THE CHEROKEES today are the largest and best-known group of aboriginal people in the United States of America. The 1990 U.S. Census reported exactly 338,844 self-identifying Cherokees. People of Cherokee culture also live in the British Isles, Canada and Mexico, as well as throughout the world.

The name "Cherokee" is an English rendering of "Tsaraki" (Ayrate or Lower Town form) or "Tsalagi" (usually pro-nounced "CSHAH-lah-ghee). The word means "the people over there" in Shawnee, an Algonkian language. In Indian sign talk, the Cherokee are called "the mountain cave people" and "the great spirit people." Cherokees call themselves "the Principal, or Mainline People" to show a common descent from their Cherokee Noah and his wife. In the Cherokee language this is "Ani-Yvwiya."

The original band of Cherokees came by raft to the Upper Cumberland Mountain region in what is now Tennessee when the world as we know it was destroyed by a great flood. They expanded eastward. Most printed versions of any "migration myth" fall into the category of falsification and propaganda. For political purposes, the Cherokee people, like others, were portrayed as migratory tribes with a vague, shifting center that never had any fixed position or boundaries.

At the time of white contact the Cherokee people were self-reliant hunter-gatherer-farmers who lived in towns and had a democratic form of constitutional government. Their sovereign territory stretched from
outside what is now Nashville, Tennessee in the west to the North Carolina piedmont in the east, from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the north to a sea corridor in the south ending at the mouth of the Savannah River.

Before European colonization, their lands included all of Kentucky (known as "The Dark and Bloody Place"), most of Tennessee (a Cherokee word), western Virginia and North Carolina, southern West Virginia and northern portions of Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.

On their boundaries were the Shawnee, Powhatan Confederacy, Creek Confederacy, Choctaw Confederacy, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Moneton, Yadkin, Occaneechi, Monacan, Manahoac, Nahyssan, Keyauwee, Shakori, Sissipahaw, Woccon, Tuscarora Nation, Meherrin, Pamlico, Catawba, Cheraw, Congaree, Santee, Sugaree, Sewee, Wateree, Waxhaw, Winyaw, Waccamaw, Pedee, Cusabo, Eno, Tutelo, Saponi, Koasati, Tuskegee, Oconee and Yamasee. In addition, enclaves and scattered vestiges of the ancient
Moundbuilder civilization existed within this territory, and tribes such as the Tehah Nahma traveled through it.

The people practiced a strict spirituality that rested on the individual's conscience and was not dictated by any form of organized religion. The Cherokee system of worship predates all the world's established religions, though most Cherokees today are Christian. The Baptist and Methodist denominations are strongest. The Christian faith came late to Cherokee territory. It was not until 1811 that the first Cherokee was converted by New England missionaries in northern Georgia. Earlier attempts by the English
evangelist John Wesley had failed.

Society was divided into matrilinear family units called clans. No authentic list of these has ever been published. There were at one time more than twice as many as the seven often named today. Apparently, many have become extinct.

The Cherokee language is classified as Iroquoian. It is spoken today by about 11,000 native speakers. Cherokee is written in a special system of writing set down by the leader Sequoyah about 1820. Current linguistic science regards Cherokee as the parent of the other Iroquois languages. Formerly, it was the other way around.

Because of their accomodations to other cultures, the Cherokees have been called one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the American Southeast. The others are the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole. All these have always admitted a high degree of intermixture with other racial and cultural groups, either by marriage or adoption. It is said that the first Cherokees encountered
by Scotch-Irish traders in the Blue Ridge Mountains greeted the Celts in the Gaelic language. Many Cherokees today bear Celtic surnames.

The first recorded treaty with a foreign power was in 1721 in South Carolina with England. The last was in 1866 with the U.S. Government. In between, the Cherokees ceded more than five million acres of land and were twice removed from their "sovereign" territory.

In the 1830s, after gold was reported to have been discovered in northern Georgia, thousands of Cherokee men, women and children were rounded up, placed in makeshift concentration camps and marched 1,200 miles to "Indian Territory" (Arkansas). It was a bitter winter. The U.S. military split the groups up and led them on round-about paths. Many were taken northward through thinly settled portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before crossing the Mississippi. Some 4,000 people died
under military escort. The bodies were often interred in swampy graves or left to the vultures. According to eyewitnesses outside Nashville, these followed the train of "refugees" by the hundreds.

The Trail of Tears shown on many official maps was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1989 though it was only one of many routes. The name has been variously explained, but it should be noted