They did everything that was asked of them.
This
Is the bitterest verse in all the book of wounds--
Not the story of the warrior's near-miss
Or the prophet's burning moon, but the platoons
Of scholars, farmers, lawmakers, and scribes
Who built republics in the settler's tongue
And met each demand of the invading tribes
Of Europeans--and were still among
The dispossessed.
Five nations of the southeast:
The Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw,
The Creek--whom the Americans called Muscogee--the least
And last the Seminole, whose law
And custom the republic named "civilized"--
A word that meant: you look enough like us
That we can almost see you. They revised
Their lives to fit the conqueror's calculus
And found the calculation was a lie.
The Cherokee led the way. In the mountains
Of the southern Appalachians, where the sky
Meets the blue ridges and the fountains
Of a hundred rivers spring from laurel slopes,
They had held their country since the forest
Was young--and now they took the ropes
Of the European system and the poorest
Gift of the conqueror, his alphabet,
And made it something the conqueror could not imagine.
Sequoyah--George Gist by his settler name, and yet
As Sequoyah alone he fills the margin
Of history's page--sat for twelve years and thought.
He could not read the English marks, but he
Understood the principle of what they wrought:
That sound could be made visible, that the free
And flowing river of the spoken word
Could be caught in symbols on a page and held
Forever--and he knew that what he heard
In Cherokee could be as precisely spelled
As anything the English tongue could write.
He did not borrow English letters' sounds.
He listened to his language in the night
And broke the Cherokee tongue to its compounds
Of syllables--eighty-six distinct, no more--
And gave each one a symbol. Some he drew
From the English alphabet's forgotten store
Of shapes, but reassigned to the new
And Cherokee sounds: D was not D but a,
R was not R but e, and S
Was not S but du--and in this way
The English letters' shapes became the dress
Of a Cherokee phonetic mind that worked
By syllable, not phoneme, and required
No years of school--the genius that lurked
In Sequoyah's system was that it aspired
To teach in weeks what English took in years.
Within a single generation, the Cherokee
Were a literate nation. The pioneers
Of their own modernity, the foray
Into the written word was not surrender
But transformation: the Cherokee Phoenix
Rose in eighteen-twenty-eight, the tender
And defiant newspaper that links
A people's voice to the machinery of print--
Bilingual, bold, and edited by Elias Boudinot,
Its columns carried the Cherokee's glint
Of sovereign identity--the knot
Of a language written in its own script,
A thing that no other Indigenous nation
Of the Americas had accomplished, equipped
By the genius of a single man's creation.
And they built a government. The Cherokee
Constitution of eighteen-twenty-seven:
Three branches modeled on the American way--
A principal chief, a senate, the leaven
Of a judiciary and a written code
Of laws that any American jurist would
Recognize--the Cherokee had strode
Into the world of written law and stood
As a republic among republics, a nation
With a capital at New Echota, where the court
Convened and the council held deliberation
In the language Sequoyah had taught to sort
Into syllables of light upon the page.
The Choctaw built their schools. The Chickasaw
Established farms that rivaled, at that stage,
The plantations of their American neighbor's law.
The Creek rebuilt after the devastation
Of the Red Stick War--Andrew Jackson's first
Campaign of Indigenous elimination,
Where he had used the Creek allies' thirst
For peace against the Creek resisters, then
Punished ally and enemy alike
With the Treaty of Fort Jackson's pen
That seized twenty-three million acres--the strike
Of a rattlesnake that bites the hand that feeds.
And the Seminole in Florida's green maze
Of swamp and hammock--a nation whose deeds
Of resistance would outlast all the craze
For removal--but that is the next chapter's telling.
Here is the bitter center: they did everything.
They adopted the plow. They built the dwelling
In the European style. They let the ring
Of the church bell sound across their towns.
They wrote constitutions, published newspapers,
Sent their children to the schools, wore the gowns
Of the American republic's capers
And conventions--and it was not enough.
It was never going to be enough. The word
"Civilized" was a lock without a key, the bluff
Of an empire that had already transferred
The verdict from the courtroom to the ledger:
The land was worth more than the people on it.
Gold was found in Georgia's Cherokee acreage,
And the settler's hunger would not quit
For any constitution or gazette.
The more the Cherokee became like the Americans,
The more the Americans felt the threat
Of a people who disproved the talismans
Of racial destiny: if the Cherokee
Could build a republic, write a constitution,
And govern themselves with a literate decree,
Then what excuse remained for the execution
Of the policy of removal? What remained
Of the comfortable fiction that the land
Was wasted on the savage, the unchained
And wandering brute who could not understand
The plow's purpose or the ballot's weight?
The Cherokee disproved the lie. And for this
They would be punished with a greater hate
Than any warrior nation would dismiss--
Because they held the mirror up and showed
The republic its own face, and the republic
Could not bear the image. What it owed
To its own principles was a truth too thick
To swallow--and so it swallowed the Cherokee instead.
Honor Sequoyah--who gave his people letters
Without borrowing any foreign alphabet's thread,
Who forged a syllabary that unfetters
The Cherokee voice from the tyranny of silence
And the colonizer's monopoly on the page.
Honor the Cherokee Phoenix, whose defiance
In print was the most civilized outrage
That any nation offered any empire--
The proof, in black ink on white paper pressed,
That the word "savage" was the colonizer's liar
And the word "civilized" was the colonizer's jest.
They built everything they were told to build.
They became everything they were told to become.
And the reward for every promise fulfilled
Was the drumbeat of removal's drum.