What Does It Mean to Be Chickamauga

It means more than you can imagine!

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Being Chickamauga

Means you are a direct, bloodline descendant of a Tribe descended from the Mound Building Culture and the Southeast Ceremonial Complex that lived in the Southeast Woodlands.

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Being Chickamauga

Means you are a direct, bloodline descendant of a group of people with blood ties to the Lower Towns.  This means you are related to a Chickamauga who may have “married” (loose term because most Chickamauga, both male and female had partners and many children from each) into another Indigenous Tribe, French, Spanish, British, Irish, Scottish, Portuguese, Mexican, Central or South American, African, or a wide variety of other nationalities and ethnicities.

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Being Chickamauga

Means your ancestors maintained a traditionalist, non-colonial cultural lifestyle.  Religiously, the Chickamauga retained their traditional religion until at least the 1820s, when Christian missionaries began to proselytize effectively with many still practicing the traditional religion today.

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Being Chickamauga

Means you would give your life and livelihood for another Chickamauga with no questions asked.  Blood is way thicker than water.  Bloody Fellow said, “Even should the habits & customs of the Cherokees (Chickamauga) give place to the habits & customs of the whites, or even should they themselves become white by intermarriage, not a drop of Indian blood would be lost; it would be spread more widely but not lost."

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Being Chickamauga

Means you learn your history, culture, language, and background.  We had to go into hiding beginning in 1839 and did not come out of hiding until the 1990s for some and the 2010s for others.  Our history is written in the War Department Records, Presidential Papers, Founders Papers, Congressional Record, and the National Archives of the United States, England, and Spain.  What can be found on the internet is not our history unless we wrote it.  Our culture is retained by our elders, and their teachings must be honored and respected.  Our language is called Erate, a southern mountain dialect of the Cherokee Trade Language, an “admixture” of the Mobilian Trade Language (Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee Creek, Seminole), French, Spanish, English, Catawba, Shawnee, Delaware, and numerous other tribal languages.

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Being Chickamauga

Means you and your relatives are survivors of a GENOCIDE committed against Chickamauga by the government of the United States and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.  We trusted both, and both betrayed us.  They often teamed up to betray us when we lived east and west of the Mississippi.  It is not in the past because it impacts how we are treated today.  Today, the United States refuses to live up to its commitment to provide what was promised to us in the treaty and legislative language.  Today, in the 2022 Cherokee Tri-Council meeting in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the delegates of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, as well as its Chief, declared the Chickamauga to be “enemies of the Cherokee People” just like the Cherokee Chief Little Turkey.

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Being Chickamauga

Means there are hundreds of thousands of people across the United States with Chickamauga blood who do not know it yet.  That is because being an Indian was a death sentence in the 1800s and early 1900s.  While the Genocide against us will ultimately fail, hundreds of thousands of Chickamauga are failing to have community with those who share their same blood.  We must go out into our communities, small, medium, or large and find and welcome in our relatives, our mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and cousins to the greatest community to which they can belong, their own family.

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Being Chickamauga

Means you financially support your Tribe.  There are numerous things we need to move forward as a Tribe, and it takes money to do so.  We have a non-profit that people can donate to if they need the tax write-off; it is called TCN Preservation A.  While we are a proud people and find it hard to ask for financial assistance, the work to keep this Tribe moving forward is not cheap.  We have over 30,000 hours of volunteer work done for the Tribe each year.  We need office space, we need hardware and software for an office, we must expand to keep moving forward, and that takes money.

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