CHARLOTTE
Freeman Owle's great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee Indian married to a Scottish settler.
In 1838, they hid in the North Carolina mountains to escape forced removal by U.S. troops during the Trail of Tears. They taught their children the Cherokee ways, including respect for every living thing.
Yesterday, at a festival celebrating American Indian Heritage Month, Owle brought his ancestors' story to life at the Charlotte Museum of History.
Owle told visitors yesterday that as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday "now is a time of mending and walking together."
"We are one tribe," he said of all Americans. "We need to work together."
That was the spirit of the festival, which included tribal dancing, singing and storytelling. About 300 visitors watched performances in the museum's Great Hall, then took their children to craft tables to make feathered talking sticks, turtle-shaped rattles and models of a Cherokee longhouse.
About 4,800 American Indians live in Mecklenburg County, said festival coordinator William Lowry of Matthews, who belongs to the Lumbee tribe.
North Carolina is home to more than 103,000 American Indians from tribes including the Lumbee, Cherokee and Waccamaw-Siouan, according to Gov. Bev Perdue's heritage month proclamation.
Dancers in feathers, beads and buckskin took their turns, accompanied by five men chanting and pounding a giant drum.
"Ninety percent of the Cherokee -- thanks to Sequoya -- could read and write," storyteller Owle told the crowd, referring to the Cherokee scholar who developed the tribe's written alphabet. Many of the soldiers who drove them from their land could not, he said.
"And they called the Indians savages," said Owle, who lives in Cherokee and teaches the native language to middle-school students living on the Cherokee reservation.
He is not bitter about his tribe's tragic past but prefers to focus instead on what he can do to keep Cherokee culture alive for those on and off the reservation.
Owle hoped that festival visitors would take home "a piece of wisdom," he said, "that leads to better understanding of all races."
Teresa Caesar, 51, brought her two grandchildren to the festival to show them that American Indians don't just live in movies and storybooks.
"I want them to know how joyous these people are," Caesar said. "I want them to see that the descendants of the Native Americans aren't forgetting their heritage. And we shouldn't either."
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