and Native women, Perdue also considers the special cases arising from the presence of white women and African men and women in Indian society.".
Elias Cornelius Boudinot provides the first full account of a man who was intimately and prominently involved in the life of the Cherokee Nation in the second half of the nineteenth century and was highly influential in the opening of the former Indian Territory to white settlement and the eventual formation of the state of Oklahoma. Involved in nearly every aspect of social, economic, and political life in Indian Territory, he was ostracized by many Cherokees, some of whom also threatened his life. Born into the influential Ridge-Boudinot-Watie family, Boudinot was raised in the East after the assassination of his father, who helped found the first newspaper published by an Indian nation. He returned to the Cherokee Nation, affiliating with his uncle Stand Watie and serving in the Confederate Army and as a representative of the Cherokees in the Confederate Congress. He was involved with treaty negotiations after the war, helped open the railroads into the Indian Territory, and founded the city of Vinita in Oklahoma. He also became a political figure in Washington, DC, a newspaper editor and publisher, and a prominent orator. James W. Parins is a professor of English and the associate director of the Sequoyah Research Center at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He is the author of John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (available in a Bison Books edition), coauthor of bibliographies of Indian writers and guides to Native publications, and editor of works by Indian writers, including Ke-ma-ha: The Omaha Stories of Francis La Flesche, also available in a Bison Books edition.
A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail. The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century, some of their leaders believed it was necessary to adapt to European ways in order to survive. Those chiefs sealed the fate of their tribes in 1875 when they signed a treaty relinquishing their land east of the Mississippi in return for promises of wealth and better land. The U.S. government used the treaty to justify the eviction of the Cherokee nation in an exodus that the Cherokee will forever remember as the “trail where they cried.” The heroism and nobility of the Cherokee shine through this intricate story of American politics, ambition, and greed. B & W photographs
In The Cherokees and Christianity, William G. McLoughlin examines how the process of religious acculturation worked within the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century. More concerned with Cherokee "Christianization" than Cherokee "civilization," these eleven essays cover the various stages of cultural confrontation with Christian imperialism. The first section of the book explores the reactions of the Cherokee to the inevitable clash between Christian missionaries and their own religious leaders, as well as their many and varied responses to slavery. In part two, McLoughlin explores the crucial problem of racism that divided the southern part of North America into red, white and black long before 1776 and considers the ways in which the Cherokees either adapted Christianity to their own needs or rejected it as inimical to their identity.