Investigation

I really enjoyed the speech and protest of John Ross, who was a Cherokee leader in the 1800's, a time in which Native Americans were being forced off of their homeland in the United States and pushed west.  John Ross stood up to the government, however, and fought against this Indian removal policy.  I gained some respect for him by the way he "went to bat" for his people, something a true leader does.  I could not obtain all of my information about this situation and John Ross just with these two primary sources, so I of course had several questions after reading them.  First of all, and this might be a dumb and ignorant question, I did not picture John Ross looking the way he did in the picture.  He was a white man, and I expected him to look more like my interpretation of an Indian.  I wondered if he grew up as a Cherokee, or was just moved into a leadership position after he got older?  Another question I had involved the Native Americans that stayed put even after they were told to head west.  In his speech he talks about a large base of Cherokees still staying in their homeland.  I am curious to find out how those Cherokees coexisted with the Europeans and where they stayed?  My third question involves his protest.  Where did he get his evidence that the treaties that justified Indian Removal were gathered and obtained by fraud?  These questions made it obvious to me that I still have a lot to learn about the topic/primary source and that I do not have a ton of background and previous knowledge on it.

As far as the speech and protest by John Ross go, I do not know anything about them in particular, but can relate and understand to the context and subject.  When Europeans kept immigrating to the United States, the hunger for more territory kept getting stronger.  The settlers forced the Indians to move off of their homeland and pushed them west.  I knew that there was some resistance by the Indians, but was not sure how much.  John Ross is an example of some resistance, and I am excited to learn more about his role in opposing Indian removal.

In order to get more information about John Ross and his role, I researched other secondary sources.  One source I found, which is cited below and taken from The Journal of American History, looks at John Ross and Indian removal in a few different angles.  This article made it out to be that Ross was pretty strategic, and a little sly as well.  Ross was trying to fight colonialism, so he wanted to learn more about Cherokee history in order to preserve it.  Ross studied ancient Cherokee stories, and found a lot of historical information, that had more than likely been tainted as the years went by.  He used them anyway, and these myths were used to fight colonialism.  A lot of people questioned the authenticity of the stories, because many believed that only the Cherokees of hundreds of years ago knew some of the stories Ross was sharing and passing on as true.  Ross was somewhat criticized  for being only 1/8 Cherokee, which answers a question I had earlier in the investigation.  In the primary sources, I was looking at John Ross through the lens of a hero, but in this article, I view him more as tricky and strategic.  The different viewpoints of the articles are very intriguing and insightful.

Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations

Claudio Saunt

The Journal of American History
Vol. 93, No. 3 (Dec., 2006), pp. 673-697

Published by: Organization of American Historians

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4486409