Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Cherokee Nation has more than 300,000 enrolled citizens, making it the largest of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. There are also two other federally recognized Cherokee tribes: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.
The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation of over 16,000 Cherokee westward to Indian Territory in 1838-1839, following the Treaty of New Echota signed in December 1835. The Cherokee were marched more than 800 miles across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, and as many as 4,000 died from disease, exposure, and starvation, nearly a fifth of those relocated.
Sequoyah was a Cherokee silversmith who, around 1809, began developing a written syllabary for the Cherokee language, which he introduced in 1821. It was the first written syllabic form of any American Indian language outside of Central America and spread so rapidly that by the 1820s the Cherokee had achieved a literacy rate higher than the surrounding white population of Georgia.
The Cherokee speak a Southern Iroquoian language, part of the Iroquoian language family. Linguistic studies suggest the Cherokee split from other Iroquoian speakers approximately 3,500-3,800 years ago, with glottochronology placing the divergence between about 1500 and 1800 BCE. Whether the Cherokee migrated south from the Great Lakes region or whether proto-Iroquoian itself originated in Appalachia remains debated among scholars.
The Cherokee Phoenix was the first American Indian newspaper, published in February 1828 at New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. It was bilingual, printed in both English and Cherokee using Sequoyah's syllabary, and was established by the Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester and Elias Boudinot.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are largely descended from Cherokee who lived along the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains and had withdrawn from the Cherokee Nation in 1819. More than 400 hid from federal troops in the remote Snowbird Mountains under Tsali, while others negotiated with state authorities to remain. A white legislator named William Holland Thomas helped over 600 Cherokee from Qualla Town obtain North Carolina citizenship, legally exempting them from forced removal.