Southern Appalachians
Cherokee medicine
In the southern Appalachians for centuries; a living tradition
The Cherokee call themselves Aniyvwiya, 'the real people', or Tsalagi. They lived in a large area of the southern Appalachians, in what are now North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Virginia. Their towns lay along rivers such as the Oconaluftee, the Tuckasegee and the Little Tennessee. The mother town was Kituwah, on the Tuckasegee, and one of the old names of the people is Ani-Kituwah, 'the people of Kituwah'. Around 1821 Sequoyah devised a writing system for Cherokee, and within a few years thousands of Cherokee could read and write. In 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix appeared, the first Indigenous newspaper in North America. Shortly afterwards, with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and a treaty most Cherokee had never accepted, they were driven from their land. In 1838 and 1839 the US Army drove them to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. On that Trail of Tears perhaps four thousand died, nearly a fifth of the people. A few hundred hid in the mountains or were allowed to stay; from them came the Eastern Band. At the end of the 1880s the ethnologist James Mooney worked among the Eastern Band. From the healer Ayunini, Swimmer, and others he received notebooks of sacred formulas, written in Sequoyah's syllabary. He published them in 1891 and the stories in 1900. A century later J. T. Garrett, himself a member of the Eastern Band and for years director of the Cherokee hospital, wrote down what elders had taught him about the plants.
