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 * Origin **

When the first Europeans passed through Cherokee territory in 1540, they found Cherokee hunters armed with giant bows which the Spanish soldiers were unable to pull back. These bows propelled arrows with the power to bring down the massive elk and bears they hunted. More than a thousand years ago, Cherokee life took on the patterns that persisted through the eighteenth century. European explorers and settlers found a flourishing nation that dominated the southern Appalachians. The Cherokees controlled some 140,000 square miles throughout eight states. Men hunted, fished, and dealt with politics, while women gathered wild food and cultivated small farms. This was life that realized harmony with nature, sustainability, personal freedom, and balance between work, play, and praise. The land furnished all: food in abundance; materials for shelter, clothing, and utensils; and herbs that were used for art and cures for every known illness - until the Europeans came.

For the first 200 years of contact, the Cherokees extended hospitality and help to the newcomers. Peaceful trade prevailed. Intermarriage was not uncommon. The Cherokees were quick to embrace useful aspects of the newcomers' culture, from food to written language. Within months, the majority of the Cherokee Nation became literate. By then, nearly 200 years of broken treaties had reduced the Cherokee empire to a small territory, and Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, began to insist that all southeastern Indians be moved west of the Mississippi. The federal government no longer needed the Cherokees as strategic allies against the French and British. Land speculators wanted Cherokee land to sell for cotton plantations and for the gold that was discovered in Georgia. Although the Cherokee resisted removal through their bilingual newspaper and through legal means, taking their claims all the way up to the Supreme Court, Jackson's policy prevailed. In 1838, events culminated in the tragic Trail of Tears, the forceful removal of the Civilized Tribes in the East to Oklahoma. One quarter of the 16,000 Cherokees who took to the long march died of exposure and disease.