Cherokee Medicine

The Cherokee were the first Native American tribe to develop a syllabic written language. They were also the first Native American tribe to have a written constitution and the first Native American tribe to have a newspaper. And the list goes on and on. The Cherokee are one of the most fascinating Indigenous tribes in the United States of America. The Cherokee managed to assimilate themselves within the US. And yet, they were sent far across the country, exiled from their ancestral homelands. What happened on their journey during the Trail of Tears?

Wohali, which means Eagle in the Cherokee language, started out as the story of a seven-year-old Cherokee boy living in the 1600s. In the second book, he is now about to turn eight and he's going to show you what it was like to be an Indian in the 17th century. Wohali lives with his family in the Smokey Mountains in what is now North Carolina. He shows you his life and what they think about the world around them. He will tell you about their clans and the village he lives in, and why they were so successful surviving in the mountains.

Conducting research for her weekly history column, Jinx, a free-spirited Muscogee (Creek) historian, travels to Hold House, a Georgia plantation originally owned by Cherokee chief James Hold, to uncover the mystery of what happened to a tribal member who stayed behind after Indian removal, when Native Americans were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homelands in the nineteenth century.

The text relates the powerful and dramatic history of the Smoky Mountain Cherokees, who for 40,000 years thrived in the difficult terrain of the Great Smoky Mountains and its surrounding regions areas of what is now Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.