Why did you decide to write Cherokee Medicine Man?
I was just up there visiting with [Cherokee medicine man] John Little Bear one day, and he said, "I want you to write a book about me." It was not anything that I would have ever come up with. When he told me that, I knew I had to do it. I didn't want him to turn me into a field mouse or something.
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What was it like writing that book?
In a way it was terribly frustrating. For almost that entire book I had to depend on other people. I had to interview other people. There was a period of time when Little Bear told me, "Somebody doesn't want us to write this book." The implication was that somebody was using medicine to stop it. And it did almost stop it. We would sit and talk for four hours about topics that had nothing to do with the book. And nobody else would talk to me about traditional Cherokee medicine. Finally I called the press, and told them that I would give the advance back. [That didn't happen.]
Was there actually medicine against writing that book?
I suspect that there was. Because that thought came from him, and I think he would not have said so if it wasn't true.
Tell us how The Cherokee Nation: A History came about.
It was written originally under a contract with the Cherokee Nation. The contract was drawn up while Wilma Mankiller was chief. About the time I finished the book, we got hot and heavy into the campaign for the election of the next principal chief. [Mankiller did not run for reelection.] And Wilma was real deep into that, because she was supporting candidate George Bearpaw. But he was determined to be ineligible, so he couldn't run. The other candidate was Joe Byrd, and we were so close to election time, the court said we will proceed with the election but no votes for Bearpaw could count. [Byrd] was not very effective. Four years, not much happened. After a new election, Chief Chad Smith said, "We need to get that book done." Four years went by. His second election came, and he said, "We still need to get that book done." Each time there were comments from the chief and a large committee. We finally got it done.
Historically, was the chief always elected?
That started in the 1820s. The old Cherokee system was a bunch of autonomous towns, each town had a war chief and a peace chief, and a council. It probably had some similarities to the Iroquoian tribe. There we know that the women would select the men that would form the government. We also know that the women had recall power. So they had a lot of political power; it just wasn't explicit. When the English first came in here, they made a lot of fun of Cherokees. The Englishmen finally discovered that after they had talked to the Cherokees, the Cherokees talked to the women. The Englishmen said the Cherokees had a petticoat government. Eventually the Englishmen said they wanted a point person to deal with, so it seems that the Cherokees appointed a trade commissioner. The Englishmen called him the emperor. He got more and more power. I think that position just kind of evolved into the principal chief. In the 1820s John Ross, a young hot shot, and some other young college-educated Cherokees, formed the Cherokee government. They established a principal chief and deputy principal chief. The matrilineal society has gone by the wayside; we might as well forget that when we consider the Cherokees.
It often seems that anyone who claims Indian blood claims to have descended from Cherokees. Why so?
Because we're the smartest.
Any other reason?
There may be truth in what they say. I wrote an essay about that in Cherokee Thoughts. When the Cherokees took off on the Trail of Tears, every night people ran away; they just faded out to who knows where. They did not all go back to be the Eastern Band. There were 13 contingents on the Trail of Tears. So if someone ran away every night, and that trip took three months, those people had to have gone somewhere, so there probably are a lot of people out there in the general population who may have Cherokee blood and do not know a thing about it.
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