A serious study of Cherokee origins points toward: the relatively late arrival in the Southern Appalachians of those who could be considered “ancestors” of the Cherokees, and an even later coalescence of various cultural groups into a group distinctly identifiable as the “Cherokee”
Nevertheless, many people are under
the impression that any and all native inhabitants of the Southern Appalachians
were Cherokees, and that they occupied this region for thousands of years.
I’ve already alluded to many reasons for
this line of thought. The purpose of
this post is to focus on one particular phrase:
“since time immemorial”
I’ll admit becoming overly sensitized
to the term, seeing how it is used to support a false narrative. A google search of “Cherokee time immemorial”
demonstrates its ubiquity.
But why this choice of words?
We have a pretty clear idea of how it
all got started. But first, a look at
contemporary usage of the term.
In Christopher B. Teuton’s aptly
titled book, Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club:
I had known Cherokee history mostly
through books. I had learned that since
time immemorial, the Cherokees have claimed the mountains and valleys of
Southern Appalachia as their homeland….
He would certainly get that idea if he
listened to the Cherokee Chamber of Commerce:
A History Measured in Eons
No one knows exactly how long the Cherokee have lived in Western North Carolina. Artifacts that have been found indicate people lived here more than 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, and ancient Cherokee tales describe hunts of the mastodon that once foraged here….
A History Measured in Eons
No one knows exactly how long the Cherokee have lived in Western North Carolina. Artifacts that have been found indicate people lived here more than 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, and ancient Cherokee tales describe hunts of the mastodon that once foraged here….
At the time
the first Europeans came in the 1500s, the
Cherokee were a settled, agricultural people living in villages consisting of
30 to 60 houses and a large council house.... The large council houses were
frequently located on mounds and were also the site of the sacred fire, which the
Cherokee had kept burning from time
immemorial.
That passage of prose is dissembling
of Clintonesque proportions. Maybe I’m
giving the writer too much credit (or blame) but this appears to be a very carefully
calibrated statement. It doesn’t actually say Cherokees were the ones hunting
mastodons. And the geographic location
of their sacred fire isn’t really specified.
But a casual reader is liable to come away with the idea that Cherokees
in Western North Carolina warmed their hands by the sacred fire ever since the
Ice Age.
Here’s how Thayer Watkins, an
economics professor at San Jose State University, might respond to the implied claims of the Cherokee Chamber:
The image that twentieth century
American liberals tried to promote of the native peoples of the Americas living
happily where they were from time immemorial until Columbus brought destruction
to them is not factually correct. There were many large scale shifts in the
populations of the Americas carried out by conquest and as often as not the
Europeans displaced not the time immemorial residents of an area but the last
conquerors of it.
Though the preponderance of the
evidence suggests that Watkins’ description applies to the Cherokee, “time
immemorial” is employed in many contexts.
Last year, officials with the Eastern
Band and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park discussed special rules for gathering plants in the Park. As
reported in a local paper:
Cherokee people have gathered traditional plants and medicines on their homeland areas since time immemorial.
The phrase doesn't always apply to their occupation of the Southern Appalachians, though. In Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance, Clint Carroll says:
Cherokees have been going to water since time immemorial for purification and renewal.
Cherokee people have gathered traditional plants and medicines on their homeland areas since time immemorial.
The phrase doesn't always apply to their occupation of the Southern Appalachians, though. In Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance, Clint Carroll says:
Cherokees have been going to water since time immemorial for purification and renewal.
In a newspaper article last year,
women were singled out:
Since time immemorial, Cherokee women
have led their people through good times and bad times.
In the year 2000, the phrase was uttered in connection with the Cherokee contribution to the National Millennial Time Capsule (to be opened in the year 2100):
The 85-letter Cherokee alphabet was submitted by Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.... She called it "the language that has survived on this land since time immemorial. It is our hope for the future that the Cherokee language will still be spoken 100 years from now."
In the year 2000, the phrase was uttered in connection with the Cherokee contribution to the National Millennial Time Capsule (to be opened in the year 2100):
The 85-letter Cherokee alphabet was submitted by Wilma Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.... She called it "the language that has survived on this land since time immemorial. It is our hope for the future that the Cherokee language will still be spoken 100 years from now."
The Cherokee One Feather’s report on a
2012 archaeological conference is very revealing:
Dr. Brett Riggs, research archaeologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, gave a talk entitled "The Archaeology of Cherokee Life at the Time of Removal." Dr. Riggs, who has worked for and with the Eastern Band of Cherokee on various projects since the early 1990s, commented, "These mountains, here in southwestern North Carolina, have been the home of Cherokee people since time immemorial."...Tom Belt, WCU Cherokee Language instructor, said of Riggs, "He's such a friend." Jokingly, he then added, "He's the first archaeologist to have a name in Cherokee that's not vulgar."
Well, no wonder, seeing as how he has mastered that "time immemorial" thing.
The phrase is used to alert outdoor enthusiasts to the Qualla Boundary's new mountain bike trail, as reported by Indian Country Today:
The Eastern Band of Cherokee's continued foray into eco-tourism makes sense, considering they've been preserving the land for time immemorial while living in harmony with nature: its mountains, woods, rivers and falls.
Dr. Brett Riggs, research archaeologist at UNC-Chapel Hill, gave a talk entitled "The Archaeology of Cherokee Life at the Time of Removal." Dr. Riggs, who has worked for and with the Eastern Band of Cherokee on various projects since the early 1990s, commented, "These mountains, here in southwestern North Carolina, have been the home of Cherokee people since time immemorial."...Tom Belt, WCU Cherokee Language instructor, said of Riggs, "He's such a friend." Jokingly, he then added, "He's the first archaeologist to have a name in Cherokee that's not vulgar."
Well, no wonder, seeing as how he has mastered that "time immemorial" thing.
The phrase is used to alert outdoor enthusiasts to the Qualla Boundary's new mountain bike trail, as reported by Indian Country Today:
The Eastern Band of Cherokee's continued foray into eco-tourism makes sense, considering they've been preserving the land for time immemorial while living in harmony with nature: its mountains, woods, rivers and falls.
Before his death in 1931, Horace
Kephart wrote The Cherokees of the Smoky Mountain which included the magic
words:
They hold what is known as the Qualla boundary, about ninety square miles of rough country on the southerly slope of the Great Smoky Mountains. From time immemorial this natural fastness has been a refuge for their people in case of disaster.
In June 2017, shortly after taking office, Principal Chief Richard Sneed just had to say it:
That is our core value as a people. It's what has set us apart from time immemorial as Cherokee people, is that we do things the right way...
They hold what is known as the Qualla boundary, about ninety square miles of rough country on the southerly slope of the Great Smoky Mountains. From time immemorial this natural fastness has been a refuge for their people in case of disaster.
In June 2017, shortly after taking office, Principal Chief Richard Sneed just had to say it:
That is our core value as a people. It's what has set us apart from time immemorial as Cherokee people, is that we do things the right way...
In 2008, a joint council of the
Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians agreed to a resolution
opposing “fabricated Cherokee tribes,” the very first “whereas” contains a
familiar phrase:
WHEREAS, the Cherokee Nation and the
Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians since time immemorial have exercised the
sovereign rights of self- government on behalf of the Cherokee people…
Some sources indicate usage of the
phrase in the early nineteenth century. In
1809, John Norton wrote of the Cherokees:
They said, that to the country they
now possessed, they had an inalienable right, from their ancestors who had
possessed it from time immemorial….
A missionary living among the
Cherokees in 1823 reported that “the worst crime in the eyes of a true Cherokee
has, from time immemorial, been that of infidelity to his native land.”
In 1826, Charles Hicks wrote a series
of letters that included memories of growing up Cherokee, to outline “the
traditions of [the Cherokee] nation which have been handed down from our
forefathers from time immemorial.” He
recalled “orationary discourses” traditionally given at tribal festivals and
councils, in which chiefs such as Oconostota,
and Attacullaculla delivered “sacred discourse, in a kind of poetic style” for stories of the settlement of the Tuckaseegee and Hiwassee river valleys.
Around 1830, “time immemorial” took on
major significance. Its usage at that point in history probably explains why it continues to be so popular, whether contemporary
speakers are aware of its background or not.
In the face of Georgia’s efforts to evict the Cherokee, tribal leaders submitted a letter to Congress, asserting their sovereignty:
The land on which we stand we have received as an inheritance from our fathers who possessed it from time immemorial, as a gift from our common father in heaven. We have already said that when the white man came to the shores of America, our ancestors were found in peaceable possession of this very land. They bequeathed it to us as their children, and we have sacredly kept it as containing the remains of our beloved men. This right of inheritance we have never ceded, nor ever forfeited. Permit us to ask, what better right can a people have to a country, that the right of inheritance and immemorial peaceable possession!
The resistance to removal resulted in legal battles that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In the opinion issued for one case, Chief Justice John Marshall repeated the term:
The Indian nations had always been considered as distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil from time immemorial, with the single exception of that imposed by irresistible power, which excluded them from intercourse with any other European potentate than the first discoverer of the coast of the particular region claimed; and this was a restriction which those European potentates imposed on themselves, as well as on the Indians. The very term "nation," so generally applied to them, means "a people distinct from others." The constitution, by declaring treaties already made, as well as those to be made, to be the supreme law of the land, has adopted and sanctioned the previous treaties with the Indian nations, and, consequently, admits their rank among those powers who are capable of making treaties. The words "treaty " and "nation" are words of our own language, selected in our diplomatic and legislative proceedings by ourselves, having each a definite and well understood meaning. We have applied them to Indians, as we have applied them to the other nations of the earth. They are applied to all in the same sense.
Maureen Konkle devotes eight pages to the Cherokee adoption of “time immemorial” in her book, Writing Indian Nations:Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827-1863. She opens that section:
A series of memorials that the Cherokee Council submitted to the U.S. Congress from 1830 to 1832 lay out the Cherokees’ position and document the increasing assaults on their autonomy by the government and people of Georgia. The principles set out in the written texts of the treaties, they argue, validate their understanding of themselves and the existence of their nation, in which they have existed since “time immemorial.” That phrase becomes a refrain in these memorials, in the cases presented to the Supreme Court, and in Cherokee writing generally…..
“Time immemorial” describes how long the Cherokees had been on the land, and it inevitably contrasts with the timeless, prepolitical state of nature that Indians were supposed to inhabit. These accounts of Cherokee memory before Congress radically interrupt modern European notions of time and progress, both by insisting on the validity of tradition (the land is a national heritage, not a thing for individual expropriation) and by countering the narrative of U. S. history. Rather than having abandoned traditional identity, the memorialists…can be seen as having stripped their identity down to its bare bones: existing on particular land, with a particular group of people, over time.
“Time immemorial” had long been
recognized as a legal term, going back hundreds of years in English law. In that regard, it meant “ancient beyond memory
or record” or “time out of mind” or “time before legal history and beyond legal
memory.” This somewhat qualified use of
the term has some merit, regarding the Cherokees, though in contemporary usage
it seems to have taken on a different (more expansive) meaning.
In his book, From Time Immemorial: Indigenous Peoples and State Systems, Richard Perry writes:
[Indigenous peoples] were the prior occupants of the region that subsequently fell within the bounds of a state. They have been there, as many state documents acknowledge, “from time immemorial.”
That seems to be the most reasonable application of the term. That is, Cherokees occupied the region before the state of Georgia was established.
The “time immemorial” cliché is bound to crop up in all things Cherokee for a long time to come, whether it is appropriate or not. Even advertising agencies have discovered its potency. A luxury resort development in South Carolina uses the phrase in its efforts to attract wealthy customers:
An area sacred to the Cherokee Nation since time immemorial due to its abundant natural resources and mild, four season climate, Keowee Falls and North Lake Keowee have become a more recent recreational paradise while maintaining the scenic, peaceful and rejuvenating way of life beloved of the Cherokee. Now being released to the public for the first time, a select few property owners will become a part of this most sought-after area of Keowee Falls, named in recognition of the Cherokee, at Arrowhead Pointe.