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Acknowledgments
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Foreword
the bedford series in history and culture is designed so that readers can study the past as historians do.
the historian’s first task is finding the evidence. documents, letters, memoirs, interviews, pictures, movies, novels, or poems can provide facts and clues. then the historian questions and compares the sources. there is more to do than in a courtroom, for hearsay evidence is welcome, and the historian is usually looking for answers beyond act and motive. different views of an event may be as important as a single verdict. how a story is told may yield as much information as what it says. along the way the historian seeks help from other historians and perhaps from specialists in other disciplines. finally, it is time to write, to decide on an interpretation and how to arrange the evidence for readers. each book in this series contains an important historical document or group of documents, each document a witness from the past and open to interpretation in different ways. the documents are combined with some element of historical narrative an introduction or a biographical essay, for example that provides students with an analysis of the primary source material and important background information about the world in which it was produced.
each book in the series focuses on a specific topic within a specific historical period. each provides a basis for lively thought and discussion about several aspects of the topic and the historian’s role. each is short enough (and inexpensive enough) to be a reasonable one-week assignment in a college course. Whether as classroom or personal reading, each book in the series provides firsthand experience of the challenge and fun of discovering, recreating, and interpreting the past.
l ynn hunt david W. blight
bonnie G. smith
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Graduate students have enriched my personal and professional life in many ways. i would like to thank George frizzell, susan hult, bryan McKown, George ellenberg, craig friend, Matt schoenbachler, Jamey carson, t im Garrison, rowena Mcclinton, dave nichols, izumi ishii, Greg o’brien, andrea ramage, lorri Glover, randolph hollingsworth, Joe anoatubby, Karl davis, cary Miller, rose stremlau, Malinda Maynor lowery, Meg devlin o’sullivan, John hall, christina snyder, Julie reed, courtney lewis, Mikaëla adams, Katy smith, Jonathan hancock, Warren Milteer, brooke bauer, liz ellis, and the late Victor blue. i would like to express special appreciation to dave nichols, who helped me update my bibliography for this edition. at bedford/st. Martin’s, thanks are due to Publisher Michael rosenberg, senior executive editor bill lombardo, director of development Jane Knetzger, executive Marketing Manager sandi McGuire, developmental editor lexi deconti, Production editor lidia Macdonald-carr, cover designer William boardman, and Production coordinator nancy benjamin of books by design.
theda Perdue
38. Will chavez, Three Trail of Tears Survivors Honored at April 18 Ceremonies, april 24, 2015 184
APPENDIxES chronology of the cherokee removal (ca. 1700–2007)
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Introduction: The Cherokees and U.S. Indian Policy
THE CHEROKEE PEOPLE
The Cherokees lived in the valleys of rivers that drained the southern Appalachians. The United States did not exist when the Cherokees first inhabited this land, but today we might describe their homeland as extending from North Carolina into South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and eventually Alabama. There they built their towns, cleared their fields, planted their crops, and buried their dead. The Cherokees also laid claim to a larger domain extending into Kentucky and Virginia, where they hunted deer and gathered raw materials essential to their way of life. Modern archaeologists believe that the Cherokees had lived on this land for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years; the Cherokees believed that they had always been there.
According to the Cherokees, the little water beetle created this land out of an endless sea by diving to the bottom and bringing up mud. The great buzzard shaped the mountains and valleys when his wings touched the soft earth. The first man and woman, Kana’ti and Selu, lived on that land. Their son and the unnatural Wild Boy, who had sprung from blood that Selu washed off dead game, unwittingly forged the Cherokee way of life when they spied on Kana’ti and Selu. The boys discovered that Kana’ti obtained the family’s meat from a cave he kept covered with a large rock. When they pushed away the rock and accidentally released
the animals, they condemned all future generations of Cherokee men to have to hunt for game. Then they found that Selu produced corn and beans by rubbing her stomach and armpits. They decided that she was a witch and that they must kill her. Realizing what her son and Wild Boy intended to do, Selu instructed them to clear a circle and drag her body over the cleared ground seven times. Where her blood dropped, corn grew. The boys tired of their task, however, and they cleared seven little spots instead of a circle and dragged Selu’s body over them only two times. Therefore, corn grows in only a few places, and Indian women must hoe their corn twice.
For many generations after Kana’ti and Selu, Cherokee women farmed and men hunted. Although the Cherokees divided tasks rather rigidly on the basis of gender, men helped clear fields and plant the crops and women helped dress and tan deerskins. Nevertheless, the Cherokees associated farming with women and hunting with men, and young women and men confirmed their marriage by an exchange of corn and deer meat. The Cherokees depended on the deer, turkeys, bears, rabbits, and other game that men killed and on the corn, beans, squash, and other crops that women raised. Farming as well as hunting, therefore, was essential to the Cherokee way of life long before Europeans arrived. In fact, the ancestors of modern Cherokees were growing crops well before the beginning of the Christian era, and by 1000, when most English people lived on coarse bread and ale, the Cherokees ate a varied and balanced diet of meat, corn, and other vegetables.
A Cherokee homestead consisted of several buildings clustered around a small plaza. Large rectangular houses with wooden sides and roofs provided shelter in summer months while small, round houses with thick mud-plastered walls provided a snug refuge from winter winds. Corncribs and other storage buildings stood nearby. Several generations of a family lived together. Because the Cherokees were matrilineal that is, they traced kinship solely through women — the usual residents of a household were a woman, her husband, her daughters and their husbands, her daughters’ children, and any unmarried sons (married sons lived in their wives’ households). Usually the women of the household cultivated a small garden near the homestead, but the majority of the family’s produce came from the large fields where all the women worked together, moving from one family’s section of the field to another’s.
These homesteads might be strung out along a river in a narrow mountain valley or tightly clustered in more open terrain, but together they formed a permanent village. Although men might travel great distances on the winter hunt, the village did not relocate, and most women,
children, and old men remained behind. The focal point of the village was the town house or council house, a large, circular structure with thick mud walls much like the winter houses. Town houses had to be large enough to seat the members of the village, sometimes several hundred people, because the entire town met there to conduct ceremonies and debate important issues. Cherokees arrived at decisions by consensus; that is, they discussed issues until everyone could agree or those who disagreed withdrew from the discussion or even from the meeting. debate could last for weeks or months, and any man or woman who wanted to speak had an opportunity. This does not mean that the Cherokees considered all opinions to be equal. Indeed, if the issue was war, a prominent warrior could be expected to command more respect than a man who had never been to war. Furthermore, a woman who had lost a husband or child in a previous engagement might hold greater sway than a woman who was unrelated to previous victims. Leadership in a Cherokee community, in fact, rested with a person who could inspire followers rather than someone born to office.
War was often a concern for the Cherokees. They shared hunting grounds with many other Native peoples, and encounters in the hunting grounds often resulted in casualties. The Cherokees believed that they had a sacred duty to avenge the deaths of fallen comrades, and so war parties formed quickly following a death. If only one or two Cherokees had died, the chief responsibility for vengeance lay with the relatives of the dead, but when the deaths involved the kin of most members of a town, revenge became a concern for the entire community. War parties prepared for an expedition by fasting and singing sacred songs in the town house. When they left the village, they took care to avoid detection because the object was to return with enemy scalps or captives, not more casualties whose deaths would have to be avenged. This is why the warriors tried to stage surprise attacks and often targeted the easiest victims, including women and children.
The nature of Native warfare often struck Europeans as particularly brutal, but the Cherokees’ view of the world and their place in it left them with few alternatives. They envisioned the world as composed of opposites that balanced each other. Men, for example, balanced women, and hunting balanced farming. By the same token, the Cherokees lived in a state of equilibrium with the non-Cherokees in the world, but if an outsider took the life of a Cherokee, he destroyed that state of equilibrium. For the world to be set right, one of the guilty party’s people had to die. Failure to seek vengeance meant that the world remained out of kilter and placed the entire Cherokee people at risk of disease, drought,
Other documents randomly have different content
separated regions, at the Arctic Pole of the (then) only Earth—so did the ultimate transformation of the Third occur. It began in those northern regions, which have just been described as including Behring's Straits, and what there then was of dry land in Central Asia, when the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic regions and excellently adapted to the primitive wants of nascent physical man. That region, however, has been more than once frigid and tropical in turn since the appearance of man. The Commentary tells us that the Third Race was only about the middle point of its development when:
The axle of the Wheel tilted. The Sun and Moon shone no longer over [pg 344]the heads of that portion of the Sweat-born; people knew snow, ice, and frost, and men, plants, and animals were dwarfedintheirgrowth.Thosethatdidnotperishremainedas halfgrownbabes735 insizeandintellect.ThiswasthethirdPralayaofthe Races.736
This means again, that our Globe is subject to seven periodical and entire changes which go paripassu with the Races. For the Secret Doctrine teaches that, during this Round, there must be seven terrestrial Pralayas, occasioned by the change in the inclination of the Earth's axis. It is a Law which acts at its appointed time, and not at all blindly, as Science may think, but in strict accordance and harmony with Karmic Law. In Occultism this Inexorable Law is referred to as the “Great Adjuster.” Science confesses its ignorance of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes and also the changes in the axial direction, which are always followed by these vicissitudes. In fact, it does not seem at all sure of the axial changes. And being unable to account for them, it is prepared to deny the axial phenomena altogether, rather than admit the intelligent hand of the Karmic Law which alone can reasonably explain these sudden changes and their accompanying results. It has tried to account for them by various and more or less fantastic speculations; one of which, as de Boucheporn imagined, would be the sudden collision of our Earth with a Comet, thus causing all the geological revolutions.
commenced after their physical Fall—and that finally, some millions of years later, they decreased to between six and seven feet, and are now, as in the older Asiatic races, dwindling down to nearer five than six feet. As Pickering shows, there is in the Malay race (a subrace of the Fourth Root-Race) a singular diversity of stature; the members of the Polynesian family, such as the Tahitians, Samoans, and Tonga islanders, are of a higher stature than the rest of mankind; but the Indian tribes and the inhabitants of the IndoChinese countries are decidedly below the general average. This is easily explained. The Polynesians belong to the very earliest of the surviving sub-races, the others to the very latest and most transitory stock. As the Tasmanians are now completely extinct, and the Australians rapidly dying out, so will the other old races soon follow.
(b) How could those records have been preserved? we may be asked. Even the knowledge of the Zodiac by the Hindûs is denied by our kind and learned Orientalists, who conclude that the Âryan Hindûs knew nothing of it, before the Greeks brought it into the country. This uncalled-for slander has been so sufficiently refuted by Bailly, [pg 347] and what is more, by the clear evidenceoffacts, as not to need very much additional refutation. While the Egyptian Zodiacs743 preserve irrefutable proofs of records embracing more than three-and-a-half Sidereal Years—or about 87,000 years—the Hindû calculations cover nearly thirty-three such years, or 850,000 years. The Egyptian priests assured Herodotus that the Pole of the Earth and the Pole of the Ecliptic had formerly coincided. But, as remarked by the author of the Sphinxiad:
These poor benighted Hindoos have registered a knowledge of Astronomy for ten times 25,000 years since the [last local] Flood [in Asia], or Age of Horror.
And they possess recorded observations from the date of the first Great Flood within the Âryan historical memory—the Flood which submerged the last portions of Atlantis 850,000 years ago. The
Floods which preceded are, of course, more traditional than historical.
The sinking and transformation of Lemuria began nearly at the Arctic Circle (Norway), and the Third Race ended its career in Lankâ, or rather on that which became Lankâ with the Atlanteans. The small remnant now known as Ceylon is the Northern highland of ancient Lankâ, while the enormous Island of that name was, in the Lemurian period, the gigantic Continent already described. As a Master says:
Why should not your geologists bear in mind that under the continentsexploredandfathomedby them... there may behidden, deepinthefathomless,orratherunfathomedoceanbeds, otherand far older continents whose strata have never been geologically explored; and thatthey may some day upset entirely theirpresent theories? Why not admit that our present continents have, like Lemuria and Atlantis, been several times already submerged, and had the time to reäppear again, and bear their new groups of mankind and civilizations; and that at the first great geological upheavalatthenextcataclysm,intheseriesofperiodicalcataclysms that occur from the beginning to the end of every Round, our already autopsized continents will go down, and the Lemurias and Atlantisescomeupagain?744
Not identically the same Continents, of course. But here an explanation is needed. No confusion need arise as regards the postulation of a Northern Lemuria. The prolongation of that great Continent into the North Atlantic Ocean is in no way subversive of the opinions so widely held as to the site of the lost Atlantis, and one corroborates the other. It must be noted that the Lemuria, which served as the [pg 348] cradle of the Third Root-Race, not only embraced a vast area in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, but extended in the shape of a horse-shoe past Madagascar, round “South Africa” (then a mere fragment in process of formation), through the Atlantic up to Norway. The great English fresh-water deposit called the Wealden—which every Geologist regards as the mouth of a former
great river—is the bed of the main stream which drained Northern Lemuria in the Secondary age. The former actual existence of this river is a fact of Science—its votaries acknowledge the necessity of accepting the Secondary-age Northern Lemuria, demanded by their data? Professor Berthold Seemann not only accepted the reality of such a mighty continent, but regarded Australia and Europe as formerly portions of one continent—thus corroborating the whole “horse-shoe” doctrine already enunciated. No more striking confirmation of our position could be given, than the fact that the elevatedridgein the Atlantic basin, 9,000 feet in height, which runs for some two or three thousand miles southwards from a point near the British Islands, first slopes towards South America, then shifts almostatrightanglesto proceed in a south-easterlyline towardthe Africancoast, whence it runs on southward to Tristan d'Acunha. This ridge is a remnant of an Atlantic continent, and, could it be traced further, would establish the reality of a submarine horse-shoe junction with a former continent in the Indian Ocean.745
The Atlanticportion of Lemuria was the geological basis of what is generally known as Atlantis, but which must be regarded rather as a development of the Atlantic prolongation of Lemuria than as an entirely new mass of land upheaved to meet the special requirements of the Fourth Root-Race. Just as in the case of Race evolution, so in that of the shifting and re-shifting of Continental masses, no hard and fast line can be drawn as to where a new order ends and another begins. Continuity in natural processes is never broken. Thus the Fourth-Race Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third-Race Men, centred, roughly speaking, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic Ocean. Their Continent was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas which were upheaved in the ordinary course of time and ultimately became the true home of the great Race known as the Atlanteans. After this consummation was once attained it follows, as stated on the highest Occult authority, that: [pg 349]
Lemuriashouldno more beconfoundedwiththeAtlantisContinent, thanEuropewithAmerica.746
The above, coming from quarters so discredited by orthodox Science, will, of course, be regarded as a more or less happy fiction. Even the clever work of Donnelly, already mentioned, is put aside, notwithstanding that its statements are all confined within a frame of strictly scientific proofs. But we write for the future. New discoveries in this direction will vindicate the claim of the Asiatic Philosophers, that sciences—Geology, Ethnology, and History included—were pursued by the Antediluvian nations who lived untold ages ago. Future “finds” will justify the correctness of the present observations of such acute minds as H. A. Taine and Renan. The former shows that the civilizations of such archaic nations as the Egyptians, Âryans of India, Chaldæans, Chinese, and Assyrians are the result of preceding civilizations lasting “myriadsof centuries”;747 and the latter points to the fact that:
Egypt at the beginning appears mature, old, and entirely without mythical and heroic ages, as if the country had never known youth. Its civilization has no infancy, and its art no archaic period. The civilization of the Old Monarchy did not begin with infancy. It was already mature.748
To this Professor R. Owen adds that:
Egypt is recorded to have been a civilized and governed community before the time of Menes.
And Winchell states that:
At the epoch of Menes the Egyptians were already a civilized and numerous people. Manetho tells us that Athotis, the son of
