Too bad you turned off replies so you won’t find out that an armed community member with a concealed carry permit pursued the killer into the school and fatally shot him.

As a Native American, I’m sad to see that too many of you don’t grasp how this turns out for you.

The Cherokee story begins with a small beetle diving into an endless sea, and it has not ended. The people who call themselves Aniyvwiya (ah-nee-yun-WEE-yah), the Principal People, still live in two homelands at once: the southern Appalachians around the mother town of Kituwah, and northeastern Oklahoma, where survivors of a forced march rebuilt a nation. They speak Tsalagi (jah-LAH-gee), the sole surviving Southern Iroquoian language. English “Cherokee” comes from that word. Some scholars derive it from a Muskogean or Choctaw term for people of a different speech or of the cave country. The Haudenosaunee (hoh-dee-noh-SHAW-nee) once called them inhabitants of the cave country. Spanish writers recorded forms such as Chalaque. Aniyvwiya remained the older inner name. Oral tradition begins with water. Elders speaking to James Mooney described the earth as an island hanging from a stone sky vault by four cords. When the world grows old the cords will break and everything will be water again. In the beginning the animals lived crowded above the vault in Galunlati. A little water beetle, Dayunisi, Beaver’s Grandchild, dove and brought up mud that spread into earth. The Great Buzzard, flying low while the ground was still soft, struck the land and raised the Cherokee mountains. The sun was later set on a path across the vault. Kituwah, on the Tuckasegee River in western North Carolina, is remembered as the mother town. The Eastern Band later bought the site back. Other stories tell of towns moving until they reached those mountains, and of an ancient coming from the north. Oral history holds both a spiritual origin in place and a memory of movement. Specialists place the split between Cherokee and the northern Iroquoian languages, Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Tuscarora, at about thirty five hundred to four thousand years ago. Some argue proto Iroquoian speakers were already adapted to Appalachian mast forest. By Spanish contact an Iroquoian language was being spoken in country otherwise dominated by Muskogean and Siouan tongues. Archaeologists tie historic Cherokee towns to the Pisgah phase, about 1000 to 1500, and then to the Qualla phase, with heavy borrowing from Mississippian and Lamar pottery. Ethnogenesis looks like long mountain residence plus an old Iroquoian inheritance, not a single late invasion, though that debate is not closed. Historic towns stood along rivers in western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, northwestern South Carolina, and northeastern Alabama, grouped as Lower, Middle, Valley, Out, and Overhill. Each town had a townhouse, plaza, sacred fire, and its own leaders. There was no king. Descent ran through the mother. The seven clans, Wolf, Deer, Bird, Paint, Blue, Wild Potato, and Long Hair, governed marriage, hospitality, and legal duty across town lines. Women farmed corn, beans, and squash. Men hunted and went to war. That balance is embodied in Selu, Corn Woman, and Kanati, the Lucky Hunter. Green Corn renewed the year. Old fires went out, offenses were aired, and a new fire was kindled in honor of Selu. Stickball, anetsa, the little brother of war, trained men and sometimes settled disputes. Pottery, river cane basketry, carved masks, and spoken formulas filled daily life. The ethic called tohi asked for right order rather than chaos or rigidity. De Soto crossed this country in 1540. Disease moved faster than his army. English traders arrived by the late 1600s. Deerskins, captives, guns, and rum remade power. Cherokee fighters joined the English in the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1715 and then in the Yamasee War. Raids with Creek, Shawnee, and Catawba neighbors never fully stopped. Alliance with South Carolina collapsed in the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758 to 1761. Fort Loudoun was starved out. Columns under Montgomery and Grant burned Middle towns and cut the corn. In the Revolution most Cherokee sided with the British. In 1776 militias under Griffith Rutherford and others smashed Middle, Valley, Out, and Lower towns. Dragging Canoe refused the land cessions that followed and fought on from the Chickamauga towns until 1794. Treaties closed the war and took more ground. In the Creek War of 1813 to 1814, Cherokee men including Major Ridge and John Ross helped Andrew Jackson break the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend. Jackson later refused to enforce Worcester v. Georgia. In 1821 Sequoyah, who was not literate in English, finished a syllabary of eighty five characters. Literacy spread in a few years. The Cherokee Phoenix began printing in 1828. A written constitution and a capital at New Echota followed in 1827. American writers lumped the Cherokee with the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole as the Five Civilized Tribes. The label was never a Cherokee name, and it bought no safety. After gold was found in Georgia, a minority Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 without Principal Chief John Ross. Congress ratified it. In 1838 the army rounded up some sixteen thousand people and drove them west on Nvna Daula Tsvyi, the Trail Where They Cried. About four thousand died. Some hid in the North Carolina mountains and became the Eastern Band on the Qualla Boundary. Earlier western migrants, the Old Settlers, later shaped the United Keetoowah Band. Survivors rebuilt around Tahlequah. In 1839 assassins killed Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot. The Civil War split the Nation again. Stand Watie raised Confederate Cherokee cavalry, fought at Pea Ridge, and was the last Confederate general to surrender, in 1865. Pin Indians stayed with the Union or returned to it under John Ross. The 1866 treaty restored a western homeland at a steep price and required citizenship for Freedmen. Oklahoma statehood in 1907 tried to dissolve tribal government. It did not dissolve the people. Three federally recognized nations exist today. The Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah has near 477,000 citizens, more than 140,000 of them on the fourteen county reservation. The Eastern Band has more than 16,000 citizens on the Qualla Boundary and keeps the Kituwah dialect and the mother town. The United Keetoowah Band, also in Tahlequah, has more than 14,000 citizens and traces itself especially to Old Settlers. All three are sovereign. Self identified Cherokee ancestry in the wider public is not the same as citizenship. Clans, Green Corn, stickball, basketry, and carving continue. Baptist and Methodist churches that have long preached in Cherokee sit beside older formulas. Tsalagi is polysynthetic. A single verb can carry subject, object, direction, and evidential shading that English would spread across a clause. Classical Cherokee does not use the English r or several other English consonants. The western dialect dominates in Oklahoma, Kituwah in North Carolina. The old Lower dialect is gone. About fifteen hundred to two thousand first language speakers remain, nearly all elders. The Durbin Feeling Language Act has funded immersion schools, master apprentice training, a language campus, and recordings of more than a thousand fluent speakers. Children in Tahlequah and Cherokee, North Carolina, now spend school days in Tsalagi. The image that belongs with this history is a painting of Sequoyah, also known as George Gist or George Guess. Charles Bird King painted him around 1828, pointing at a tablet of the characters he invented. King’s original burned in the Smithsonian fire of 1865. What most people know is Henry Inman’s copy. It shows Sequoyah, the man who made Tsalagi a written language.

This is the way.