Page 239 - American Stories, A History of the United States

9.1 Read the Document Nile’s Weekly Register, “Memorial of the Cherokee Nation” (1830)

9.2

9.3

chERoKEE litERacy Sequoyah’s invention of the cherokee alphabet enabled thousands of cherokees to
read and write primers and newspapers in their own language.

Boudinot could point with pride to high levels of Cherokee acculturation, education,
and economic success at American-style “civilization.”
The Seminole, the smallest of the five nations, present perhaps the starkest cultural
contrast to the Cherokee, both because the Seminole reacted to pressure from white
settlers with armed resistance rather than accommodation, and because their multicul-
tural history gave them a different relationship to slavery.
The Seminole Nation in Florida, which formed after the European conquest of
America, was an amalgam of many different peoples with roots in Africa and the New
World. Disparate groups of Creek Indians migrating from Georgia and Alabama in the
wake of war and disease mingled with the remnants of native Floridians to form the
new tribe known as the Seminole. Spain had also granted asylum to runaway African
American slaves from the Carolinas, who created autonomous “maroon communities”
in Florida, allying with the Seminole to ward off slave-catchers. African Americans
and Native Americans intermingled, and by the late eighteenth century, some African
Americans were already known as “Seminole Negroes” or estelusti. The word Seminole
itself meant “wild” or “runaway” in the Creek language.
Although the Seminoles adopted African slavery in the early nineteenth century,
it was different from slavery as it existed among whites, or even among the Cherokee
and Creek. Seminole “slaves” lived in separate towns, planted and cultivated fields in

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