History

The Cherokee homelands include Georgia, North and South Carolina and Tennessee, and has well over 300,000 members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (the biggest Native American tribe today).  The Cherokees has a story that long, long ago, the Cherokee tribe came to live in the Appalachian Mountains from the 'Great Lakes' area.

But there are also Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma, Texas and other areas further north.  These tribes came from the Blue Ridge Cherokee area, though.

The Trail of Tears was an 'Indian Removal Act' by the white men to relocate several different Indian tribes in the South Easter area of the United States.  Some of these tribes were the Cherokee people, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek and the Seminole people.  This tragic 19th century event killed many indians.  men, women and children had to walk from the Appalachian Mountains to Oklahoma, the old and the young.  It was a horrible thing for the 'white men' to do to Natives that have been here for possibly thousands of years.  It was their home, and they forced them off their homeland, killing seval along the way.