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The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online platform for sharing knowledge and resources for endangered languages. Join this global effort to conserve linguistic diversity.

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Prior to the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Guarani people referred to themselves as Aba ‘men’.

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http://aboutworldlanguages.com/cherokee

http://www.everyculture.com/wc/Norway-to-Russia/Guaran-s.html

http://aboutworldlanguages.com/guarani

http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/Culture.aspx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8lPqgXrrYE

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/10/cherokee_blood_why_do_so_many_americans_believe_they_have_cherokee_ancestry.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd5s0p8LDu8

http://ies28.sfe.infd.edu.ar/aula/materias.cgi?wAccion=vermateria&wIdMateria=25&id_curso=244
http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/

Language Vitality and Endangerment-UNESCO

Language Maintenance and Shift

https://youtu.be/Q-XozG0RSCo

What is an endangered language: Anthony C. Woodbury (Endangered Languages LSA)

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The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online platform for sharing knowledge and resources for endangered languages. Join this global effort to conserve linguistic diversity.

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Did you know ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee) is vulnerable?

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The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online platform for sharing knowledge and resources for endangered languages. Join this global effort to conserve linguistic diversity.

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Relative lack of indigenous language literature. Aboriginal language literature, if it is available, is usually limited.
Language purism: Some people may choose to retain their language in its “pure form”. The younger generation of a community refrains from speaking their traditional language because they know or think that their language is incorrect or wrong and/or because they are criticized for speaking that way. In return, the older generation may prefer not to teach the language to the younger generation at all, rather than to have it “corrupted” by the younger generation which does not speak it well or does not treasure their ancestral language.

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Tourism: This brings in speakers of other languages, including those of the dominant language.

Spread of religion:

Culture contact and clash: When an ethnic group encounters a culture that is more prestigious than theirs, they will often go through changes of values, shift or cultural assimilation.

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Assimilation policy and language policy.
The education of children: this has promoted the dominant language. It has drastic negative effects on the minority language

Imposition of the dominant language: prohibition of the use of the indigenous language in education, punishment and humiliation for the use of indigenous language.

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Mixing of speakers of different languages: caused by boarding schools, reservations/settlements, intermarriage.
Improved communication and mass media: TV, books, internet,etc.

Indifferent attitude: Language apathy and language negligence. Some people do not care but it is too late when a language is gone.

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Dispossession of the land: due to invasion, conquest, colonization, settlement or grazing.

Relocation of the people: migration or by force.

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Decline or loss of population: natural catastrophes, illnesses. Violent acts by humans such as warfare, slavery, massacres, and genocide (here we do not agree with the author, we would classify "violent acts by humans" as a social cause)

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Indian Guarani Village language and culture

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Indian Guarani Village language and culture

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Indian Guarani Village Guarani languaye and culture

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View more videos like this and subscribe to my channel!

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Mbyá Guaraní men in traditional costumes

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Mbyá Guaraní men in traditional costumes

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Mbyá Guaraní incised ceramics bowls, Museum Farroupilha, in Triunfo

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Mbyá Guaraní incised ceramics bowls, Museum Farroupilha, in Triunfo

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Each symbol represents a syllable usually consisting of a consonant and a vowel.

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In 1540 the Cherokee lay claim to a 40,000 square-mile territory that today partly includes the states of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

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American Indian Activist Russell Means Powerful Speech

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The language and culture of the Cherokee Nation in the Appalachian region of North Carolina Excerpt from from the documentary "Voices of North Carolina" * at...

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tha causes of death or shift cn be: natural or environmental; political or military; social; language policy; cultural and religious; linguistic.

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Cherokee Nation Census Designated Places

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Cherokee Nation Census Designated Places

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Despite the relatively healthy size of the ethnic population, Cherokee is an endangered language. Only about a hundred monolingual speakers of Cherokee are still living.

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It is spoken by 15,000 to 22,500 people in eastern and northeastern Oklahoma, Cherokee Reservation; Great Smokey Mountains; and western North Carolina (Ethnologue).

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Today, all Cherokee people refer to themselves as tsa-la-gi.

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Cherokee (Tsalagi) belongs to the Iroquoian language family.

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Cherokee (Tsalagi) belongs to the Iroquoian language family.

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it happens when communities who share a native language abandon it and shift to speaking another one instead.

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Became a written language relatively recently. Prior to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the language did not have a writing system.  about lgs. The first Guaraní-Spanish dictionary was printed in 1639, and the first grammar in 1722. This is a way to preserve a language.

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What makes us who we are? How does our history impact what the Cherokee Nation has become today? Here are some historical insites into how the Cherokee lived, what we did and what was and has remained important to us from our earliest days.

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Mbyá Guaraní is spoken by 15,000 in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay

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Mbyá Guaraní (avañe’ẽ) belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní family of South America.

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Mbyá Guaraní (avañe’ẽ) belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní family of South America.

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one that is likely to become extinct in the near future.  Endangered Languages

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By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear

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By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear

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A language dies about every two weeks. About 18 languages are known to only have one living speaker.

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A language dies about every two weeks. About 18 languages are known to only have one living speaker.

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Less than 1/4 of all languages are used in education and cyber space. 

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Less than 1/4 of all languages are used in education and cyber space. 

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Tapeguahê porãite - Welcome

Guaraní ( avañe'ẽ) belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní family of South America. It is spoken by 4.6 million people in Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil ( Ethnologue). These languages are spoken by people who inhabit a vast area in the Amazon forest in Brazilian states and Paraguay in the south, and from the Atlantic coast in the east to the Andes of Bolivia and Peru in the west. Despite their geographical spread, the differences between the languages is relatively small, making it possible for the Portuguese Jesuits to develop a língua geral 'common language' which could be understood by everyone. The history and meaning of the name Guarani is a subject of dispute due to lack of historical records. Prior to the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Guarani people referred to themselves as Aba 'men'. The term Guaraní was originally applied by early Jesuit missionaries to refer to natives who had accepted conversion to Christianity.

Guaraní enjoys official status in several South American countries:

Bolivia. Guarani shares official status along with Spanish, Aymara, and 34 other indigenous languages.

Paraguay. Guarani shares official status with Spanish. Around two-thirds of the Paraguayan population speak Guaraní. Paraguay's constitution is bilingual, and school textbooks are typically half in Spanish and half in Guaraní. The two languages are considered equal.The linguistic situation in Paraguay, however, is quite complicated because almost nobody in Paraguay speaks 'pure Spanish' or 'pure Guaraní'. Rather most people code-switch between Spanish and Guaraní. At one extreme, better educated and more urbanized people tend to speak Spanish with a small amount of Guaraní. At the other extreme, less educated and more rural indigenous people tend to speak Guaraní with many Spanish words. This latter mix is called Jopará. It is estimated that over half of Paraguay's rural population speaks Jopará. Speakers of Guaraní who are not fluent in Spanish have restricted opportunities for education and employment.

Argentina. Guaraní is the second official language, along with Spanish, of the Argentine province of Corrientes.

Dialects

Ethnologue identifies several mutually intelligible varieties of Guaraní:

Eastern Bolivian Guaraní spoken by 33,700 in Bolivia

Western Bolivian Guaraní spoken by 7,000 in Bolivia

Guarani Ava spoken by 15,900 people in Brazil, and Paraguay

Guaraní Mbiyá spoken by 15,000 in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay

Paraguayan Guaraní spoken by 4.6 million in Paraguay

Structure

All syllables in Guaraní consist either of a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel. Guaraní words are either oral or nasal - a phenomenon called nasal harmony. A Guaraní word is nasal if it has at least one of the nasal vowels or consonants /ĩ, ẽ, ɨ᷀, ã, ũ, õ, ᵐb, ⁿt, ⁿd, ᵑg, m, n, ɲ, ŋ/ in its stem. Nasal harmony influences the choice of prefixes, and to a certain extent, enclitics. For example, the postpositions pe, ta turn into me, nda after nasal words.

VowelsGuaraní has six oral vowels. All vowels have nasal counterparts. In the table below, nasal vowels are marked with a tilde.

Consonants
The consonants of Guaraní are given below. Guaraní syllables consist of a vowel or a consonant plus a vowel. There are no consonant clusters.

/ᵐb, ⁿt, ⁿd, ᵑg/ are prenasalized stops, a combination of nasal plus stop, that behave phonologically like single consonants

/ɟ/ has no equivalent in English

/ʔ/ = sound between vowels in uh-oh

/ɣ/ has no equivalent in English

/ɾ/ is produced with a single tap of the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, e.g., in the Spanish word pero 'but.'.

/r/ is produced with the tip of tongue vibrating vibrating against the alveolar ridge, e.g., in the Spanish word perro 'dog.'

/ʋ/ has no equivalent in English

Guarani is an agglutinative polysynthetic language. The term polysynthetic refers to languages that have a high ratio of morphemes per word and which typically permit noun incorporation. A word in a polysynthetic language can express a meaning which would require a sentence in many other languages. Guaraní uses postpositions instead of prepositions, e.g., Paraguay pe 'in Paraguay'.

Guarani nouns are not marked for gender, number or case.

There is no definite article in Guaraní, but the colloquial variety uses of two Spanish articles la for singular, e.g., la ava 'the man' and lo for plural, e.g.,'lo mitã 'the boys.'

The plural marker kuéra is used for some pronouns, e.g., ha'e 'he/she,' ha'ekuéra 'they.' Postpositions precede the plural marker, e.g., hendive ' with him/her,' hendivekuéra 'with them.'

Guaraní distinguishes between inclusive (including hearer) and exclusive (excluding hearer) first person plural pronouns, as shown in the table below (Wikipedia).

Verbs
Guaraní has a complex verbal system.

There is a distinction between oral and nasal verbs.

Negation is formed as follows: nd + thematic vowel + root + i.

Interrogation is formed by adding the pa suffix to the root.

Word order
The normal word order in Guaraní is Subject- Verb-Object. If the subject is not specified, the word order is Object-Verb.

After four centuries of Spanish domination, Guaraní 's vocabulary is dominated by Spanish loanwords.

Below are a few basic words and phrases in Guaraní.

Guaraní numerals 1-10 are given below.

Writing

Guaraní became a written language relatively recently. Prior to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the language did not have a writing system. The first written texts in Guaraní were written by Jesuit missionaries who used the Latin alphabet to represent the language. The first Guaraní-Spanish dictionary was printed in 1639, and the first grammar in 1722. The script was standardized in 1950, although some disagreement about some of the letters still persist. The modern Guaraní alphabet is an adapted version of the Roman alphabet. Its orthography is largely phonemic (i.e., each letter represents a phoneme, a sound capable of differentiating word meaning). Tilde is used to mark nasalization of vowels, while ' represents a glottal stop.

Take a look at f Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Guaraní.

Art. 1
Mayma yvypóra ou ko yvy ári iñapytl'yre ha eteîcha dignidad ha derecho jeguerekópe; ha ikatu rupi oikuaa añetéva ha añete'yva, iporâva ha ivaíva, tekotevê pehenguéicha oiko oñondivekuéra.

Article 1
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Did You Know?

English has borrowed a number of words from Guaraní ( via Portuguese). Among them are the following:

Difficulty

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Tapeguahê porãite - Welcome Guaraní ( avañe'ẽ) belongs to the Tupi-Guaraní family of South America. It is spoken by 4.6 million people in Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil ( Ethnologue).

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Languages highlight the varieties of human experience. Language shapes human experience. So if a language dies, this deprives us of extremely valuable knowledge.

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Languages highlight the varieties of human experience. Language shapes human experience. So if a language dies, this deprives us of extremely valuable knowledge.

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3,500 smallest languages account for just 0,2 % of the world's people. 

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3,500 smallest languages account for just 0,2 % of the world's people. 

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83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80% of the world's population, 

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83 most widely spoken languages account for about 80% of the world's population, 

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Cherokee (Tsalagi) belongs to the Iroquoian language family. The name of the language occurs in several forms. The form Cherokee came from the Eastern, while the form Tsalagi came from the Western dialect. Today, all Cherokee people refer to themselves as tsa-la-gi. Cherokee speakers constitute the seventh-largest group of speakers of native languages north of Mexican border. It is spoken by 15,000 to 22,500 people in eastern and northeastern Oklahoma, Cherokee Reservation; Great Smokey Mountains; and western North Carolina ( Ethnologue). Linguists believe that the Cherokee people migrated to the southeast from the Great Lakes region about three thousand years ago. Despite the three-thousand-year geographic separation, the Cherokee language today still shows some similarities to the languages spoken around the Great Lakes, such as Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora..

In 1540 the Cherokee lay claim to a 40,000 square-mile territory that today partly includes the states of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. In the late 18th century, some Cherokee were paid a fee to voluntarily migrate west, but most of them remained on their ancestral lands. In 1838, under pressure from white settlers, Andrew Jackson ordered a forcible removal of some 20,000 Cherokee to Oklahoma, the home of The Cherokee Nation today. Several thousand died along the way, and the forced march became known as the Trail of Tears. The journey is called in Cherokee nu-na-hi du-na tlo-hi-lu-i'trail where they cried'. Several hundred Cherokee evaded removal by hiding in the mountains of North Carolina. In 1842, they received permission to remain on lands set apart for their use in western North Carolina. These lands today constitute the Qualla Reservation.

Status
Despite the relatively healthy size of the ethnic population, Cherokee is an endangered language. Only about a hundred monolingual speakers of Cherokee are still living. However, increasing numbers of Cherokee descendants are renewing interest in the traditions, history, and language of their ancestors. In some communities in eastern Oklahoma and western North Carolina, Cherokee is now used by speakers of all ages.

Dialects

At the time of European contact, there were three dialects of Cherokee: Lower, Middle, and Overhill. The Lower dialect which was spoken primarily on the South Carolina-Georgia border, has been extinct for over 200 years. Of the remaining two dialects, the Middle dialect (Kituwah) is spoken by the Eastern band on the Qualla Boundary. The Overhill or Western dialect is spoken by some 9,000 people in Oklahoma. The Western dialect is more widely spoken and written than the Eastern. Both dialects have been influenced by English, with the Western dialect showing some Spanish influence.

Structure

Cherokee has a relatively small inventory of phonemes.

Vowels
Cherokee has 6 vowels which can be either short or long. Vowel length distinguishes the meaning of words. In writing, vowel length is represented by a colon after the vowel. The language has one somewhat unusual vowel: a nasalized schwa /ə̃/ which is represented in writing by the letter v. There is only one diphthong, namely /ai/.

Consonants
There are 10 consonants in North Carolina Cherokee. Like other Iroquoian languages, Cherokee lacks the labial sounds /p/, /b/, /f/, /v/. The only labial sound is /m/ which occurs only in a few native words and in loanwords from English.

/ʔ/ = sound between the vowels in uh-oh, represented by an apostrophe in writing

Pitch accent Cherokee syllables may be marked by low, mid, or high pitch in addition to one falling and two rising pitches. However, linguists have not yet reached a consensus about the nature of Cherokee pitch accent. Pitch is usually not marked in writing.

Like many Native American languages, Cherokee is polysynthetic, meaning that many morphemes may be linked together to form a single word. A single Cherokee word may be equivalent to an entire clause in English, e.g., gawonisgo which means 'he speaks all the time'.
Nouns

Cherokee nouns belong to one of two classes: animate and inanimate. All people and animals are animate, and with only a few exceptions, all other nouns are inanimate.

Animate and inanimate nouns are distinguished by different forms of the modifiers, e.g., in the singular: dalonige nvya 'yellow rock', and adalonige tsisgwa 'yellow bird'; in the plural didalonige nvya 'yellow rocks', and anidalonige tsisgwa 'yelow birds'.

Animate and inanimate nouns take different forms of the verb, e.g., sgwahlesdi tsigowtiha 'I see a ball', gihli tsigowtiha 'I see a dog' in the singular and disgwahlesdi detsigowtiha 'I see balls', gihli gatsigowtiha 'I see birds' in the plural.

Nouns are derived from verbs by using derivational suffixes. For instance, the agentive suffix -i is used to derive the noun gawonsisgi 'speaker' (literally, 'one who often speaks') from the verb gawonisgo 'he speaks all the time'.

Pronouns
Cherokee personal pronouns are prefixed to nouns. There is an inclusive and an exclusive form of the first person plural 'we'. The inclusive form includes the listener, while the exclusive form does not.
Verbs

Cherokee verbs are quite complex. They consist of a root plus a number of prefixes and suffixes that must be kept in a strict order. Here is an example from Wikipedia.

Verbs are marked for tense, aspect and mood.

There are many different prefixes and suffixes which allow many many possible combinations, so that Cherokee verbs potentially have thousands of different inflected forms. For example, yi-tsi-gata-ha 'I don't know' consists of yi- 'negative prefix' + -tsi- 'I' + -gata- 'know' + -ha 'present tense'.

Word order
The normal word order in Cherokee is Subject-Object-Verb. Modifiers generally precede the nouns they modify.

Vocabulary
Cherokee tends to rely on its own linguistic resources rather than on loanwords. For instance, instead of borrowing the word for 'airplane' from English, Cherokee created the word tsi-yu ga-no-hi-li-to-hi, literally 'the thing that one flies'.

Here are some common words and phrases in Cherokee.

Below are the Cherokee numerals 1-10.

Writing

Cherokee was one of the first American Indian languages to have a writing system devised especially for it. In 1821, the Cherokee tribal council approved a Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, a Cherokee speaker who knew only a few words of English. Using printed alphabets of other languages given to him by missionaries, he created a Cherokee syllabary with 85 letters adapted from English, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. Each symbol represents a syllable usually consisting of a consonant and a vowel. The syllabary is no longer in public use, although there are efforts to revive its use for a greater variety of purposes.

Below are Cherokee numerals 1-10.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Cherokee syllabary and in transliteration.

ᏂᎦᏓ ᎠᏂᏴᏫ ᏂᎨᎫᏓᎸᎾ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏂᏠᏱ ᎤᎾᏕᎿ ᏚᏳᎦᏛ ᎨᏒᎢ.ᎨᏥᏁᎳ ᎤᎾᏓᏅᏖᏗ ᎠᎴ ᎤᏃᏟᏍᏗ ᎠᎴ ᏌᏊ ᎨᏒ ᏧᏂᎸᏫᏍᏓᏁᏗ ᎠᎾᏟᏅᏢ ᎠᏓᏅᏙ ᎬᏗ.

Nigada aniyvwi nigeguda'lvna ale unihloyi unadehna duyukdv gesv'i. Gejinela unadanvtehdi ale unohlisdi ale sagwu gesv junilvwisdanedi anahldinvdlv adanvdo gvhdi.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Difficulty

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Cherokee (Tsalagi) belongs to the Iroquoian language family. The name of the language occurs in several forms. The form Cherokee came from the Eastern, while the form Tsalagi came from the Western dialect. Today, all Cherokee people refer to themselves as tsa-la-gi.

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Although approximately 6,000 languages still exist, many are under threat.

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Although approximately 6,000 languages still exist, many are under threat.

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"Language diversity is
essential to the human heritage. Each and every language embodies the unique cultural wisdom of people. The loss of any language is thus a loss for all humanity". Unesco

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It is the community members, not outsiders, who do or do not maintain their languages: it is their choice as to whether and in what way their languages should be revitalized, maintained and strengthened. Unesco

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"The world faces new challenges in keeping its languages alive and meaningful. It is time for the peoples of the world to pool their resources and to build on the strengths of their linguistic and cultural diversity". Unesco

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Guaranís - Introduction, Location, Language, Folklore, Religion, Major holidays, Rites of passage

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Guaranís - Introduction, Location, Language, Folklore, Religion, Major holidays, Rites of passage Norway to Russia

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Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?

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Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?

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"I cannot say when I first heard of my Indian blood, but as a boy I heard it spoken of in a general way," Charles Phelps, a resident of Winston-Salem in North Carolina, told a federal census taker near the beginning of the 20 th century. Like many Americans at the time, Phelps had a vague understanding of his Native American ancestry. On one point, however, his memory seemed curiously specific: His Indian identity was a product of his "Cherokee blood."

The tradition of claiming a Cherokee ancestor continues into the present. Today, more Americans claim descent from at least one Cherokee ancestor than any other Native American group. Across the United States, Americans tell and retell stories of long-lost Cherokee ancestors. These tales of family genealogies become murkier with each passing generation, but like Phelps, contemporary Americans profess their belief despite not being able to point directly to a Cherokee in their family tree.

Recent demographic data reveals the extent to which Americans believe they're part Cherokee. In 2000, the federal census reported that 729,533 Americans self-identified as Cherokee. By 2010, that number increased, with the Census Bureau reporting that 819,105 Americans claimed at least one Cherokee ancestor. Census data also indicates that the vast majority of people self-identifying as Cherokee-almost 70 percent of respondents-claim they are mixed-race Cherokees.

Why do so many Americans claim to possess "Cherokee blood"? The answer requires us to peel back the layers of Cherokee history and tradition.

Most scholars agree that the Cherokees, an Iroquoian-speaking people, have lived in what is today the Southeastern United States-Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama-since at least A.D. 1000. When Europeans first encountered the Cherokees in the mid-16 th century, Cherokee people had well-established social and cultural traditions. Cherokee people lived in small towns and belonged to one of seven matrilineal clans. Cherokee women enjoyed great political and social power in the Cherokee society. Not only did a child inherit the clan identity of his or her mother, women oversaw the adoption of captives and other outsiders into the responsibilities of clan membership.

To claim Cherokee blood is to authenticate your American-ness.

As European colonialism engulfed Cherokee Country during the 17 th and 18 th centuries, however, Cherokees began altering their social and cultural traditions to better meet the challenges of their times. One important tradition that adapted to new realities was marriage.

The Cherokee tradition of exogamous marriage, or marrying outside of one's clan, evolved during the 17 th and 18 th centuries as Cherokees encountered Europeans on a more frequent basis. Some sought to solidify alliances with Europeans through intermarriage.

It is impossible to know the exact number of Cherokees who married Europeans during this period. But we know that Cherokees viewed intermarriage as both a diplomatic tool and as a means of incorporating Europeans into the reciprocal bonds of kinship. Eighteenth-century British traders often sought out Cherokee wives. For the trader, the marriage opened up new markets, with his Cherokee wife providing both companionship and entry access to items such as the deerskins coveted by Europeans. For Cherokees, intermarriage made it possible to secure reliable flows of European goods, such as metal and iron tools, guns, and clothing. The frequency with which the British reported interracial marriages among the Cherokees testifies to the sexual autonomy and political influence that Cherokee women enjoyed. It also gave rise to a mixed-race Cherokee population that appears to have been far larger than the racially mixed populations of neighboring tribes.

Europeans were not the only group of outsiders with which 18 th-century Cherokees intermingled. By the early 19 th century, a small group of wealthy Cherokees adopted racial slavery, acquiring black slaves from American slave markets. A bit more than 7 percent of Cherokee families owned slaves by the mid-1830s; a small number, but enough to give rise to a now pervasive idea in black culture: descent from a Cherokee ancestor.

In the early 20 th century, the descendants of Cherokee slaves related stories of how their black forebears accompanied Cherokees on the forced removals of the 1830s. They also recalled tales of how African and Cherokee people created interracial families. These stories have persisted into the 21 st century. The former NFL running back Emmitt Smith believed that he had "Cherokee blood." After submitting a DNA test as part of his 2010 appearance on NBC's Who Do You Think You Are, he learned he was mistaken. Among black Americans, as among Americans as a whole, the belief in Cherokee ancestry is more common than actual blood ties.

Slaves owned by Cherokees did join their owners when the federal government forced some 17,000 Cherokees from their Southeastern homeland at the end of the 1830s. Cherokee people and their slaves endured that forced journey into the West by riverboats and overland paths, joining tens of thousands of previously displaced Native peoples from the Eastern United States in Indian Territory (modern-day eastern Oklahoma). We now refer to this inglorious event as the Trail of Tears.

But the Cherokee people did not remain confined to the lands that the federal government assigned to them in Indian Territory. During the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, Cherokees traveled between Indian Territory and North Carolina to visit family and friends, and Cherokee people migrated and resettled throughout North America in search of social and economic opportunities. While many Native American groups traveled throughout the United States during this period in search of employment, the Cherokee people's advanced levels of education and literacy-a product of the Cherokee Nation's public education system in Indian Territory and the willingness of diaspora Cherokees to enroll their children in formal educational institutions-meant they traveled on a scale far larger than any other indigenous group. In these travels it's possible to glimpse Cherokees coming into contact with, living next door to, or intermarrying with white and black Americans from all walks of life.

At the same time that the Cherokee diaspora was expanding across the country, the federal government began adopting a system of "blood quantum" to determine Native American identity. Native Americans were required to prove their Cherokee, or Navajo, or Sioux "blood" in order to be recognized. (The racially based system of identification also excluded individuals with "one drop" of "Negro blood.") The federal government's "blood quantum" standards varied over time, helping to explain why recorded Cherokee "blood quantum" ranged from "full-blood" to one 2048 th. The system's larger aim was to determine who was eligible for land allotments following the government's decision to terminate Native American self-government at the end of the 19 th century. By 1934, the year that Franklin Roosevelt's administration adopted the Indian Reorganization Act, "blood quantum" became the official measure by which the federal government determined Native American identity.

In the ensuing decades, Cherokees, like other Native American groups, sought to define "blood" on their own terms. By the mid-20 th century, Cherokee and other American Indian activists began joining together to articulate their definitions of American Indian identity and to confront those tens of thousands of Americans who laid claim to being descendants of Native Americans.

Groups such as the National Congress of American Indians worked toward the self-determination of American Indian nations and also tackled the problem of false claims to membership. According to the work of Vine Deloria, one of NCAI's leading intellectuals, "Cherokee was the most popular tribe" in America. "From Maine to Washington State," Deloria recalled, white Americans insisted they were descended from Cherokee ancestors. More often than not, that ancestor was an "Indian princess," despite the fact that the tribe never had a social system with anything resembling an inherited title like princess.

So why have so many Americans laid claim to a clearly fictional identity? Part of the answer is embedded in the tribe's history: its willingness to incorporate outsiders into kinship systems and its wide-ranging migrations throughout North America. But there's another explanation, too.

The Cherokees resisted state and federal efforts to remove them from their Southeastern homelands during the 1820s and 1830s. During that time, most whites saw them as an inconvenient nuisance, an obstacle to colonial expansion. But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother. That great-grandmother was often a "princess," a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring.

The continuing popularity of claiming "Cherokee blood" and the ease with which millions of Americans inhabit a Cherokee identity speaks volumes about the enduring legacy of American colonialism. Shifting one's identity to claim ownership of an imagined Cherokee past is at once a way to authenticate your American-ness and absolve yourself of complicity in the crimes Americans committed against the tribe across history.

That said, the visibility of Cherokee identity also owes much to the success of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. Today, the Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees comprise a combined population of 344,700. Cherokee tribal governments provide community members with health services, education, and housing assistance; they have even teamed up with companies such as Google and Apple to produce Cherokee-language apps. Most Cherokees live in close-knit communities in eastern Oklahoma or the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, but a considerable number live throughout North America and in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto. Cherokee people are doctors and lawyers, schoolteachers and academics, tradespeople and minimum-wage workers. The cultural richness, political visibility, and socioeconomic diversity of the Cherokee people have played a considerable role in keeping the tribe's identity in the historical consciousness of generation after generation of Americans, whether or not they have Cherokee blood.

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why do so many people have cherokee blood?

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why do so many people think they have cherokee blood?

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Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?

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"I cannot say when I first heard of my Indian blood, but as a boy I heard it spoken of in a general way," Charles Phelps, a resident of Winston-Salem in North Carolina, told a federal census taker near the beginning of the 20 th century.

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Cherokee Nation Community and Cultural Outreach

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Tommy Wildcat's life work is sharing Cherokee culture and history. We talk about what drives him to create a better understanding of the Cherokee people.

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Jaguota Javy means "let's walk togetherl" in Guaraní. This is the second in a series of recordings of the Morinigo family in aldea Katu-Pyry near San Ignacio, Misiones, Argentina. All are new songs written over the past three years by the community. Explore this project at The Ethnomusicologist: http://www.ethnomusico.com