Trail ties nation together
By Pam Sohn psohn@timesfreepress.com
Online: Hear Chris Eyre talk about the upcoming PBS series on American Indians. Watch video on local filming for the series. Comment. Gayle Ross has spent her life listening to stories about her Cherokee heritage. “I grew up with stories of our ancestor and the Trail of Tears. It gave me a lifelong love of our stories and our history,” said Ms. Ross, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Chief John Ross, for whom Ross’s Landing is named. She’ll get to swap those stories with lots of people this week. For the first time in 25 years, descendants of Cherokees forced from the Chattanooga area are reuniting with those who stayed to relive family history, reconnect with their roots and set Cherokee government policy. Cherokee heritage is coming to life here as the two Cherokee nations — East and West — come together this week for a reunion at Red Clay, Tenn., the last eastern capital of the Cherokee Nation before the Trail of Tears, in which about 17,000 Cherokees were forced out of the Chattanooga and North Georgia area. The reunion between those groups “will be fantastic,” said Ms. Ross. “The Cherokee people know how to have fun.” The Cherokee Nation, which
once included seven states in the Southeast, today is in two parts: the Eastern Band with about 14,000 members and the Oklahoma Cherokee Nation with about 250,000 members. The first and last time the two nations met here was in 1984. More than 34,000 people attended that council, according to officials. At that time, the council lit the eternal flame of the Cherokee Nation that burns at Red Clay, located in Bradley County between Cleveland and Dalton. This year, the timing couldn’t be better. PBS’ five-part series, billed as a project that establishes native history as an essential part of American history, premiered Monday and continues each Monday through May 11. The Trail of Tears episode, filmed in Southeast Tennessee and North Georgia, is scheduled to air April 27. There will be a special screening of that episode at 3 p.m. on Friday at Red Clay. The spirit of the Cherokee people is one thing that stuck with Chris Eyre, the Sioux-born director of three of the five PBS documentaries airing weekly through May under the title “We Shall Remain: America Through Native Eyes.” Especially stirring, he said, was the Cherokees’ petitioning of both the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Congress in the 1830s, both efforts to keep their land. John Ross, a part Cherokee-part Scot chief, won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1828 that said the Cherokee were entitled to stay here. When then-president Andrew Jackson chose to ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling, John Ridge, born on Hiwassee Island, accumulated 15,000 Cherokee signatures on a scroll to petition Congress to stop the removal. “They had to ride over hundreds of miles to collect those signatures. Then they took those pages and sewed them together until they had a scroll,” Mr. Eyre said. “When it was rolled out, it was 160 feet of signatures of Cherokee people asking Congress to not remove them.” But it did no good. In 1838 and 1839, all Native Americans were forcibly removed on the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma. As many as 4,000 died along the way. Last month, Congress designated more pieces of the Trail of Tears. An earlier law passed in 2006 designated trails only in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Now, the new act adds two primary westward trails — the Benge and Bell routes — as well as water routes on the Tennessee and Arkansas rivers, along with the “round-up routes” from Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama on which the Cherokee were gathered and marched to holding camps before the journey west. U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, RTenn., who authored and sponsored the legislation, called the work “a labor of love from the very start.” Pamela Bennett, a North Georgian and founding president of Friends of Red Clay State Historic Park, said she is looking forward to the ceremonial lighting of the eternal flame during the event on Friday. “To me that’s really significant,” she said. “It means renewal. It means people really do survive — no matter what hardships they endure.” In the Cherokee culture, the Sacred Fire burned seven sacred woods. It was kept burning in the council house of each village and was used to light the fires of every Cherokee household. It was a symbol of strength and unity among the Cherokee people. On another personal level, more people than ever before are seeking to learn their own long-buried native heritage. “In the last couple of years, there’s been a lot more interest, probably because we have a lot more microfilm available now,” said Karen Brown, a librarian at the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library. In addition to the actual questionnaires filled out by Cherokees and other Native Americans in the years after the removal as they applied for tribal citizenship — documents known as the Dawes Roll — the library also has stockade records that show names of Cherokees receiving specific amounts of corn, salt and other rations. The records were donated by the descendants of an Army man who was in charge of keeping the books on rations as Cherokee and Creek Indians were rounded up to be moved westward. Actors Wes Studi, front; Andrew Hair, back left; and Freddie Douglas, back right, exit the council building at New Echota Historic Site during filming for a scene of “We Shall Remain.”
