Culture Of The Native Cherokee

By Nathan Lambert 

 The Native Cherokee Idians had many spirits that they believed in. One was called the Wendigo, which was a spirit that held people and threw them into cannibalism like zombies. They said it had a deer skull as a head, the body of a giant goat, and stood on 2 hooves.

   A lot of their spiritual gatherings used tobacco, and they didn't just use regular pipes. They held tomahawks that were hollowed out into pipes. They have many different reasons for these pipes. The smell of the pipes would be used for ceremonies, and only people known as ‘alter keepers’ used them to contrast their singing around a fire.

   While they were put on reservations, if they married a person off the reservation they could leave with them. Besides the reservations, some churches had removed native kids from their dead Cherokee parents. They were forced to convert to Christianity and if they didn't want to be they were harshly beaten. They could not speak their own language, because if they did, it was seen as demonic and they were beaten for it.

    The Cherokee have a belief system like most Indians. They believed that plants, animals, and humans are all equal and should be respected as such. They even thought that inanimate objects have a form of a spirit, like rivers, mountains, and even the sky.