Gregory according to the u. S. Census, almost one million americans suffer identify as cherokee. Everyone travels the United States, someone is likely to lay claim to a cherokee ancestors somewhere in their family tree. In fact, as far as scotland, hawaii, even australia and chances are youll meet someone who insists that they are descended from cherokee forebears. How can so many people on the scattered all over the world claim to be cherokee . Historian Gregory D Smithers addresses this question in his new book the cherokee diaspora an indigenous history of migration, resettlement, and identity. He reveals for the first time the origins of the dispersion of the cherokee people. He takes the reader back to the 18 and 19 centuries to uncover the importance of migration and tradition,nds, and and culture and language in defining what it means to be cherokee while living in diaspora. The story is a remarkable one. Full of bravery, innovation, and resilience. Gregory smithers is associate professor of history at virginia commonwealth university. His research and writing focuses on the histories of native americans and africanamerican people. Since the 18th century. Richly, he gave a most popular to park last year in november on the history of native americans in virginia. Some of you may have been here for it. He is particularly interested in the rich history of the cherokee people, native American History in the southeast, and environmental history. The author of numerous books and articles, his most recent being the cherokee diaspora. An indigenous history of migration. Resettlement, and identity. Copies of which make a great Christmas Present and will be available for you to purchase and for him to sign in the shop after the lecture please join me in giving a very warm welcome to gregory smithers. [applause] gregory thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction. That was very nice. Thank you all for coming this afternoon. Over the years, i have spent more time here than i care to count. Upstairs in the reading room looking at manuscript. I know this place well and it is always lovely to come back. Now that i live here, it is really cheap to get to the dhs. Thank you all, also, for coming and supporting us. This they very Important Institution in our city and so, i appreciate it as im sure the staff are of your support. This project of mine, which ended up in this book that you see on the screen there, did not begin in georgia or North Carolina. Or in oklahoma, for that matter. It began in australia. In the National Archives of australia which is located in australia. Im from there originally and grew up there and was educated there and my family all still lives there. Tooved away to california try and get a phd in history. Along the way, i met my wife. Australia one summer. I was doing research on a different project and i stumbled across an immigration file from the mid1960s. 1965, actually. It was an immigration file to a woman named cherokee meeks. Her and her family had migrated or trying to migrate from oklahoma to australia. To queensland actually. It is a state very much like oklahoma and much of the west. What on earth were they doing there . What were they thinking in 1955 to want to try to relocate their family with two or three small children whether they trying to move to the other side of the world . What would possibly compel someone to take such a drastic step . I was fascinated by this file. Wanting to know more about this family and at the same time, curious to know whether there had been other people of cherokee ancestry who had made similar decisions, not only to migrate to australia, but to other parts of the world, as well. So, that is how the story started. 2001 winter afternoon in canberra, australia, cherokee meeks and her family did not acquire access to austria. They did not receive the permission from the government that they were seeking to become permanent members of australian society. Remember in 1965, australia had a policy still in 1972, called the white astro your policy. As someone of cherokee ancestry, as someone of native american heritage, the commonwealth of australia deemed this and inappropriate family for admission despite the fact that they came with considerable savings and family assets. Onetheless, i was curious this was the beginning of what has turned out to be an almost decade and a half long search to retrace the cherokee diaspora. It has taken me to scotlands. It has taken me two parts of england, london, manchester, back to australia and hawaii. All over north america. The cherokee people today live throughout the world. There are cherokees who call toronto home. There are cherokee so call San Francisco and los angeles home. There are cherokees who call washington, d. C. , austin, new york, home. The cherokee diaspora is in many ways a truly global diaspora. It is a product of american colonialism and it is also a product of cherokee innovation. But they cherokee determination to maintain a strong sense of their identity as cherokee people. So, that initial discovery in australia in 1965 a 1965 document has been driving me for the last decade and a half. To know more about the people who constituted and made the cherokee diaspora. That is what the book is about. Find thisnecessarily history of the cherokee diaspora the 19thoks from century and 20th century and today. One inrokee story is which they encounter europeans, they adapt and become quote unquote civilize. There ultimately forcibly relocated in the 1830s by the federal government. It is one of the more shameful episodes in American History. Other than this forced relocation in the early 19th century, the cherokee are not thought of, historically, to have any tradition of movements, migrations, and travel. This map that you see on the screen here, is indicative of how we have all been programs, culturally, to perceive the cherokee since 19 century. This is a map from 1828 textbook. Primer prepared by an educator. You can see on the map that the are positioned in that iny, very authoritative oval the Appalachian Region. Indicated based upon the lines that are drawn for the shawnee to the lower creek and for the uruguay to the north, the cherokee are thought to be sedentary. To have no history of movement, adaptation, innovation. And this is something that is wrong. That is misleading. And it is indeed what i want you about today. Want to talk to you about today. The history of pride the cherokee had taken within through the jasper over the 19th the diapora over the 19th and 20th centuries. It was this pride in cherokee identity that parents felt when they gave their daughter the name cherokee. One of the things that i was whening most keenly about i was researching is, why would they named their daughter cherokee . Clearly there is some concern on meeks parents. Their daughter, forced by modernity and american assimilation policy the 20th century, to forget who she is. Her ancestors, where she came from. She only needs to say her name, then, to recall, to be reminded of who she is. Then, i story of extraordinary courage, community, and family pride that made the cherokee diaspora what it is today. Cherokee meeks is just the entry point into correcting this type of onedimensional history that we have been exposed to for many centuries now. What do we actually know about the cherokee people . Iroquoiskee are and speaking people, possibly descended from the migratory group of the northern iroquois indians. They settled in the vast and diverse region that is today the space of virginia and west virginia. North and south carolina, georgia, alabama, tennessee, and kentucky included. Cherokee towns, one of which you see produced on the screen. This is an important over hilltown that is now underwater. This town would have been located in what is today tennessee. The cherokee town names often reflected the iroquois ancestry of the cherokee people. Towns such as seneca highlighted the linguistic connection of the cherokee people. They offered clues as to where the cherokee came from. An archaeologist and language over the past and linguists over the past generation are in agreement that the evidence we have suggests that the cherokee are descended from migrants, iroquois migrants that several in the Appalachian Region about 4000 years ago. They were outsiders then to the southeast. Toy were sometimes referred by other native peoples in the southeast as kay jewelers. Cave dwellers. The cherokee, the people that come to be known as the cherokee, they see themselves as keepers of the sacred fire. 1000 in our common era, come to refer to themselves as the principal people. An identifiable, strong and sophisticated political cultural and social system that is connected with other native communities and societies throughout the southeast. Ultimately connected after the arrival of europeans in the 16th century to a transatlantic world of trade and cultural exchange. Cherokee are important to the story of the cherokee diaspora. Towns such as the one you see on the screen provide something of an access route. At least from the english perspective, to the rich and fertile lands of the ohio and illinois valleys. The tennessee river, which was once referred to as the cherokee river, was dominated by cherokees who lived in towns like this. Superhighways of the early modern period. The cherokee people controlled and dominated those rivers. Way, isn, by the probably the most important town in Cherokee Society in the 18th century. Its now underwater. It sits at the bottom. It remains at the bottom of the dam. Which was completed after a long legal battle that was fought by the cherokee people with environmental allies for much of the 1960s and 1970s. Colonialism still impacts cherokee people, at the does for all native american people. But what this image indicates is that cherokee people lived in tightly knit communities. Town life structured ones life and identity. It provided the sense of rhythm to an individuals life. But so too did ones clan identity. The cherokee people belong historically to one of 7 matrilineal clans. Women have an enormous amount of political power in traditional Cherokee Society. They are responsible for Food Production and distribution. Women are responsible for determining who can and cannot become a member of a clan. Women, for example, often have the last word on determining who of the captives captives of debts they determine when and how those individuals will become members of a particular clan. Women have so much political power in Cherokee Society that one french observer in the 1790s referred to the cherokee as living under a petticoat government. So the cherokee, by the time europeans arrived in the 16th century, and certainly the english in the following century, have a very sophisticated society, both culturally and politically. Women are at the core of that society. Historians have charted this history fairly consistently for many generations now. The arc of cherokee history typically follows this narrative of Traditional Town and clan and thee role of women matrilineal nature of Cherokee Society. That history often culminates, and indeed ends, with removal. An era that i mentioned moments ago is perhaps one of the most tragic in American History. This narrative isnt wrong. Not incorrect to inculcate generations of schoolchildren in College Students with this narrative. Cherokee people did encounter traders, settlers, colonial officials, missionaries, and ultimately enslaved african and africanamerican people. All of this is part of the reshaping of cherokee life over the 17th, 18th, and into the 19th century. Its not wrong, but its incomplete. Its an incomplete picture of who the cherokee people are and what they became over the course of the 18th and 19th century, and into the present day,. To get a sense of who the , what i didple are during my research was to revisit the oral traditions, the oral narratives that gave the meaning and purpose to life for cherokee communities. Earth being once divided of cherokee ancestors being forced to cross a great bridge that later sank to the bottom of the ocean. Stories of lost cherokee. Cherokee warriors and hunters who, in what europeans call the early modern period, migrated beyond the trends Mississippi Mississippi all the way to the Mountain Range we know as the rocky mountains. Stories are not often recalled in historys of the cherokee people in the histories of the cherokee people. The most famous story of all in cherokee culture, the story of the corn mother, and the lucky hunter. Attention draws our to the importance of Human Movement in cherokee culture. Be short, itto tells the story of how he cherokee acquire their source of food, sense of identity. But it does more than that. It places travel and migration and relocation at the center of cherokee identity. And there are other forms of travel, too in the 1730s and the 1760s. Cherokee were among visitors to london. Diplomats, representatives of a people. Representing the interests of cherokee people, asserting their sovereignty and their independence from the english crown. Relocation, settlement these are all part of cherokee history and culture. They become much more by systematic part of cherokee history and the cherokee story after the 1750s. This is particularly true in the latter half of the century. Century. 8th dominated by the industrial revolution. From a cherokee respect, dominated perspective, dominated by the destruction of their communities, their towns and crops at the hands of aggressive settlers, particularly expansionist virginian settlers. Initially in the halfcentury after the 18th century, cherokee people begin to relocate and real established towns, culture, families in other parts of Cherokee Country in the southeast. Reestablishing their lives in towns, as they once commonly had done, they begin to establish Community Life around farmstead, believing that those farmsteads would offer them a source of both sustenance and a geographical form of protection from these aggressive white people. Some cherokees, it should be wanted to forcibly resist the expansion of angloamerican settler colonialism during the late 18th and 19th century. Became theee vanguard of the cherokee diaspora during this p eriod. Then migrated to the trans mississippi west, not in search of buffalo or to improve their masculinity. They migrated with an entire community. With women and children, with people of all demographic. They were relocating their life as they knew it in the southeast. They were trying to keep a sense of what is meant to be cherokee alive away, at a safe distance from these aggressive americans. Some of the people who lead the vanguard of the cherokee figures likeuded the one that you see on the screen. Hes known to the english as john jolly, a prominent over hill chief in modern day tennessee. John jolly is most famous for being the adoptive father sam houston. Sam houston wasnt adopted cherokee. Was an adopted cherokee. He spent much of his youth learning about the history and culture of the cherokee people. It was this man whom she traveled with into arkansas territory in the early 19th century. 1817, actually. Jolly and his community, which included sam houston, relocated and attempted reestablish a traditional sense of cherokee life in transmississippi west. Its not surprising that we see the waves of migration during this period of the late 18th and 19th century. Historians have long known about a series of removal crises that struck at the heart of cherokee communities. Firstly in 1906, than in 1809, than in 1817, which prompted jolly and his community to leave and head for arkansas. Then in 1828, and 1829, and of course all through the 1830s, ounted a famous legal opposition to removal. Certainly, byre the early 19th century, becoming an increasingly disaporic people. People. Oric they need is some kind of intellectual framework to articulate who they were in this new world, in this new colonial world. One of the individuals, the great minds of the 19th century Cherokee Community was the main on the screen there. Oowatie is a fascinating character. Limit give you a brief summary of who buck oowaite was. He was born and took the name of the philanthropist and revolutionary era hero, elias not elias boudinot. His education was both at the hands of his cherokee elders and at the feet of missionaries. He attended the famous missionary school in connecticut, where he shared the classroom students who were i,eek, malay, mallory maor waiian,and, choctaw ha and fellow cherokees. This education proves pivotal in buck oowaites life. Outlines a, he framework for about eight for diasporicrokee identity. But he also laid out an explicit critique of antiindian races. Behold an indian, my kindred art are indian. My kin sleeping in the wilderness grave, they too are indian. Rubber means and the will broader means and nobler influences have fallen upon me. This is a statement about the adaptive nature of cherokee people and their culture. Tradition is not something that stays the same generation after generation. Its something that is adapted and is alive. It adapts to the needs of the people who give it meaning. Ite iss what buck oowa trying to do, letting white people know that we are still cherokee irrespective of the socalled civilized improvements that you white people pe rceive. Boudinot, the cherokee people possess the skills and intellectual agility and a deep sense of commitment to maintaining their identity irrespective of where settler colonialism pushes them to migrate. Boudinot cousin added a note about the past and present present, andt, future nature of the cherokee diaspora. When he wrote of the mingling of two migratory people, europeans and cherokees, cherokee and white blood, he insisted, will inevitably intermingle and wind fairourse in begiing the complexion. That has all sorts of applications for those who contend they have cherokee ancestors. Theytantly to note is that practiced what they preached. At least in respect to the intermingling of white a cherokee blood. Ridge married a white woman. Married a young woman named. Gold, so infuriated her family that one of her cousins wrote a terrible letter to her during their courtship, telling her oh dear. , whose oh dear. Oh dear harriet, whose gold should soon be dimmed. The feeling