Cherokee Homeland: Tennessee's Original Name

Tennessee is named for a Cherokee village. The village was called Tanasi, and it stood on the Little Tennessee River in what is now Monroe County, in the eastern part of the state. European traders and settlers heard the name, applied it first to the river, then to the surrounding region, and eventually to the whole of the territory that became the sixteenth state. The people who named that place in the first instance were still living there when the state was formed.

Before European settlement, the Cherokee Nation held most of what is now eastern and middle Tennessee, a territory of river valleys, mountain ridges, and agricultural bottomland that they had occupied and shaped for centuries. The Cherokee were not a single uniform nation but a confederation of towns with their own councils and their own leaders. Echota, also called Great Tellico, was one of the important ceremonial centers. Dozens of named communities existed throughout the region.

The legal instrument that displaced them was the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty, signed by Andrew Jackson, a man who had himself lived and built his political career in Tennessee. The act authorized the federal government to negotiate treaties exchanging Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for land in the west. The treaties it generated were disputed and coerced. The most important of them, the Treaty of New Echota in eighteen thirty-five, was signed by a small faction without authorization from the majority of the Cherokee Nation.

Between eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen thirty-nine, United States Army troops and state militia conducted the forced removal of approximately sixteen thousand Cherokee people from their homes in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama. The march westward became known in Cherokee history as Nunna daul Tsuny, the trail where they cried. Approximately four thousand people died during the removal and the journey.

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose ancestors evaded or returned from the removal, holds federal recognition today and its government is centered in North Carolina, about two hundred miles east of where you are now.