Portal:Oklahoma/Selected article/January, 2008
The Cherokee are a people from
Ozark Plateau. They were one of the tribes referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, they are the most numerous of the 563 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.[1]
Of the southeastern Indian confederacies of the late 1600s and early 1700s (Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, etc), the Cherokee were one of the most populous and powerful, and were relatively isolated due to their hilly and mountainous homeland. Beginning at about the time of the
Shawnee and engaged in raids against colonial settlements (see Cherokee–American wars). Some of these early dissidents eventually moved across the Mississippi River to areas that would later become the states of Arkansas and Missouri. Their settlements were established on the St. Francis and the White Rivers
by 1800.
The
Delaware
" (Wishart 1995, 120). However there is ample evidence that the Cherokee were adapting modern farming techniques, and a modern analysis shows that the area was in general in a state of economic surplus (Wishart 1995).
In Oklahoma, the Dawes Act of 1887 broke up the tribal land base. Under the Curtis Act of 1898, Cherokee courts and governmental systems were abolished by the U.S. Federal Government. (read more . . . )
- ^ "The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2000" (PDF). Census 2000 Brief. 2002-02-01. Retrieved 2007-03-10.