Cherokee

The Cherokee (Tsalagi, Aniyvwiya) are an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands whose ancestral towns lined the river valleys of southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, western South Carolina, northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama, some forty thousand square miles, with hunting grounds into Kentucky. Their language belongs to the Iroquoian family, a southern island in a Muskogean sea, and tradition remembers a southward migration from the Great Lakes. Seven matrilineal clans governed palisaded towns around council houses, farming corn, beans and squash, playing stickball, and keeping the Green Corn ceremony. Sequoyah's 1821 syllabary made the Cherokee the most literate nation in North America, with their own newspaper, constitution and schools. The 1830 Removal Act forced most west on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, where the Cherokee Nation is today the largest tribal nation in the United States; the Eastern Band endures in the North Carolina mountains, keeping the Tsalagi language and the Green Corn fire.