Journalist finds her Cherokee roots

by Candice Felice
DACULA, GA - Corporate relocations and new job opportunities bring many people to Georgia from across the nation and around the globe. But for this fairly recent Gwinnett County resident, my move to Georgia brought me home to face my native roots.

As a young child growing up in Texas, I often questioned my identity. During an afternoon visit with my maternal grandmother, Mary Lewis Thibodeaux, I asked her to explain our ancestry. She told me we were both an anomaly and a paradox.

“We are a people of many tribes and nations and it is from the dust of the earth we were created,” she said.

She then took me by the hand and brought me outside to demonstrate her point. She picked up a glass container and poured into it three equal parts of crushed white shell, sea salt and sand to represent our Irish, Sephardi Hebrew, and Latin American ancestry. Lastly, she filled the remaining half with red clay to represent the Cherokee Nation.

It struck me as odd that she would save the greater part of our lineage for last. My mother later told me this was the part of us she most wanted to forget because of the shame she endured growing up as a “half-breed.”

We were called Cherokee Indians. There are differing points of view as to where the name “Indian” originated. Some believe it came from Christopher Columbus because he mistakenly thought he had landed in India. The term endures to this day but eventually, it became an offense, an ethic slur creating a negative stereotype that caused native Americans to no longer condone its use.

Now that I am living on Georgia land, which once belonged to my ancestors, I set out to discover the part of my heritage that my grandmother had tried so hard to forget. My first stop was the once standing national capitol of the Cherokee Nation, New Echota in Calhoun, GA.

According to Site Director, David Gomez, New Echota represents the beginning place for the establishment of a governing system for the Cherokee Nation. Prior to New Echota, which was the Cherokee Nation’s capital in 1825, the nation was governed much like most Cherokee natives – by individual leaders.

At that time, the Cherokee’s didn’t have a centralized government, Gomez said.
When the Cherokee Nation founded their capital in New Echota, tribal leaders established a Republic similar to the United States, with three branches: the executive, legislative and judicial. Echota is also the birthplace of Native American Journalism, the Cherokee Phoenix, the first bi-lingual newspaper of its kind.

As a journalist this brought a smile to my face to discover that writing was part of the early Cherokee culture. Gomez said New Echota is also known for being the focal point of an important Supreme Court Case, where a missionary named Samuel Austin Worcester in Worcester vs. Georgia made efforts to help the Cherokee hold on to their land primarily in Georgia. Only a treaty signed by the Cherokee could negate the court ruling.

On Dec. 29, 1835, the Treaty of New Echota was signed in the house of Elias Boudinot, an educated Cherokee and editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. The treaty relinquished all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for seven million acres of Great American Dessert lands in Oklahoma; The Cherokees were also given $5 million for their land and $300,000 for any improvements needed in their new territory. The Treaty of New Echota was approved by a one-vote margin in the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, in May 1836. The Cherokee were given two years to vacate. Those who supported the treaty and left early were given money and managed to avoid the later hardships. Eventually, those who remained were all forced out. Boudinot was later killed by Cherokees in Oklahoma for supporting the Treaty.

Many Americans opposed the removal including Congressman Davy Crockett, who’s political career was destroyed due to his support of the Cherokee.

The term “Trail of Tears” was the Cherokee description of their forced removal from the southeast. The Trail of Tears route was made up of several trails belonging to the Five Civilized Tribes – a tribal federation of Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole.

Of the estimated 8,000 native Americans who died along the trail, 4,000 were Cherokee. Over a period of 10 years more than 70,000 Native Americans were forced by the federal government to give up their homes and move to areas assigned to tribes in Oklahoma.

According to legend, Georgia’s state flower – the Cherokee Rose – came about as a result of The Trail of Tears. It was told that when Cherokee mothers mourned for their dead, the chiefs prayed for a sign to lift their spirits to care for the remaining children. The next day a beautiful white rose blossomed wherever a mother’s tear fell. White symbolizes the mother’s tear, its gold center is for the gold that had been taken away and the seven leaves represent the seven Cherokee clans that made the journey. Today the rose still flourishes along the route of the “Trail of Tears”.

After walking the grounds of New Echota and experiencing firsthand the historical aspects of my lineage, I traveled to Jasper, GA to meet an activist for the Cherokee Nation preservation in Georgia, Chipa Wolfe. Chipa runs a game preserve for animals and refers to himself as a “promotional martyr” for the eastern and western band of Cherokee. 

“I became involved because I couldn’t find any Indians to play with in the state of Georgia and in fact in the 70’s and 80’s, there just weren’t any Indians around,” Chipa said.

In Chipa’s opinion, modern times have not yet corrected the many wrongs done to the Cherokee Nation, and beginning in 1989 he looked for ways to promote awareness. He joined forces with the American Indian movement, the Alliance for Native American Indian Rights, and the Native American Indian Association based out of Nashville, TN.

“At the time, destruction of Native American grave sites was rampant and nobody was paying any tribute. It was just commonplace for dozers to plow through these things and to ignore them. So, therefore I joined forces with the Catua tribe from Okalahoma and other tribes from all across the country to combat the illicit destruction of gravesites. And then found out that it was going on right here where I’ve chosen to make my home in Georgia,” he said.

His first battle was in the Dacula area with Gwinnett County. While there Chipa said he was shown ill regard and told to go away. But he would not stand down in his quest to protect these Cherokee gravesites from extinction.

Chipa issued a press release that was picked up by the national media and he pitched his tent at Gwinnett’s historic Elisha Winn House in protest. Native Americans from all across the United States and Canada came in support to help him defend the burial grounds of the Cherokee.

In 2001, an article published in Creative Loafing, by Susanne M. Gargiulo, stated, “Gwinnett has more than 500 record archaeological sites; Georgia as a whole boasts more than 35,000.”

Former Gwinnett Historical Society president, Phyllis Hughes said there are still more that have gone unreported.

Wolf says, “With that we pushed for HB 451, a legislative order for the protection of gravesites here in the state of Georgia. And from that in conjunction with other states we were able to bring about the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act NAGPRA. It was the first time that Native peoples had contested their ill treatment or the fact that they just didn’t exist in the state of Georgia since their removal in 1838-39.” 

Little Mulberry Park is also included under this [same federal] protection. As one Native poet Wovoka Paiute wrote: “You ask me to plow the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.” 

Although the Cherokee people have survived, only a small remnant of what they once were remains. They no longer enjoy the freedoms of a being a sovereign nation, which Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in 1832 that they were.

My history lesson into the past and present struggles of the Cherokee Nation helped explain my grandmothers’ definition of who we are.

I’ve also learned that what makes man great can also make him small. Those who don’t learn from the past are prone to repeat it.

article used by permission from The Neighborhood News.