Cherokee: the story on HearLore

Cherokee

The Cherokee people, known to themselves as Aniyunwiya, the principal people, have inhabited the Southern Appalachian region for thousands of years, long before European contact. Their history is rooted in the river valleys of what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and parts of western South Carolina, northern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. This ancestral homeland covered approximately 40,000 square miles, a vast territory that supported a complex society of permanent towns and hunting grounds extending into Kentucky. The Cherokee language belongs to the Iroquoian family, a linguistic connection that has sparked centuries of debate regarding their origins. Some oral traditions recorded by ethnographer James Mooney in the 19th century suggest the Cherokee migrated southward from the Great Lakes region, an area historically associated with other Iroquoian peoples. However, modern linguistic and archaeological scholarship, including the work of anthropologist Thomas R. Whyte in 2007, proposes that the proto-Iroquoian language likely originated in the Appalachian region itself, with the divergence between Northern and Southern Iroquoian languages beginning approximately 4,000 years ago. This deep history is evidenced by earthwork platform mounds built by ancestors during the earlier Woodland period, such as the Biltmore Mound found south of the Swannanoa River, and the later Pisgah phase of South Appalachian Mississippian culture that arose circa 1000 and lasted to 1500 CE. The Cherokee consider the ancient settlement of Kituwa on the Tuckasegee River to be their original settlement in the Southeast, a place that is now part of the Qualla Boundary, the base of the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The name Cherokee itself remains a subject of scholarly debate, with theories ranging from a Spanish transliteration recorded in 1755 as Chalaque, to a Lower Creek word meaning chuh-log-gee, to a Cherokee word meaning people of the cave. The earliest recorded Spanish expedition to encounter the Cherokee was led by Hernando de Soto in 1540, who passed through present-day South Carolina and western North Carolina, recording a Chalaque people living around the Keowee River. This early contact set the stage for centuries of interaction, conflict, and adaptation that would define the Cherokee experience in the following centuries.

The Deerskin Trade And War

The 18th century brought a dramatic shift in Cherokee life as the deerskin trade became the economic engine of the region, transforming the Cherokee from a primarily agrarian society into a crucial trading partner for British colonists. The Cherokee gave sanctuary to a band of Shawnee in the 1660s, but from 1710 to 1715, they allied with the British to fight the Shawnee, who were allied with French colonists, forcing the Shawnee to move northward. The Cherokee fought with the Yamasee, Catawba, and British in late 1712 and early 1713 against the Tuscarora in the Second Tuscarora War, marking the beginning of a British-Cherokee relationship that remained strong for much of the 18th century. The deerskin trade was so vital that Cherokee deer skins from the cooler mountain hunting grounds were considered of better quality than those supplied by lowland coastal tribes. In January 1716, Cherokee warriors murdered a delegation of Muscogee Creek leaders at the town of Tugaloo, marking their entry into the Yamasee War, which ended in 1717 with peace treaties between the colony of South Carolina and the Creek. Hostility and sporadic raids between the Cherokee and Creek continued for decades, coming to a head at the Battle of Taliwa in 1755, at present-day Ball Ground, Georgia, with the defeat of the Muscogee. The political landscape of the Cherokee was decentralized, with towns acting autonomously. In 1735, the Cherokee were said to have 64 towns and villages, with an estimated fighting force of 6,000 men. However, the arrival of European diseases brought catastrophic consequences. In 1738 and 1739, smallpox epidemics broke out among the Cherokee, who had no natural immunity to the new infectious disease. Nearly half their population died within a year, and hundreds of other Cherokee committed suicide due to their losses and disfigurement from the disease. The British colonial officer Henry Timberlake, born in Virginia, described the Cherokee people as he saw them in 1761, noting the devastation and the resilience of the people. The Anglo-Cherokee War broke out from 1753 to 1755, and British soldiers built forts in Cherokee country to defend against the French in the Seven Years' War. Serious misunderstandings arose quickly between the two allies, resulting in the 1760 Anglo-Cherokee War. King George III's Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade British settlements west of the Appalachian crest, as his government tried to afford some protection from colonial encroachment to the Cherokee and other tribes they depended on as allies. The Crown found the ruling difficult to enforce with colonists, and from 1771 to 1772, North Carolinian settlers squatted on Cherokee lands in Tennessee, forming the Watauga Association. Daniel Boone and his party tried to settle in Kentucky, but the Shawnee, Delaware, Mingo, and some Cherokee attacked a scouting and forage party that included Boone's son, James Boone, and William Russell's son, Henry, who were killed in the skirmish. In 1776, allied with the Shawnee led by Cornstalk, Cherokee attacked settlers in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina in the Second Cherokee War. Overhill Cherokee Nancy Ward, Dragging Canoe's cousin, warned settlers of impending attacks. Provincial militias retaliated, destroying more than 50 Cherokee towns. North Carolina militia in 1776 and 1780 invaded and destroyed the Overhill towns in what is now Tennessee. In 1777, surviving Cherokee town leaders signed treaties with the new states. Dragging Canoe and his band settled along Chickamauga Creek near present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee, where they established 11 new towns. Chickamauga Town was his headquarters and the colonists tended to call his entire band the Chickamauga to distinguish them from other Cherokee. From here he fought a guerrilla war against settlers, which lasted from 1776 to 1794. These are known informally as the Cherokee, American wars, but this is not a historian's term. The first Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse, signed the 7th of November 1794, finally brought peace between the Cherokee and Americans, who had achieved independence from the British Crown.

Who are the Cherokee people and what is their self-designated name?

The Cherokee people, known to themselves as Aniyunwiya, the principal people, have inhabited the Southern Appalachian region for thousands of years. Their ancestral homeland covered approximately 40,000 square miles and included parts of southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and parts of western South Carolina, northern Georgia, and northeastern Alabama.

When did the Cherokee develop a written language and who created it?

Sequoyah introduced the Cherokee syllabary, the first written syllabic form of an American Indian language outside of Central America, in 1821. This innovation allowed the Cherokee to achieve a higher rate of literacy than the whites around them in Georgia by the 1820s.

What happened to the Cherokee during the Trail of Tears in 1838?

Over 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly relocated westward to Indian Territory in 1838 and 1839, a migration known as the Trail of Tears. As many as 4,000 died during the journey due to disease, exposure, and starvation, representing nearly a fifth of the population.

Which Cherokee leader became the last Confederate General to surrender in the American Civil War?

Stand Watie became the last Confederate General to stand down on the 25th of June 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. He was a Brigadier General of the Confederate States and the only other American Indian to hold that rank during the war besides Ely S. Parker.

How many Cherokee citizens are enrolled in the Cherokee Nation today?

The Cherokee Nation has more than 300,000 enrolled citizens, making it the largest of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. The 2020 census recorded a total of 1,130,730 people claiming Cherokee ancestry, though the percentage of full-blood individuals is considered very low.

The Acculturation Era

Following the Cherokee-American wars, the Cherokee lands between the Tennessee and Chattahoochee rivers were remote enough from white settlers to remain independent, but the deerskin trade was no longer feasible on their greatly reduced lands. Over the next several decades, the people of the fledgling Cherokee Nation began to build a new society modeled on the white Southern United States. George Washington sought to civilize Southeastern Native Americans through programs overseen by the Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins. He encouraged the Cherokee to abandon their communal land-tenure and settle on individual farmsteads, which was facilitated by the destruction of many American Indian towns during the American Revolutionary War. The deerskin trade brought white-tailed deer to the brink of extinction, and as pigs and cattle were introduced, they became the principal sources of meat. The government supplied the tribes with spinning wheels and cotton-seed, and men were taught to fence and plow the land, in contrast to their traditional division in which crop cultivation was woman's labor. Americans instructed the women in weaving. Eventually, Hawkins helped them set up smithies, gristmills and cotton plantations. The Cherokee organized a national government under Principal Chiefs Little Turkey, Black Fox, and Pathkiller, all former warriors of Dragging Canoe. The Cherokee triumvirate of James Vann and his protégés Major Ridge and Charles R. Hicks advocated acculturation, formal education, and modern methods of farming. In 1801 they invited Moravian missionaries from North Carolina to teach Christianity and the arts of civilized life. The Moravians and later Congregationalist missionaries ran boarding schools, and a select few students were educated at the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions school in Connecticut. In 1806 a Federal Road from Savannah, Georgia, to Knoxville, Tennessee, was built through Cherokee land. Chief James Vann opened a tavern, inn and ferry across the Chattahoochee and built a cotton-plantation on a spur of the road from Athens, Georgia, to Nashville. His son Rich Joe Vann developed the plantation to 1,000 acres, cultivated by 150 slaves. He exported cotton to England, and owned a steamboat on the Tennessee River. The Cherokee allied with the U.S. against the nativist and pro-British Red Stick faction of the Upper Creek in the Creek War during the War of 1812. Cherokee warriors led by Major Ridge played a major role in General Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Major Ridge moved his family to Rome, Georgia, where he built a substantial house, developed a large plantation and ran a ferry on the Oostanaula River. Although he never learned English, he sent his son and nephews to New England to be educated in mission schools. His interpreter and protégé Chief John Ross, the descendant of several generations of Cherokee women and Scots fur-traders, built a plantation and operated a trading firm and a ferry at Ross' Landing, now Chattanooga, Tennessee. During this period, divisions arose between the acculturated elite and the great majority of Cherokee, who clung to traditional ways of life. Around 1809 Sequoyah began developing a written form of the Cherokee language. He spoke no English, but his experiences as a silversmith dealing regularly with white settlers, and as a warrior at Horseshoe Bend, convinced him the Cherokee needed to develop writing. In 1821, he introduced Cherokee syllabary, the first written syllabic form of an American Indian language outside of Central America. Initially, his innovation was opposed by both Cherokee traditionalists and white missionaries, who sought to encourage the use of English. When Sequoyah taught children to read and write with the syllabary, he reached the adults. By the 1820s, the Cherokee had a higher rate of literacy than the whites around them in Georgia. In 1819, the Cherokee began holding council meetings at New Town, at the headwaters of the Oostanaula, near present-day Calhoun, Georgia. In November 1825, New Town became the capital of the Cherokee Nation, and was renamed New Echota, after the Overhill Cherokee principal town of Chota. Sequoyah's syllabary was adopted. They had developed a police force, a judicial system, and a National Committee. In 1827, the Cherokee Nation drafted a Constitution modeled on the United States, with executive, legislative and judicial branches and a system of checks and balances. The two-tiered legislature was led by Major Ridge and his son John Ridge. Convinced the tribe's survival required English-speaking leaders who could negotiate with the U.S., the legislature appointed John Ross as Principal Chief. A printing press was established at New Echota by the Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester and Major Ridge's nephew Elias Boudinot, who had taken the name of his white benefactor, a leader of the Continental Congress and New Jersey Congressman. They translated the Bible into Cherokee syllabary. Boudinot published the first edition of the bilingual Cherokee Phoenix, the first American Indian newspaper, in February 1828.

The Trail Of Tears

Before the final removal to present-day Oklahoma, many Cherokees relocated to present-day Arkansas, Missouri and Texas. Between 1775 and 1786 the Cherokee, along with people of other nations such as the Choctaw and Chickasaw, began voluntarily settling along the Arkansas and Red Rivers. In 1802, the federal government promised to extinguish Indian titles to lands claimed by Georgia in return for Georgia's cession of the western lands that became Alabama and Mississippi. To convince the Cherokee to move voluntarily in 1815, the US government established a Cherokee Reservation in Arkansas. The reservation boundaries extended from north of the Arkansas River to the southern bank of the White River. Diwali, Sequoyah, Spring Frog and Tatsi and their bands settled there. These Cherokees became known as Old Settlers. The Cherokee eventually migrated as far north as the Missouri Bootheel by 1816. They lived interspersed among the Delawares and Shawnees of that area. The Cherokee in Missouri Territory increased rapidly in population, from 1,000 to 6,000 over the next year, according to reports by Governor William Clark. Increased conflicts with the Osage Nation led to the Battle of Claremore Mound and the eventual establishment of Fort Smith between Cherokee and Osage communities. A group of Cherokee traditionalists led by Diwali moved to Spanish Texas in 1819. Settling near Nacogdoches, they were welcomed by Mexican authorities as potential allies against Anglo-American colonists. The Texas Cherokees were mostly neutral during the Texas War of Independence. In 1836, they signed a treaty with Texas President Sam Houston, an adopted member of the Cherokee tribe. His successor Mirabeau Lamar sent militia to evict them in 1839. Following the War of 1812, and the concurrent Red Stick War, the U.S. government persuaded several groups of Cherokee to a voluntary removal to the Arkansas Territory. These were the Old Settlers, the first of the Cherokee to make their way to what would eventually become Indian Territory, modern day Oklahoma. This effort was headed by Indian Agent Return J. Meigs, and was finalized with the signing of the Jackson and McMinn Treaty, giving the Old Settlers undisputed title to the lands designated for their use. During this time, Georgia focused on removing the Cherokee's neighbors, the Lower Creek. Georgia Governor George Troup and his cousin William McIntosh, chief of the Lower Creek, signed the Treaty of Indian Springs in 1825, ceding the last Muscogee lands claimed by Georgia. The state's northwestern border reached the Chattahoochee, the border of the Cherokee Nation. In 1829, gold was discovered at Dahlonega, on Cherokee land claimed by Georgia. The Georgia Gold Rush was the first in U.S. history, and state officials demanded that the federal government expel the Cherokee. When Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as president in 1829, Georgia gained a strong ally in Washington. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, authorizing the forcible relocation of American Indians east of the Mississippi to a new Indian Territory. Jackson claimed the removal policy was an effort to prevent the Cherokee from facing extinction as a people, which he considered the fate that the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware had suffered. There is, however, ample evidence that the Cherokee were adapting to modern farming techniques. A modern analysis shows that the area was in general in a state of economic surplus and could have accommodated both the Cherokee and new settlers. The Cherokee brought their grievances to a US judicial review that set a precedent in Indian country. John Ross traveled to Washington, D.C., and won support from National Republican Party leaders Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Samuel Worcester campaigned on behalf of the Cherokee in New England, where their cause was taken up by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In June 1830, a delegation led by Chief Ross defended Cherokee rights before the U.S. Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. In 1831, Georgia militia arrested Samuel Worcester for residing on Indian lands without a state permit, imprisoning him in Milledgeville. In Worcester v. Georgia, the US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that American Indian nations were distinct, independent political communities retaining their original natural rights, and entitled to federal protection from the actions of state governments that infringed on their sovereignty. Worcester v. Georgia is considered one of the most important dicta in law dealing with Native Americans. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's ruling, as he needed to conciliate Southern sectionalism during the era of the Nullification Crisis. His landslide reelection in 1832 emboldened calls for Cherokee removal. Georgia sold Cherokee lands to its citizens in a Land Lottery, and the state militia occupied New Echota. The Cherokee National Council, led by John Ross, fled to Red Clay, a remote valley north of Georgia's land claim. Ross had the support of Cherokee traditionalists, who could not imagine removal from their ancestral lands. A small group known as the Ridge Party or the Treaty Party saw relocation as inevitable and believed the Cherokee Nation needed to make the best deal to preserve their rights in Indian Territory. Led by Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot, they represented the Cherokee elite, whose homes, plantations and businesses were confiscated, or under threat of being taken by white squatters with Georgia land-titles. With capital to acquire new lands, they were more inclined to accept relocation. On the 29th of December 1835, the Ridge Party signed the Treaty of New Echota, stipulating terms and conditions for the removal of the Cherokee Nation. In return for their lands, the Cherokee were promised a large tract in the Indian Territory, $5 million, and $300,000 for improvements on their new lands. John Ross gathered over 15,000 signatures for a petition to the U.S. Senate, insisting that the treaty was invalid because it did not have the support of the majority of the Cherokee people. The Senate passed the Treaty of New Echota by a one-vote margin. It was enacted into law in May 1836. Two years later, President Martin Van Buren ordered 7,000 federal troops and state militia under General Winfield Scott into Cherokee lands to evict the tribe. Over 16,000 Cherokee were forcibly relocated westward to Indian Territory in 1838, 1839, a migration known as the Trail of Tears or in Cherokee Tsalagi, The Trail Where They Cried, although it is described by another word, The Removal. Marched over across Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri and Arkansas, the people suffered from disease, exposure and starvation, and as many as 4,000 died, nearly a fifth of the population. As some Cherokees were slaveholders, they took enslaved African Americans with them west of the Mississippi. Intermarried European Americans and missionaries also walked the Trail of Tears. Ross preserved a vestige of independence by negotiating permission for the Cherokee to conduct their own removal under U.S. supervision. In keeping with the tribe's blood law that prescribed the death penalty for Cherokee who sold lands, Ross's son arranged the murder of the leaders of the Treaty Party. On the 22nd of June 1839, a party of twenty-five Ross supporters assassinated Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. The party included Daniel Colston, John Vann, Archibald, James and Joseph Spear. Boudinot's brother Stand Watie fought and survived that day, escaping to Arkansas. In 1827, Sequoyah had led a delegation of Old Settlers to Washington, D.C., to negotiate for the exchange of Arkansas land for land in Indian Territory. After the Trail of Tears, he helped mediate divisions between the Old Settlers and the rival factions of the more recent arrivals. In 1839, as President of the Western Cherokee, Sequoyah signed an Act of Union with John Ross that reunited the two groups of the Cherokee Nation.

Civil War And Division

The Cherokee living along the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains were the most conservative and isolated from European-American settlements. They rejected the reforms of the Cherokee Nation. When the Cherokee government ceded all territory east of the Little Tennessee River to North Carolina in 1819, they withdrew from the Nation. William Holland Thomas, a white store owner and state legislator from Jackson County, North Carolina, helped over 600 Cherokee from Qualla Town obtain North Carolina citizenship, which exempted them from forced removal. Over 400 Cherokee either hid from Federal troops in the remote Snowbird Mountains, under the leadership of Tsali, or belonged to the former Valley Towns area around the Cheoah River who negotiated with the state government to stay in North Carolina. An additional 400 Cherokee stayed on reserves in Southeast Tennessee, North Georgia, and Northeast Alabama, as citizens of their respective states. Together, these groups were the ancestors of the federally recognized Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and some of the state-recognized tribes in surrounding states. The American Civil War was devastating for both East and Western Cherokee. The Eastern Band, aided by William Thomas, became the Thomas Legion of Cherokee Indians and Highlanders, fighting for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Cherokee in Indian Territory divided into Union and Confederate factions. Stand Watie, the leader of the Ridge Party, raised a regiment for Confederate service in 1861. John Ross, who had reluctantly agreed to ally with the Confederacy, was captured by Federal troops in 1862. He lived in a self-imposed exile in Philadelphia, supporting the Union. In the Indian Territory, the national council of those who supported the Union voted to abolish slavery in the Cherokee Nation in 1863, but they were not the majority slaveholders and the vote had little effect on those supporting the Confederacy. Watie was elected Principal Chief of the pro-Confederacy majority. A master of hit-and-run cavalry tactics, Watie fought those Cherokee loyal to John Ross and Federal troops in Indian Territory and Arkansas, capturing Union supply trains and steamboats, and saving a Confederate army by covering their retreat after the Battle of Pea Ridge in March 1862. He became a Brigadier General of the Confederate States, the only other American Indian to hold the rank in the American Civil War was Ely S. Parker with the Union Army. On the 25th of June 1865, two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Stand Watie became the last Confederate General to stand down. After the Civil War, the U.S. government required the Cherokee Nation to sign a new treaty, because of its alliance with the Confederacy. The U.S. required the 1866 Treaty to provide for the emancipation of all Cherokee slaves, and full citizenship to all Cherokee Freedmen and all African Americans who chose to continue to reside within tribal lands, so that they shall have all the rights of native Cherokees. Both before and after the Civil War, some Cherokee intermarried or had relationships with African Americans, just as they had with whites. Many Cherokee Freedmen have been active politically within the tribe. The US government also acquired easement rights to the western part of the territory, which became the Oklahoma Territory, for the construction of railroads. Development and settlers followed the railroads. By the late 19th century, the government believed that Native Americans would be better off if each family owned its own land. The Dawes Act of 1887 provided for the breakup of commonly held tribal land into individual household allotments. Native Americans were registered on the Dawes Rolls and allotted land from the common reserve. The U.S. government counted the remainder of tribal land as surplus and sold it to non-Cherokee individuals. The Curtis Act of 1898 dismantled tribal governments, courts, schools, and other civic institutions. For Indian Territory, this meant the abolition of the Cherokee courts and governmental systems. This was seen as necessary before the Oklahoma and Indian territories could be admitted as a combined state. In 1905, the Five Civilized Tribes of the Indian Territory proposed the creation of the State of Sequoyah as one to be exclusively Native American but failed to gain support in Washington, D.C. In 1907, the Oklahoma and Indian Territories entered the union as the state of Oklahoma. By the late 19th century, the Eastern Band of Cherokee were laboring under the constraints of a segregated society. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, conservative white Democrats regained power in North Carolina and other southern states. They proceeded to effectively disenfranchise all blacks and many poor whites by new constitutions and laws related to voter registration and elections. They passed Jim Crow laws that divided society into white and colored, mostly to control freedmen. Cherokee and other Native Americans were classified on the colored side and suffered the same racial segregation and disenfranchisement as former slaves. They also often lost their historical documentation for identification as Indians, when the Southern states classified them as colored. Black Americans and Native Americans would not have their constitutional rights as U.S. citizens enforced until after the Civil Rights Movement secured passage of civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, and the federal government began to monitor voter registration and elections, as well as other programs.

Modern Cherokee Tribes

The modern Cherokee Nation, in recent times, has expanded economically, providing equality and prosperity for its citizens. Under the leadership of Principal Chief Bill John Baker, the Nation has significant business, corporate, real estate, and agricultural interests. The Cherokee Nation controls Cherokee Nation Entertainment, Cherokee Nation Industries, and Cherokee Nation Businesses. CNI is a very large defense contractor that creates thousands of jobs in eastern Oklahoma for Cherokee citizens. The Cherokee Nation has constructed health clinics throughout Oklahoma, contributed to community development programs, built roads and bridges, constructed learning facilities and universities for its citizens, taught the practice of Gadugi and self-reliance, and improved language immersion programs for youth. The Cherokee Nation hosts the Cherokee National Holiday on Labor Day weekend each year, and 80,000 to 90,000 Cherokee citizens travel to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for the festivities. It publishes the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribal newspaper, in both English and Cherokee, using the Sequoyah syllabary. The Cherokee Nation council appropriates money for historic foundations concerned with the preservation of Cherokee culture. The Cherokee Nation supports the Cherokee Nation Film festivals in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and participates in the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, led by Chief Richard Sneed, hosts over a million visitors a year to cultural attractions of the sovereign nation. The reservation, the Qualla Boundary, has a population of over 8,000 Cherokee, primarily direct descendants of Indians who managed to avoid The Trail of Tears. Attractions include the Oconaluftee Indian Village, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, and the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual. Founded in 1946, the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual is the country's oldest and foremost Native American crafts cooperative. The outdoor drama Unto These Hills, which debuted in 1950, recently broke record attendance sales. Together with Harrah's Cherokee Casino and Hotel, Cherokee Indian Hospital and Cherokee Boys Club, the tribe generated $78 million in the local economy in 2005. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians formed their government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and gained federal recognition in 1946. Enrollment in the tribe is limited to people with a quarter or more of Cherokee blood. Many members of the UKB are descended from Old Settlers, Cherokees who moved to Arkansas and Oklahoma. The Cherokee Nation has more than 300,000 enrolled citizens, making it the largest of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States. Of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band maintain their headquarters in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where the majority of their citizens reside. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is based on the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina and is largely descended from Cherokee ancestors who resisted or avoided removal and remained in the region. Although they relinquished tribal citizenship during this period and became state and U.S. citizens, they reorganized in the late 19th century and achieved federal recognition as a tribe. On the 9th of July 2020, the United States Supreme Court decided in the McGirt v Oklahoma decision in a criminal jurisdiction case that roughly half the land of the state of Oklahoma made up of tribal nations like the Cherokee are officially Native American tribal land jurisdictions. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, himself a Cherokee Nation citizen, sought to reverse the Supreme Court decision. The following year, the state of Oklahoma couldn't block federal action to grant the Cherokee Nation, along with the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole Nations, reservation status. In the 2020 census a total of 1,130,730 people claimed Cherokee ancestry. However the percentage of full-blood individuals is probably very low considering that the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reported having only 395 full-blood members. Perhaps there is a larger number of full-blood individuals among the United Keetoowah Band and among the Cherokee Nation.