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Cherokee Revealed - Translated Moravian records disclose a forgotten history
CHURCH MISSIONS: 19TH-CENTURY DOCUMENTS
Courtesy of Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA.
This map showing the settlements of the Cherokee Nation was drawn by Moravian missionary John Daniel Hammerer and is dated to 1766.
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Published: September 8, 2009
In front of the house stands a long, open shed covered with clapboards adequately provided with benches and other seats, as well as a raised plank for writing on. The Talk was held under this shed. At a short distance from this stands a tall pole. A designated Indian took his position at this pole with a drum, and beat the drum as a sign of the beginning of the meeting. He kept drumming until Indians were seen coming in lines. In the heat, the Indians used turkey wings in stead of fans to make a breeze for themselves. -- Report from Abraham Steiner, a Moravian missionary to the Cherokee at Springplace, Ga., May 22, 1801, translated from the German.
This glimpse into the shared history of Moravians and Cherokees was shrouded in archaic German script for over 200 years at the Moravian Archives in Winston-Salem.
The words were found among hundreds of diaries, letters and other papers that recorded about 100 years of history between the Moravian missionaries and their Cherokee brethren. The records constitute the only known account of daily life in the Cherokee nation.
In 1992, workers began to translate and transcribe the documents. But money grew tight and work slowed on the project because the staff had to consider prioritizing other projects and possibly cutting back hours or staff, said Daniel Crews, the archivist of the Moravian Church, Southern Province.
Then earlier this year, members of the Cherokee Nation made a $125,000 grant, to be paid over five years, to translate and transcribe the documents. The archives have committed two archivists to work on the collection two days a week for the next five years, Crews said, with the hope of publishing their findings in a series of books after the work is complete.
The Cherokee Nation is made up of those people descended from ancestors who survived the Trail of Tears, the removal of the Cherokee in 1838 from the Eastern United States to the Indian Territory, which is now Oklahoma.
The Eastern Band, the Cherokee whose ancestors went into the mountains rather than accept removal, have also agreed to help pay for the project, Crews said, but have not announced how much they will donate.
The records contain details about what the Cherokee ate, how they built their villages, and the way they danced and dressed.
Jack Baker, a member of the Cherokee Nation tribal council, said that such information is available nowhere else.
"They're telling the story from within the Cherokee mission," he said. "It's their viewpoint, but it's an eyewitness account to what's happening within the Nation."
Mission in Georgia
In 1801, the Moravians sent missionaries to work among the Cherokee at Springplace mission in north Georgia, near Dalton. The Moravians brought their typical diligence in record-keeping to the enterprise.
About half of the records were written in German, in a handwriting that only a few German scholars can read today, known as "deutsche Schrift." Crews compared it to the Gothic script used in medieval times.
The Cherokee were generally less interested in the spiritual guidance that the Moravians offered than in educational opportunities, Crews said.
Baker said that because of frequent intermarriage with whites, the Cherokee had come to realize the value of education.
"They knew they had to educate their youth to compete in white culture," he said.
Much of the time, information about the Cherokee has to be teased out of the Moravian-focused texts, Crews said. Such work follows a general trend in historical research over the past 30 years to look for minority voices within a dominant culture.
In one diary entry, Crews said, a missionary complains about being kept awake all night by dancing Cherokee. But he went on to describe the dance.
The Moravians, with their German background, were orderly, precise and disciplined, Crews said. Their culture sometimes clashed with that of the Cherokee.
One diary entry for New Year's Day, for example, records a missionary's displeasure when he arrived at a Cherokee home to conduct religious services, only to find that a Cherokee chief had led a group off hunting.
The missionaries never made more than about 100 converts, Crews said, but there is evidence throughout the historical record that ties of affection existed between the Cherokee and the Moravians.
Sympathy with Cherokee
When the U.S. government ordered the Cherokee from their home in Georgia to Oklahoma, the Moravian missionaries fought the move. When they were overruled, the missionaries refused to travel with the Cherokee because they felt that meant they approved of the plan. Instead, they went to Oklahoma ahead of the Cherokee, and established a mission they called New Springplace, Crews said. The mission in Oklahoma continued to operate until 1899. The mission in Georgia closed after the Cherokee left.
Many of the Moravians identified with the Cherokee plight, Crews said, because many of them had been driven out of Europe.
"We knew what it was like to have your ancestral homelands taken over by someone else," he said.
The Cherokee had several nicknames for the Moravians, including "The Quiet Ones." They also referred to them as "The Ravens" and "The Black Coats" both names in recognition of the black suits the missionaries were fond of wearing.
Baker said that he agreed with Crews' assessment and that the ties between Cherokee and Moravian had remained even after the Moravians turned over their mission in Oklahoma to the Danish Lutherans in the 1890s.
In addition to general information about Cherokee daily life, the diaries are yielding a lot of genealogical information for Cherokee, Baker said. One document lists all of the students at Springplace, along with their parents' names and birth dates. Such information is available nowhere else.
His own ancestors intermarried with white families and he has found mention of them by name in some of the diaries, Baker said. Information about where they were living shed light on family dynamics.
Although the project has a serious, scholarly purpose, the task offers a feeling of discovery and connection to those long-ago missionaries and the people they lived and worked beside, Crews said.
And the research is providing new connections between the Moravians and Cherokee after a gap of about 100 years. The Cherokee-Moravian Historical Society has been founded as a result of the research to further an understanding of the history and relationships between the two groups.
"At least once a year a group of Moravians will go out to The Oaks, which is what they call New Springplace," Crews said, "and make connections."
■ Mary Giunca can be reached at 727-4089 or at mgiunca@wsjournal.com
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