“Cherokee is a Choctaw name for a people who never called themselves that.”
The people who built towns across the southern Appalachian Mountains, from what is now western North Carolina into Georgia and Tennessee, called themselves Aniyvwiya, a word in their own language meaning the Principal People. They also used the name Tsalagi or Chalagi in certain dialects to refer to themselves. Neither of these became the word the outside world used. The name Cherokee, which entered European records in the 1670s, almost certainly came from the Choctaw language spoken by neighboring peoples to the southwest, who applied a term meaning people who live in the mountains, or in some analyses cave people, to the highland nation visible across the ridges.
The exact Choctaw source is debated, but the leading candidate is a form built on a Choctaw root for cave or mountain hollow, applied to highland people seen from a distance. Creek speakers used a similar form, Tciloki, and Spanish colonial documents from the 1560s through the 1600s show variant spellings including Chalaque and Cheraqui. English colonists in Virginia and Carolina got the word from indigenous trade intermediaries rather than directly from the Cherokee. By 1674, when Virginia trader Abraham Wood organized expeditions westward into Cherokee territory, the English spelling had stabilized enough to appear consistently in official correspondence.
The Cherokee were one of the most populous peoples in the eastern woodlands, with perhaps 22,000 people and sixty towns at first sustained European contact. They engaged in trade, diplomacy, and war with British, French, and Spanish colonial powers through the eighteenth century, and their name became known in European capitals. The American Revolutionary War divided Cherokee towns between those who supported the British and those who sought accommodation with the new states. In 1821, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah completed a syllabary for the Cherokee language, creating a writing system that allowed his community to achieve widespread literacy within a few years.
Today Cherokee refers to the people themselves, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, as well as their language, a Southern Iroquoian tongue with around 2,000 fluent speakers as of 2020. The name also marks the landscape: Cherokee County appears in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. Since 1974 it has also belonged to one of the best-known sport utility vehicles in American automotive history. The word Cherokee is distributed across an American landscape shaped by the removal of the people it names, and whether it belongs there is a question the Principal People continue to raise.
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Today
The word Cherokee is now distributed across an American landscape that was shaped by the removal of the people it names. There are Cherokee streets, Cherokee counties, Cherokee high schools, and an automotive nameplate that has sold millions of units. The name is part of American geography in the way that Latin is part of medical terminology: so absorbed into the background that most people who use it have no occasion to ask where it came from or what it cost.
The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina both continue to assert that the name and the culture belong to living people, not to a usable American past. The Cherokee language is actively taught in tribal schools, and the syllabary Sequoyah completed in 1821 is still in use. A name given by outsiders, filtered through Choctaw and colonial English, now appears in the Cherokee people's own documents alongside their own script. They took back the label and wrote it in their own hand.
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