- [Briana Garza] Coming up on "Greater Chattanooga," we'll explore the legacy of Chattanooga's founding father and we'll meet a family working to preserve the Cherokee language for future generations.

That's all coming up on "Greater Chattanooga."

(gentle music) Funding for this broadcast of "Greater Chattanooga" is provided by EPB Fiber Optics.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Brianna Garza.

Welcome to "Greater Chattanooga."

We're here at Red Clay State Park with an origin story.

In fiction, origin stories often reveal the circumstances that shape our hero.

This origin story is about the complicated history of a proud people and the leader whose actions have shaped the city of Chattanooga for over 200 years.

- Chief John Ross, they have two different sides, you know, depending on what side you look at, but I think he was a great leader.

And, you know, as all leaders, sometimes we make mistakes, sometimes we don't.

- I think that he was probably a great leader.

He tried at that time.

- A lot of the stuff that was done, you know, was it really enforced to help us?

I mean, if it did affect us, why was the removal still done?

A lot of these names that were glorified aren't really that much glory to them.

(thoughtful music) - John Ross was born October 3rd, 1790.

And as a young boy, his Cherokee name was Tsani Usdi, which means little John.

But in later life he acquired another name, Guwisguwi.

John Ross's father was Daniel Ross, and he was an immigrant from Scotland and his mother, Molly, who was one fourth Cherokee, even though he was one eighth, he was still accepted as Cherokee and not a white man.

- I mean, he wasn't completely fluid in Cherokee.

He knows some Cherokee.

- And he spoke English.

He was educated.

And so, and he was Cherokee.

So people, it was like the best of both worlds.

- [Christopher] He lives in what's today known as Rossville.

- He lived in it after the year 1802 up until the 1820s.

People that lived, even in that area, came here and got their mail.

It was just more or less the center of the place.

And that's about the same time that he established a trading post down the Tennessee River with Timothy Meigs, which was the actually the third trading post in this area.

- [Christopher] In 1815, Timothy Meigs dies.

Lewis Ross, John Ross's brother, will go into partnership with him.

That's when Ross's Landing actually comes to be known as Ross's Landing.

Major Ridge, also known as the Ridge, was a very influential Cherokee leader.

He's even the mentor of John Ross.

Both of them are soldiers, both of them fault under Jackson during the Creek Indian War.

- Early on, you know, they had a pretty good relationship.

And, I mean, they both worked in the government together.

- Ridge was not very fluent in English, but he was steeped in tradition, the old customs.

A lot of the older members of the nation would look to Ridge for guidance, where Ross is kind of your younger generation.

(gentle music) - The Cherokee wanted to have a central government.

They formed the Constitution for Cherokee Nation.

Well, they had an executive branch, a judicial branch, and the legislative branch.

And John Ross in 1828 became Principal Chief.

- When New Echota officially became the capital and they had been meeting here for six years already, from 1819 to '25.

This was almost a last ditch effort to assimilate into the European and American culture, in some ways, not in all.

- [Christopher] By the time Ross becomes Principal Chief of the Cherokee in 1828, it's about trying to maintain and hold on to this land.

(gentle music) - [Dr. Abram] And after Sequoyah had it had perfected his syllabary, then they could actually print.

- So if you're a Cherokee and you were being taught to read and write before 1821, when Sequoyah finalize his system, you were being taught English or French or some foreign language.

And so this enabled them to record their own history, their own records of what was going on.

- [Dr. Abram] The Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper that was ever published by any Native American tribe.

- [David] It was being sent overseas, especially in some of the Northern states where they were getting some support in Congress.

It was a propaganda tool.

- We've never being the people to be conceited or to boast.

Just because we have a written language and a newspaper doesn't make us any better than any other people.

It's just the fact that we had people that were more associated with Europeans.

- And so they had slowly, you know, for a hundred years, been assimilating, as we refer to it today.

- Cherokee was a very peaceful people.

We didn't really go to war.

Well, we did from time to time, but basically a lot of our disagreements were settled on a stick ball field.

(whooping) - Fighting the United States, at that point, might not have been as beneficial on the battlefield as it was fighting the United States at their own game, through the law.

- [Dr. Abram] Whatever they did was never good enough.

- The Indian removal act has been signed by Congress, and it's just a matter of time before a removal will actually occur.

They wanted the land.

And to have an independent and sovereign nation sitting in the middle of Georgia was not going to happen for Georgians.

- The state of Georgia actually passed a law stating that no Cherokee could meet in that state unless they were discussing giving away their land.

So they had to move their capital and they brought it to Red Clay in 1832.

- [Richard] This was the only area that we could come, it was so far away from everything that we could actually have a grand council meeting.

- In 1835, a group of Cherokees snuck off in the middle of the night, back down to New Echota from Red Clay and signed away their last remaining portion of Cherokee land.

I mean, they literally had no land to stand on.

- All the hassle they went through of going to Washington, trying to get this and that done, until it finally reached the point that it broke apart into two groups.

- There was pretty much two distinct groups, ones, the John Ross faction, which still had hope that he could still go to Washington and convince Andrew Jackson not to force them to leave.

And then there's the other group that followed Major Ridge, and they're the ones that supposedly saw the writing on the wall and knew that if they did not leave, that it only meant death and destruction of their land and their people.

- And so there's a major division out there today among the Cherokee, and that is the continually feuding over who was right, the Ross Party or the Treaty Party.

I don't know that it'll ever be settled.

(somber music) - So you have to remember that the life that everyone knew, and this is home, this is everything that you knew.

This was where your creation story started, right here.

And that's all being taken away.

Ironically, this comes full circle.

Thousands of Cherokee will be rounded up to the Ross's Landing, they'll be forcibly removed from their ancestral homes.

(somber music) - Their legacy, I guess, would be a homeland.

Say home and, Hey, that's where I come from.

That legacy, I don't think many people really know or understand.

(somber music) - A lot of people tend to always want to fall back on the Trail of Tears.

We're past that.

We know it's part of the history, we teach it, but we talk about are people still here.

I like to come and tell how strong we still are, surviving removal, surviving attempted genocide.

- They talk about native people in the past.

They don't really see the native people as people that live in our time.

- The Cherokee Nation has been removed by 1839 and that same year is when Chattanooga is named.

- Without the Ross family, there wouldn't have been a Chattanooga, Tennessee where it is now.

They're so important to the history of this area.

- What happened to the Cherokee people to keep their memory and what happened to them alive, so no one forgets and history doesn't repeat itself.

- Would Chattanooga be what Chattanooga is without the entrepreneurship of John Ross?

It's important to be proud of what Chattanooga is, but also to remember where we came from, that this began as Ross's Landing, the very place that we can still visit today and take the passage down the stairs that are being flooded by water and read the Cherokee symbols and get down to the bottom where removal started.

- The native didn't go out and build statues to themselves.

Nothing, except to say, "Look around you, there is Cherokee, people of the forest."

(somber music) - We are fortunate to have the opportunity to speak with Dr. Danielle Shelton, historian at Red Clay State Park.

Dr. Shelton, where are we?

- We are on the site of the old Red Clay council grounds, which was the last Cherokee Capitol prior to their removal in 1838.

- What happened here at Red Clay?

- So, after Georgia started enacting harassment laws to try to move the Cherokee and the Creek out of their state in 1830, they basically made it illegal for any native people to have meetings in the state of Georgia, even in their own lands.

So they had to move outside of Georgia to have their council meetings because their capital had been at New Echota.

And so in 1832 they came here to Red Clay.

We're right on the Georgia border.

And then when the Cherokee, when the army began rounding the Cherokee up, this became a concentration camp for at least two and a half months, if not four, before they were removed from Tennessee.

- [Briana Garza] Wow.

- Yeah.

- Now, Dr. Shelton, what do you want visitors to take away when they come here?

- I want them to know... To face history for what it was.

I mean, we've got, you know, a very unpleasant history with people of color and it's time to recognize those things and to be better.

- Well, thank you for joining us.

And we hope to explore and learn a lot here at Red Clay State Park.

Thank you.

- Pleasure.

(whooshing) - 2021 marked the bicentennial of the Cherokee syllabary, developed by Sequoyah.

The written word of Cherokee can help preserve the language for future historians.

But what about the spoken word?

Many efforts to preserve the language of the Cherokee are going on across the country.

And we met one family in our area working to keep the language alive for future generations.

(whooshing) (gentle music) - Salt, (speaking Cherokee).

Coat, (speaking Cherokee).

Shoe, that's one shoe, (speaking Cherokee).

One or more, (speaking Cherokee).

Mitten- - The Cherokees, both the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern band of the Cherokee identified in the United Keetoowah identified that the native speakers that learned it first and then learned English in the first grade, we're going to be gone by 2030, 2040, definitely by 2040.

(speaking Cherokee) - The language is now considered endangered.

We're pretty much assimilated.

Then that also means that when mom and dad are not using the language, the children are not picking it up.

(speaking Cherokee) - The main heartbeat of this culture, or any culture, fundamentally, is a language.

So when you lose the language, you lose a vital aspect of a culture.

So it's important that we try to keep it alive and to teach future generations.

(speaking Cherokee) - It's a beautiful language.

And this is who we are, you know, this is what it means to be Cherokee.

(gentle music) I grew up in a Snowbird community and I lived about a mile from the Snowbird Day School.

We grew up speaking Cherokee and that's all we knew.

And when I started school, I didn't have any English at all.

None whatsoever.

(gentle music) My grandpa was, you know, he wasn't educated, but he was a very intelligent man.

And he always kept his dictionary there and he would tell me stuff.

And he would say, "And it means this in English."

And he said, "I know it's boring to you, but one day it's going to be important."

(speaking Cherokee) They were very smart.

They knew that we needed to hear and keep our language, keep our culture, you know, they go together.

And I think my sister's seen that years ago.

(gentle music) - Shirley Oswalt was a real member, born in Snowbird, North Carolina.

- Shirley had a summer program, her and Mary Brown, and they're both fluent speakers, extremely strong speakers.

- They seen the need for, you know, preserving the language.

And the summer camp went on for about 15 years, 16 years before I got involved in it.

(speaking Cherokee) Close your eyes.

(speaking Cherokee) Good job!

- Year after year after year after year, of summer program, summer program, six weeks, six weeks.

But there was a big gap between, but, you know, you go to school for six weeks, you tend to forget.

There's what?

46 more weeks in a year.

And there was no language for most of the kids.

(speaking Cherokee) - Eventually, Shirley passed away with cancer.

- When she got sick and couldn't do it anymore, it's when my brother Gil said, "We got to carry on."

He said, "We can't just let this stop here."

(speaking Cherokee) - The tribe approached us and our program.

And by this time Shirley was gone and she had passed.

And they approached me and said, "What do you think about having an afterschool program?"

And we were excited.

(speaking Cherokee) (upbeat music) - Here we serve basically the community we have enrolled students or enrolled members and then unenrolled members.

And we help them with their schoolwork for the first 30 minutes to an hour.

And then they get two hours of instructional Cherokee language.

(speaking Cherokee) - When I started this teaching, I realized when I said, "Gosh, I love doing this."

You know, I said, "I love these kids.

They're great."

It's just awesome to see them growing in the language.

And so that's what I teach, you know.

Any little kid that can't read, they want to learn, come on, I'm all for it.

And that's how we're going to do it, I think that's how we're going to save our language.

(speaking Cherokee) (gentle upbeat music) - The impact is tremendous.

They're able to remember a whole lot more of the language than what they normally would have been.

- It's a continual process of building on, it's like building a foundation, you lay a brick, you lay another brick, you lay another brick and after a while then you...

It's just been really advantageous as far as promoting language.

(upbeat music) - Robbinsville High School is centered at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Graham County, North Carolina.

We are lucky to have the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians out on Snowbird Reservation, part of our county.

And our school population consists of about 15% Native American.

We offer a Cherokee history and language class.

- That was put in place in about 2008.

We had Chief Michell Hicks who wanted to put monies in our high school and he wanted to have a language teacher.

We were very fortunate because we had Shirley Oswalt, Shirley Jackson Oswalt.

She had taught in the community for many years, volunteered.

And so we reached out to her and she agreed to come in to the Robbinsville High School and teach our language.

When she passed, it was a big loss, you know, and we knew we had to get someone that could fill that position, and fortunately, Gil, her brother, come aboard.

- That's good, okay, all right.

Do number six, duck.

(upbeat music) - My first year of teaching was sixth grade in the public school here in Robbinsville.

And, the very first day, I remember this beautiful, small girl, sixth grader, coming up to me and speaking to me in the language.

I said, "Whoa."

That just kind of set the stage.

You know, it just made me think, you know, that's really precious.

Okay, number eight.

I don't really care about teaching reading and writing.

I'm really more interested in teaching people to maintain the language because there's so few of us.

- The most important thing that I think that we're doing by offering this Cherokee language and Cherokee history is we're just a small part of helping preserve the culture of the Cherokee people, and I think that's crucial that Graham County schools plays a part in that and helps preserve this language of this people that first occupied this area.

(gentle music) - Shirley was a very big supporter of the museum.

I can't remember if it was her or if it was I, but it was like, "Why don't we do a Cherokee language class?"

And so our very first class, which would have been 18 years ago, maybe 19 years ago, and Shirley, and there was probably eight students.

That was one of the most, as a historian, emotional experiences in the 30 years I've been doing history, was to have the language being taught by Shirley here in front of Sequoyah.

(gentle music) - After she got sick, Gil said, "Let's go to Vonore, Tennessee and teach that class that she's been teaching.

Flower, (speaking Cherokee).

Examine, (speaking Cherokee).

Barrel, (speaking Cherokee).

The more I worked with the adults in Vonore, I realized that you teach adults just like you do kids.

(speaking Cherokee) Teach them the phonetics.

And then I said, "Well, we're going to go right on teaching you some words.

And then we're going to go around on it to make it in sentences."

And I concentrate on the Eastern dialect so that they can talk to someone on the Cherokee Reservation.

(speaking Cherokee) - As the years have gone, the class numbers grew larger and larger.

- Sometimes we have an overflow and we were only doing two classes, now we're doing three classes at Vonore, because it's just too many students.

- There are several of us who want to try and keep culture and language alive.

It's really important to a lot of us who have, you know, indigenous backgrounds or mixed indigenous backgrounds.

- While I am not a tribal member, I do have Cherokee heritage in my family.

And so it feels like a natural calling.

It feels like a duty.

It is sort of like carrying a torch forward.

And it is an honor, if anything else.

(speaking Cherokee) (gentle music) - There's going to be some that's gonna want to turn around and teach.

There's going to be some, that's going to say, "Lou told us we can't lose this."

And that's what Shirley said, "We gotta get them to the point where they can carry on."

And that's my goal too.

(speaking Cherokee) - I see kids, there's so many that we have that have the interest of keeping it alive, of speaking it, and passing it along.

So I don't really see it gone.

And if you love it, you want to learn it, you're going to make it live.

(speaking Cherokee) - For me, it's just an incredible source of pride.

I'm just so thankful that my mom and dad gave me the language.

It's a gift, you know, from my creator.

And if you think about it, it's a gift that only 50 something people in our community have that gift.

That's an I but it's pronounced (speaking Cherokee).

That's pretty profound, to me.

There you go.

- Shirley, Lou, and Gil, I mean, from the bottom of my heart, they have done an incredible job of bringing the language back.

(speaking Cherokee) - It's just that natural desire now to give back what you learned from your parents and your ancestors, and it's about giving, and if you do that, then you have the initiative to go out and do your best, to share what you know, share what you have, and you'll never go wrong with that.

(chuckling) (speaking Cherokee) - We hope you enjoyed this episode of "Greater Chattanooga."

Please visit our website to connect with us and to learn more about the series.

You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

I'm Brianna Garza, thanks for watching.

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