Cherokee

Currently the largest tribe in the steadily-growing race known as Native American Indians. The Natives are, fortunately, making a comeback, and NOT just with casinos, dammit! With well over 700,000 mixed- and full-blooded members, the Cherokee nation is the largest tribe in the entire United States. The "motherland" that the tribe inhabited, of which many still do, is known as the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and very western North Carolina. The white settlers and slaveowners pushed a great number of my people off their lands, of which many of us thoroughly and bitterly resent them. It was those people who made this region the South, with their new countrified, Southeast-style culture and political opinions. They also believed that the Cherokees were nothing but savages and heathens, VERY BIG misconception. Thanks to most of those people who took over the lands, now we have a mixture of lightly-educated hicks, and a bunch of arrogant, and usually racist, rednecks. What a GREAT EXCHANGE! We have managed to hold out, however. Many of the ancestors held out in different hiding places in the mountains, and a lot of them survived the Trail of Tears. It is true that many Cherokees served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, but it is a decision that most of them made out of fear of the Southerners. Many of them, however, ended up serving in the Union Indian Brigade, which fought out in the Trans-Mississippi Theatre, coming from Oklahoma and Kansas, were most of the Natives had been exiled to from their eastern homelands. The Cherokee are a strong people, they served the nation and the settlers even as their own rights and lands were gradually being taken from them, and they deserve a lot of respect, and even tribute, in return.