Cherokee Tribe Facts for Kids

the Cherokee quick facts

• The name Cherokee comes from a Muscogee word meaning “people of different speech”.
• In 1650 the Cherokee controlled about 40,000 square miles of the Appalachian Mountains.
• Sequoyah’s syllabary of 86 symbols was finished by 1821.
• The Cherokee Phoenix, first published in 1828, was the first Native American newspaper.
• A few hundred Cherokee escaped removal in 1838, and their descendants live in western North Carolina.

Who are the Cherokee?

The Cherokee are a Native American people whose homeland was in the south-east of what is now the United States. When Europeans arrived, they were one of the largest tribes to be united under one system of government.

The name Cherokee comes from a Muscogee word meaning “people of different speech”. Many Cherokee people prefer their own names, Keetoowah or Tsalagi.

The Cherokee language belongs to the Iroquoian family of languages. To find out about other Native American peoples, read our Native American facts for kids.

The Cherokee homeland

In 1650 there were thought to be about 22,500 Cherokee. They controlled around 40,000 square miles (100,000 km²) of the Appalachian Mountains.

Their land covered parts of what are now Georgia and eastern Tennessee, and the western parts of North Carolina and South Carolina. It was a land of wooded mountains, river valleys and good farmland.

Towns of peace and war

The Cherokee nation was made up of many towns. Some were known as red towns, linked with war. Others were white towns, linked with peace.

The chiefs of the red towns answered to a supreme war chief. The leaders of the white towns answered to a supreme peace chief.

Peace towns could give shelter to people who had done wrong, while war ceremonies took place in the red towns. It was a way of keeping war and peace in balance.

Daily life long ago

When Spanish explorers met the Cherokee in the mid-1500s, the Cherokee used stone tools, including knives, axes and chisels. They wove baskets and made pottery.

They were farmers as well as hunters. They grew corn, beans and squash. Deer, bear and elk gave them meat, and skins for clothing.

Families lived in log cabins with bark roofs. The cabins had no windows, just one door and a hole in the roof to let out smoke. A typical town had between 30 and 60 of these houses.

Every town also had a council house, where people met to talk over important matters. A sacred fire burned inside it.

The Green Corn festival

One of the most important Cherokee ceremonies was the Green Corn festival, also called the Busk. It celebrated the first crops of the year, and fires were lit anew.

For a farming people, the first corn of the year mattered enormously. It meant that there would be food for the months ahead.

Contact with Europeans

The Spanish, French and English all tried to settle parts of the south-east. By the early 1700s, the Cherokee had chosen the British as their trading partners and allies.

That alliance came at a cost. Wars and treaties took away large areas of Cherokee land. In 1773, for example, the Cherokee and the Muscogee gave up more than two million acres in Georgia to pay off debts.

During the American War of Independence, the Cherokee sided with the British, believing they were more likely to protect Cherokee land. After defeats in 1776, the Cherokee were forced to give up more land in North and South Carolina.

In the early 1800s, many Cherokee adopted the settlers’ ways of farming, weaving and building. They hoped this would help them keep their land.

Sequoyah and Cherokee writing

Sequoyah was born around 1775 and grew up in the Tennessee country. He was raised by his Cherokee mother, of the Paint clan, and he never learned to speak, read or write English. He was a silversmith, a painter and a soldier.

He believed that writing gave people power, because it let them store and share knowledge. Around 1809, he began to create a way of writing the Cherokee language.

He tried pictures first. Then he tried symbols for the syllables of spoken Cherokee, adapting some letters from English, Greek and Hebrew. His daughter helped him to pick out the syllables. By 1821 he had a system of 86 symbols, one for each syllable of the language.

A system like this is called a syllabary. It was so easy to learn that almost the whole Cherokee people could read and write within a short time.

In February 1828, the Cherokee Phoenix began publication. It was the first Native American newspaper, and it used Sequoyah’s syllabary. The Cherokee also adopted a written constitution.

The giant sequoia trees of California are named after him.

The Trail of Tears

In 1830, the US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. It required tribes in the south-east to give up their lands in exchange for land west of the Mississippi River.

When gold was found on Cherokee land in Georgia, the pressure grew. The Cherokee took their case to the US Supreme Court, which ruled that Georgia had no power over them and no claim to their land. But Georgia ignored the ruling, and President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce it.

In December 1835, a small minority of Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota. It handed over all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million. Most Cherokee rejected it.

In May 1838 the removal began. About 7,000 soldiers under General Winfield Scott forced people from their homes, many at gunpoint. As many as 16,000 Cherokee were held in camps while their homes were looted and burned.

Then they were sent west in groups of about 1,000, most of them on foot. Some groups went by river. Principal Chief John Ross led many of the later groups.

The journey took place through the autumn and winter of 1838–39, and the last groups arrived at the end of March 1839. Food, shelter and clothing were badly short, and the cold made the suffering far worse.

Thousands died. The US National Park Service says more than a thousand died on the way, and perhaps several thousand more died from the effects of the forced move. Encyclopaedia Britannica puts the deaths on the journey at about 4,000. The forced march came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

A new home in Oklahoma

The Cherokee were taken to Indian Territory, in what is now north-eastern Oklahoma. There they joined four other tribes that had also been forced out of the south-east: the Muscogee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole.

Each tribe had its own land and its own government, modelled on that of the United States. But as Oklahoma prepared to become a state, much of the land was divided up or opened to settlers. The tribal governments were officially dissolved in 1906, though they carried on in a limited form.

Not everyone left the south-east. In 1838, a few hundred Cherokee escaped into the mountains. They became the roots of the community of several thousand Cherokee who live in western North Carolina today.

The Cherokee today

Cherokee people now live all over the United States. In the early 2020s, more than a million Americans said they had Cherokee ancestors, and about 225,000 said their ancestry was Cherokee alone.

Cherokee tribal governments carry on today, and many Cherokee people work to keep their language and traditions alive. You can learn about the Cherokee Nation from its own website, cherokee.org.

To learn about another Native American people, read our Miami tribe facts for kids.

Three things people get wrong

The Cherokee did not live in tepees. Long ago they lived in log cabins with bark roofs, in towns with a council house at the centre.

Not all Cherokee were forced west. A few hundred escaped into the mountains in 1838, and their descendants still live in western North Carolina.

Sequoyah did not invent an alphabet. He created a syllabary, in which each of the 86 symbols stands for a whole syllable, not a single sound.

Frequently asked questions

Where did the Cherokee live?

The Cherokee homeland was in the Appalachian Mountains, in parts of what are now Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and the western parts of North and South Carolina. After 1838 most were forced to Oklahoma.

What did the Cherokee eat?

The Cherokee grew corn, beans and squash, and hunted deer, bear and elk for meat. The Green Corn festival celebrated the first corn of the year.

What kind of houses did the Cherokee live in?

Long ago the Cherokee lived in log cabins with bark roofs, one door, no windows and a smoke hole in the roof. A town had 30 to 60 houses and a council house.

Who was Sequoyah?

Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith and soldier, born around 1775, who created a way of writing Cherokee. By 1821 his syllabary had 86 symbols, and almost the whole nation soon learned to read.

What was the Trail of Tears?

The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of about 16,000 Cherokee from their south-eastern homeland to Oklahoma in 1838–39. Thousands died from cold, hunger and disease on the journey or soon after.

Where do Cherokee people live today?

Cherokee people live all over the United States, with many in Oklahoma and several thousand in western North Carolina. More than a million Americans report Cherokee ancestry.

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Cherokee — the Cherokee homeland, towns, daily life, history, removal, Oklahoma and population today
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Sequoyah — Sequoyah’s life and how he created the syllabary
• US National Park Service: Trail of Tears history — the Indian Removal Act, the timing of removal, numbers removed and deaths
• US National Archives: Cherokee removal — the Treaty of New Echota and the records of removal