Cherokee

Cherokee homelands are the southern Appalachians, the mountain country of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee, where the mother town of Kituwah still stands by the Tuckasegee River. Today the Cherokee Nation, headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, counts about 450,000 enrolled citizens, the most of any US tribal nation, alongside the Eastern Band in North Carolina and the United Keetoowah Band; about 1.5 million Americans identified as Cherokee alone or in combination in the 2020 census.

In 1821 Sequoyah finished the syllabary that made Cherokee a written language almost overnight, within years the Nation had a bilingual newspaper, a constitution and courts. None of it prevented the Treaty of New Echota being forced through, and in 1838–39 the US army drove some 16,000 Cherokee west on the Trail of Tears, at the cost of thousands of lives. In Indian Territory the Nation rebuilt: capital, supreme court, seminaries, much of it still standing in Tahlequah.

Today the Nation runs health systems, courts and businesses, and fights for its treaty rights, including the promise, made in 1835 and pressed in Washington today, of a Cherokee delegate seat in Congress. The language is the sharpest edge: roughly 2,000 first-language speakers remain, and the Nation's immersion schools and language department are working to grow the next thousand.

This is an introduction, the first layer. A full collection, like the Mapuche collection that opened this atlas, follows as research and review are completed for each people.