The Cherokees lived in their own nation in the southeastern United States, mostly in what is now Georgia, North and South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. Of all the Native American groups living in the Southeast in the early 1800s, the Cherokees were the most successful at assimilating—adopting parts of another culture different from their own. Because of this, the Cherokees were known as one of the “civilized tribes” who had taken on American ways.

In this lesson, you will learn about how the Cherokees assimilated parts of the culture of the white American South and whether this helped them to keep their land.

Goals
Here are the big ideas you will learn about in this lesson:

• Cherokee culture became more like American culture as Americans settled around Cherokee lands.
• The U.S. government forced the Cherokees to leave their land because many other groups of Americans wanted the gold found there.

Strategies
You will be using many reading and writing strategies to complete this lesson. The key strategies that you will focus on are:

• Categorizing basic facts and ideas
• Making inferences
• Determining important information
• Sequencing events

• removal
• treaty

Hundreds of years before white settlers came to America to create a new nation, Cherokees lived well off the land. Everyone in a Cherokee village could use the surrounding land—no one person owned it. Women did most of the farming, while the men hunted. Cherokee summer houses were made of wooden sticks covered in bark or clay; the winter houses were partially underground and round on top.

When white Americans began settling around them, the Cherokees began to adopt parts of this new culture, like living in wooden houses and owning land. They began to rely on farming more than hunting for their food. Rich Cherokees had plantations worked by hired men and, like white plantation owners, even enslaved black people.

Most Native American groups, including the Cherokees, did not have a system of writing. But the Cherokees saw how important writing was in other American cultures, so they learned to read and write in English. They also created a Cherokee alphabet so they could read and write in their own language. In this video, you will learn how a Cherokee man named Sequoyah created the Cherokee alphabet. As you watch, think about how this alphabet was an important tool that the Cherokees used to preserve parts of their own culture while assimilating parts of American culture, including the English language.

Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

How did Sequoyah's Cherokee alphabet change the Cherokee way of life?

As the population of the United States moved closer to the Cherokee Nation, Cherokee leaders agreed to give up some of their land to the newly arriving Americans. They did this for two reasons:

• First, they wanted to be seen as reasonable people who treated these Americans as their friends and neighbors, not as their enemies.
• Second, they did not want to fight a war. Native Americans who went to war to keep their lands had almost always been defeated. Sometimes the U.S. Army attacked them. More often, they were just outnumbered by the ever-growing population of American settlers and realized they would not be able to defeat them.

The Cherokees' willingness to compromise helped them to live in peace with their American neighbors for several decades.

In the late 1820s, gold was discovered on Cherokee land. Click "View" on the left to see a map of where it was found.

People from the neighboring state of Georgia wanted that gold. Georgia passed laws that took away Cherokee rights and started giving away Cherokee land to Georgians. When the Cherokees protested to the U.S. government, they found that the new president, Andrew Jackson, would not help them.

In 1830, with Jackson's support, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The act gave Native Americans new land west of the Mississippi River in return for their giving up their land in the Southeast. The Cherokees knew this was unfair, and they were determined to fight the act.

What was the purpose of the Indian Removal Act?

You have learned how the Cherokees assimilated parts of American culture and struggled to keep their land.

Now show what you have learned so far about the Cherokees by answering these three questions. Be sure to save all your answers before you go to the next screen.

In this lesson, you have seen how the Cherokees successfully assimilated American culture to survive as an independent nation within the United States. Now you will read more about how the Cherokees fought the Indian Removal Act, and what happened when that fight failed.

Click "View" on the left to read the passage.

After you have finished the reading, write two to three sentences about why you think the Cherokee assimilation strategy to keep the Cherokee Nation safe finally failed.

In June 1838, the army began to force groups of Cherokees to leave. The second group, which left in October, had to walk for five to seven months during a terribly cold and snowy winter. As many as 4,000 Cherokees died on that journey—known as the Trail of Tears.

This video shows you what happened when the Cherokees were forced to leave their land. As you watch the video, think about why the Cherokees were unable to stop the U.S. government from enforcing the Indian Removal Act against them. Click "View" on the left to watch the video.

After you watch the video, click "View" on the bottom left to look at a map of the three trails on which the Cherokees traveled to reach the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

What happened to the Cherokees in 1838 after the federal government forced them off of their land?

You will now check your understanding of the vocabulary words for this lesson by placing them in sentences. Click "View" on the left to begin the activity.

Before moving to the next screen, choose two words from the vocabulary list and write a new sentence for each word.

Vocabulary words: assimilate, civilized, culture, removal, treaty

As the videos and the reading passage have shown, the Cherokee story began with assimilation, was followed by a fight with the U.S. government, and ended with removal. In this activity, you will sort information on a concept map to describe different events in the Cherokee story. Each event belongs under a specific section in the map.

Click "View" on the left to begin the activity. Your teacher will review the answers with you.

Then, before moving on to the final assignment, you may want to watch this lesson's videos again or reread the passage.

The Cherokee Alphabet

Video: 1m 20s

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The Cherokee Removal

Video: 3m 41s

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Assimilation vs. Removal

Document

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In this lesson, you have learned about the assimilation strategy of the Cherokees that worked for a number of years. You have also learned that this strategy finally failed to protect the Cherokees from land- and gold-hungry settlers. You will now write an essay that shares what you have learned and what you think about it.

Begin by reviewing your notes. Click "review my work" above and view or print out the screen that pops up.

Final Assignment Instructions

• Download Trail of Tears: The Cherokee Fight Against Removal—Final Assignment (PDF).
• Choose one of the topics in the PDF and write an essay.
• Organize your response so that it includes at least three supporting details that you have learned from the reading passage, video(s), and other materials in this lesson.
• Use at least three vocabulary words (or a form of the words) as part of your supporting details. For example, for the word jump, you could use jumps, jumped, or jumping.