The Five Civilized Tribes History, Who are the Five Civilized Tribes List, Where are Five Civilized
Tribes Located, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Native American Indians Nations
The Five Civilized Tribes is the term applied to five American Indian (aka Native American) nations:
the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. They were considered civilized by white society because they had
adopted many of the colonists' customs and had generally good relations with their neighbors. The Five Civilized Tribes lived
in the Southeastern United States before their forced removal to other parts of the country; many were relocated to what is
currently referred to as the state of Oklahoma. Today, many Native Americans, especially those from other
nations, find the "Five Civilized Tribes" label patronizing or racist. When the tribes are discussed together, sometimes the
modified label "Five Tribes" is used to avoid the suggestion that other indigenous peoples were savages. Cherokee
Indian Territory Nation Oklahoma
During the American Civil War,
the Five Tribes were divided in their loyalties. The Choctaw and Chickasaw fought predominantly
on the Confederate side, while the Creek, Seminole and especially the Cherokee were split between the Union and the Confederacy.
Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act assisted in
the destruction of the American Indian.
Once the tribes had been relocated
to Indian Territory, the United States
government promised that their lands would be free of white settlement. Some settlers violated the agreement with impunity
even before 1893, when the government opened the "Cherokee Strip" to outside settlement by
the Oklahoma Land Run. In 1907, the territories of Oklahoma and Indian Territory were merged
into the new state of Oklahoma; where all Five Civilized
Tribes currently have a major presence.
Recommended
Viewing: 500 Nations
(372 minutes). Description: 500 Nations is an eight-part documentary (more than 6 hours and that's not including its interactive CD-ROM
filled with extra features) that explores the history of the indigenous peoples of North and Central America, from pre-Colombian
times through the period of European contact and colonization, to the end of the 19th century and the subjugation of the Plains
Indians of North America. 500 Nations utilizes historical texts, eyewitness
accounts, pictorial sources and computer graphic reconstructions to explore the magnificent civilizations which flourished
prior to contact with Western civilization, and to tell the dramatic and tragic story of the Native American nations' desperate
attempts to retain their way of life against overwhelming odds. Continued below...
Mention the
word "Indian," and most will conjure up images inspired by myths and movies: teepees, headdresses, and war paint; Sitting
Bull, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, and their battles (like Little Big Horn) with the U.S. Cavalry. Those stories of the so-called
"horse nations" of the Great
Plains are all here, but so is a great deal more. Using impressive computer imaging, photos, location film footage
and breathtaking cinematography, interviews with present-day Indians, books and manuscripts, museum artifacts, and more, Leustig
and his crew go back more than a millennium to present an fascinating account of Indians, including those (like the Maya and
Aztecs in Mexico and the Anasazi in the Southwest) who were here long before white men ever reached these shores.
It was
the arrival of Europeans like Columbus, Cortez, and DeSoto that marked the beginning of the end for the Indians. Considering
the participation of host Kevin Costner, whose film Dances with Wolves was highly sympathetic to the Indians, it's no bulletin
that 500 Nations also takes a compassionate view of the multitude of calamities--from alcohol and disease to the corruption
of their culture and the depletion of their vast natural resources--visited on them by the white man in his quest for land
and money, eventually leading to such horrific events as the Trail of Tears "forced march," the massacre at Wounded Knee,
and other consequences of the effort to "relocate" Indians to the reservations where many of them still live. Along the way,
we learn about the Indians' participation in such events as the American Revolution and the War of 1812, as well as popular
legends like the first Thanksgiving (it really happened) and the rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas (it probably didn't).
Recommended
Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Description: 1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question
of what human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed
the party. The history books most Americans were (and still are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast, underused
territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans.
For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists, paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann
brings together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among the revelations: the first Americans may not have come
over the Bering land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10 or even 20 thousand years earlier; the
Americas were a far more urban, more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians,
rather than living in static harmony with nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that
even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Continued below...
Mann is well
aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise
scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening
revisionist stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early American-European contact. To many of those who were
there, the earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of natural domination. And those who came later
and found an emptied landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly, encountered not the natural and
unchanging state of the native American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what was likely the greatest
epidemic in human history, the smallpox and other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population without immunity,
which swept through the Americas faster than the explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land that
held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained for centuries before. Includes outstanding photos and maps.
Recommended Reading: Nations
Remembered: An Oral History of the Five Civilized Tribes, 1865-1907 (Contributions in Ethnic Studies) (Hardcover). Description:
This work offers a view of Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole life rarely glimpsed by the scholar or general
public.... An impeccably researched and readable document that will appeal to specialist and generalist alike.
Recommended Reading: The
Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole (Civilization of the American Indian) (455 pages:
University of Oklahoma Press). Description: Fascinating and captivating study of the often referred to Five
Civilized Tribes, with each tribe's: evolution, struggles, Indian removal, treaties, internal and external strife, and outlook...numerous
maps and photographs compliment this research. By focusing on all 'Five Tribes' it also presents a better understanding of
how the tribes interrelated in the Indian Territory (most of present-day Oklahoma). While most authors only focus on "a tribe"
rather than "the tribes," Foreman, by interconnecting the tribes, conveys a more comprehensive understanding of the Five Nations.
Cherokee Chief William Holland Thomas: Cherokee Indian Agent to Washington; Tsali:
Cherokee Hero and Legend; President Andrew Jackson; Cherokee War Rituals, Culture, Festivals, Government, and Beliefs; Cherokee
Indians and the American Civil War; Cherokee Declaration and the American Civil War; History of the Cherokee Indians
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