NANCY WARD, CHEROKEE ANCESTOR OF EDD HICKS
By Stanley Rice 2014
Edd Hicks was the last member of his family to speak
the Cherokee language. He tried to teach his youngest children
(including Nina, Bill, and Jack) to speak a little Cherokee about 1930,
but they thought it sounded very funny, and they saw no use for it in
the white world of the twentieth century. They also laughed when they
heard Edd sing Cherokee songs. Therefore Edd’s kids grew up like any
other rural Oklahoma kids in the early twentieth century, except in one
way: they learned that they were the descendants of Nancy Ward, Beloved
Woman of the Cherokees.
Nanyehi, also known as Nancy Ward, was Edd’s fourth
great grandmother. She may have been the most famous woman in Cherokee
history. The struggles that Nanyehi endured, and the leadership that she
provided, were a reflection of the tremendous and stressful changes
that the Cherokee tribe underwent during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, and is an important part of the background for Edd
Hicks’s life.
Nanyehi was only 17 years old when she distinguished
herself as a war hero. She insisted on accompanying her husband to the
Battle of Taliwa in 1755, between the Cherokee and Muskogee tribes. When
her husband was killed, she took his rifle and killed the man who had
killed her husband, then rallied the Cherokees to a decisive victory.
Nanyehi was not the only warrior woman to have done this—a similar
account exists for a woman named Cuhtahlutah. Partly as a result of
Nanyehi’s heroism and leadership, the tribe gave her a position of power
that allowed her supreme authority to decide the fate of captives and
of prisoners of war, a position that could not be taken away from her.
This position, called Ghigau, is often translated Beloved Woman. Women
played an important role in Cherokee tribal governance until the tribe
adopted a constitutional government, led by an all-male council. Nancy
Ward was the last Ghigau.
To people versed in European and American history, it
may seem unusual for women to have political power prior to the
twentieth century, but it is not so unusual in Native American history.
Women raised children and most of the food, and it just seemed to make
sense to the Cherokee and other tribes that women should have an input
into tribal decisions. One of the first Natives to visit Europe was
Attakullakulla, a Cherokee leader, and Nanyehi’s uncle. He met King
George II, and Parliament. Attakullakulla’s response was, in so many
words, What is wrong with you people? Where are the women? Why don’t you
have any women in leadership positions? With such a precedent, it is
not surprising that the Cherokees would reward a heroine like Nanyehi
with esteem and power. When, later, Nanyehi was part of a Cherokee
delegation to negotiate with the whites, she said the same thing that
her uncle had said in England—where are the women?
As in all other tribal societies in the late
seventeenth century, Cherokee men hunted and went to war, while the
women raised crops and gathered food and raised the children. But men
were not dominant. Men and women had separate spheres of authority.
Since women ruled the home, the home and crops and children belonged to
them. If a husband and wife divorced, a not uncommon practice, the wife
kept everything. This practice was reinforced by the clan system. The
husband left his family and joined the wife’s family, the opposite of
western practice. Furthermore, he did not join her clan. The children
belonged to the wife’s clan. The wife’s clan protected her. It was the
responsibility of the clan to take revenge for injustices against any
clan member. If the husband was killed or suffered some injustice, it
was his clan, not his wife’s, that sought vengeance. If a man took more
than one wife (also a not uncommon practiced) the wives were usually
members of the same clan, often sisters. It seemed almost as if the
husband was sort of a roving inseminator rather than a family member.
The separate spheres of authority for men and women
were reinforced by the Cherokee concept of blood. Men shed blood in war
and in hunting; women shed blood by menstruation. Men would help women
during planting and harvest, but were not farmers. If a man chose to
farm, rather than hunt, he had no connection with blood and thus little
power. He was tolerated but not esteemed. If a woman went hunting with
her husband, she usually provided a supporting role, but nevertheless
earned some respect because she had two connections with blood: hunting,
and as a woman. A woman also had two connections with blood if she
joined her husband in war, which brought her even greater esteem. Women
warriors were uncommon but not rare in Cherokee tribal society.
Nanyehi was an inconvenient child and adult. She saw
things that others did not see. When Nanyehi saw a forest, she did not
just see the trees. She heard the voices of a living forest. She was
always getting lost, apparently; “Nanyehi” means “wandering” as a wild
rose does. Because she was aware of things beyond mundane everyday life,
and because of her leadership, Nanyehi could be considered a
prophetess. In retrospect, people look back and think that the prophet
in their midst had a special calling. There is a legend that at
Nanyehi’s birth a white wolf was seen, which predicted the path of peace
for the Cherokee, for which this child would provide leadership.
When the time came for Nanyehi to lead, she was
ready. Other wives stayed in the village while their husbands went off
to war. But Nanyehi, only 17 years old, went to the Battle of Taliwa,
against the Creeks, with her husband Kingfisher. And when a Creek
warrior shot him, Nanyehi picked up Kingfisher’s rifle and killed the
Creek warrior. She then roused the Cherokees to victory. This was in
1755.
But this was also a moment of intense realization for
her. The Cherokees won the Battle of Taliwa, but the father of her two
children was dead. From that moment onward, her consistent prophetic
message was that the Cherokees should pursue the path of peace. Every
time you kill an enemy warrior, you leave a widow and orphans, she said.
Also, I believe her prophetic vision allowed her to see the rising tide
of white immigration, and that it would be ultimately futile to resist
it.
Her convictions, of the value of peace and of the
necessity of working out a way of living with the whites (first the
British, then the Americans) led her to make decisions that some others
in the tribe would criticize as virtually treasonous. But it was too
late; they had already given her a lifetime position of authority.
During one border conflict in 1776, Cherokee warriors captured a certain
Mrs. Bean. They had her tied to a stake, and had the kindling arranged
around her, and had already lit the fire. Along came Nanyehi, who
ordered her release. Nanyehi stomped out the fires. This dramatic act,
as well as her release of five white captives at Sitico in 1781, was
consistent with her role as Ghigau.
In stark contrast to Nanyehi stood her cousin,
Dragging Canoe (Tsiyu Gansini). His response to white aggression into
Cherokee lands was to fight. At a meeting in 1775, the older chiefs,
including his father Attakullakulla, along with Nanyehi, chose to make
peace with the whites and to sell some of the land to them. But Dragging
Canoe said, enough! He chopped his tomahawk into the war pole and said
that he was going to fight the whites. The younger chiefs followed him,
and for the rest of his life he led a band of Cherokees, called the
Chickamaugas, who remained at war with the American whites.
When you think of July 1776, you inevitably think of
Philadelphia and the Declaration of Independence. But on the western
frontiers of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the
battles were over Cherokee land. And it was a complex situation. To the
Cherokees, the British and the Americans looked alike. To the whites,
the peaceful and the warlike Cherokees looked alike. In July 1776,
Cherokee warriors had captured some white men. Dragging Canoe planned an
attack on white settlements. It appears that it was Nanyehi who
secretly released the captives; not only that, she told them of her
cousin’s plans. This information provided the white settlers with just
enough time to send their wives and children to safety and to be ready
for Dragging Canoe’s attack. During the Battle of Island Flats, Dragging
Canoe was wounded and his forces retreated.
The war faction of the Cherokees may have been
justified in seeing Nanyehi’s act as an act of treason. But the old
chiefs did not see it this way, since they were doing their best to
prevent war between the Cherokees and the white Americans. This reminds
me of the way the ancient Israelites reacted to prophets such as
Jeremiah. Jeremiah told the Israelites that their enemies would conquer
them. In response, they treated him as a criminal. The Israelites locked
him in the stocks, and another time they threw him in a pit. Nanyehi
was not treated in this manner, because she had been given a position of
authority, and the other Cherokees respected this authority. But don’t
think that there weren’t some Cherokees who wished they could throw
Nanyehi into a pit.
Both the instinct of war and the capacity for peace
are part of evolved human nature. They never neutralize each other; they
are both always present, always next to one another like strands of
color in marble. I feel both of them all the time. So do you. We all
feel what Dragging Canoe felt, and what Nanyehi felt.
Nanyehi’s vision of peace was a matter of deep and
lifelong conviction, or, if you will, prophetic vision. In ancient
Israel, several prophets proclaimed the vision of the lion lying down
with the lamb, and the child playing with harmless snakes. Of beating
swords into plowshares. This was also Nanyehi’s vision. “The white men
are our brothers. The same house shelters them, and the same sky covers
us all,” she said.
But every human, prophets and prophetesses included,
has mixed motives. Nanyehi was a prophet of peace out of deep
conviction, but there is no denying that her cooperation with the
English and the Americans brought her personal benefits. Soon after she
was widowed in the Battle of Taliwa, Nanyehi married an Irish trader,
Bryant Ward. Thereafter she was known as Nancy Ward. Later, Bryant moved
out of Cherokee land and, apparently without divorcing Nancy, married a
white woman and started a family. Rumor has it that Nancy also had a
lover from among the white negotiators. Just as in 1776, Nancy Ward sent
warning to the whites of an impending attack in 1780. It was apparently
her lover Isaac Thomas who carried the message to the whites.
The benefits that Nancy Ward received as a result of
cooperating with the whites extended to her descendants. Her Cherokee
daughter married a white man, Ellis Harlan. In addition, the only
offspring of Nancy and Bryant, Elizabeth (who was Edd’s third great
grandmother), married Joseph Martin. Martin was one of the leading
Indian agents, and later governor of Virginia. Two of Elizabeth’s
daughters married prominent white men, both of them Hildebrand brothers;
granddaughter Nancy (Nannie), Edd’s great great grandmother, married
Michael Hildebrand. It is possible that, because they got in good with
the whites, the descendants of Nancy Ward did not suffer as much as
other Cherokees from white encroachment and violence.
Dragging Canoe died after an all-night party (not
advised for a 60 year old man) in 1792. There was no leader to take his
place, no one who could maintain the war against white America, which
ended by treaty in 1794. The only way of peace was to cooperate with the
whites, to adjust to their society. Nancy Ward played an important role
in this transition.
Although the transition was inevitable, it was not
easy. It began as soon as the Cherokees established trading
relationships with the English in the eighteenth century. Like hunters
in many other tribes, Cherokee hunters would ceremonially ask
forgiveness from the animal they killed. The animal (usually a deer) was
a source of life—meat for food, hide for clothing, bone for tools—and
not just a commodity. But white traders (like Bryant Ward) brought items
that the Cherokees found very useful, such as metal tools. Women
adopted farming tools, such as plows, as well as domestic tools, such as
looms. The men adopted the use of rifles almost right away. The white
traders also brought whiskey. The bodies of Natives produce less of the
enzyme that metabolizes alcohol, which is why alcoholism is so common in
Native American societies. The process of inebriating Native tribes was
well under way in the 1700s. But how were Cherokees to pay for these
items? The English and Americans wanted deer hides. Cherokee hunters
started killing far more deer than they needed for domestic use to meet
this demand. Deer became a commodity that was the major source of
income. Women had raised the food; now raising corn was less important,
in many cases, than purchasing items from traders, so that the men were
providing most of the sustenance. In this way, the power of women
declined in Cherokee society.
Another way in which the whites changed Cherokee
society was in demanding male representatives to treaty negotiations.
Before white contact, the Cherokees had no central government. Each town
cooperated with the others, based on clan ties, which were matrilineal.
But now the white men recognized only the Cherokee men as figures of
authority. When Nancy Ward spoke with authority, during treaty
negotiations, Uncle Attakullakulla was not surprised, but the white men
were.
Nancy Ward recognized the inevitability of adopting
white ways, and decided to make the best of it, and to adopt just those
practices that were beneficial. She was one of the leaders who
encouraged the tribe to raise livestock, in addition to raising crops.
She learned how to make cheese and butter from the same Mrs. Bean whom
she had rescued. By the end of Nancy Ward’s life in the early nineteenth
century, Cherokee Society was superficially similar to rural southern
white society: white farming practices (in which men did the farming),
with a constitutional government, white houses with white furniture and
tableware, and even black slaves in the fields and at home.
But cooperation and adjustment did not necessarily
mean surrender. Nancy Ward, into her old age, continued to call for the
Cherokee Nation to remain independent of the United States. When she was
old, in her final speech, Nancy told the council to not sell out
Cherokee land and move west. Many, however, did so.
Eventually, the whole tribe had to move west to
Indian Territory, as a result of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The
Cherokees resisted as long as they could; the Cherokee Nation even sued
the United States in the Supreme Court, AND WON. President Andrew
Jackson (whose face on our $20 bill is a disgrace to the world) defied
the Supreme Court and ordered the U. S. Army to round up the remaining
Cherokees. The Cherokees were kept in concentration camps, and then
forced on a long winter march to what is now Oklahoma in 1838-1839. Many
Cherokees had already moved there, but the majority waited until they
were forced to move. This was the Trail of Tears. A few Cherokees hid in
the hills; their descendants today form the Eastern Band of the
Cherokee tribe.
One woman on this trail, about 27 years old, was
Nannie Hindebrand’s daughter Elizabeth. She was Edd’s great grandmother.
Her name at the time was Elizabeth Pettit. She is buried in the
Cherokee Citizens’ Cemetery at Ft. Gibson, Oklahoma, under the name
Elizabeth Armstrong. There is a marker on her gravestone, provided by
the Cherokee National, that identifies her as a Trail of Tears survivor.
Her son William Pettit, who also survived the Trail of Tears (but was
not in Edd’s lineage), is buried next to her.
Elizabeth’s daughter Minerva, a little kid on the
Trail, later married a man who had also (according to family tradition)
walked the Trail as an orphaned child. His Cherokee name was U-s-quv-ne,
and his adopted name was Lewis Hicks. There is an Usquvne listed on the
roll of people who migrated to Indian Territory in 1817, and if this is
the same person, then Lewis was not on the forced march west, but was
already in Indian Territory when the Trail of Tears migrants arrived.
Lewis and Minerva were Edd’s grandparents.
And this might perhaps be a last little bit of
evidence that Nancy Ward’s family received some benefits from their
cooperation with the whites. Lewis and Minerva must have grown up
thinking that the Cherokee relocation to Indian Territory was a good
thing, and that President Jackson had been right to order it. Who knows,
maybe Elizabeth and her children suffered less on the trail as a result
of their cooperation with the Americans. Maybe they got to ride horses
or something. No one knows. I do know that our family inherited no
wealth from them. Edd was a sharecropper, not owning his own land until
he bought a house in Chelsea after he retired from farming. The way we
know that Lewis and Minerva were Jackson sympathizers is that they named
one of their children, Edd’s father, Andrew Jackson Hicks. That is,
they named their child after the president who had caused the Trail of
Tears.
In Indian Territory, the Cherokees continued to adopt
white ways, but not simply imitate them. Perhaps the major example of
this was literacy. Many Cherokees learned to read and write English. But
in addition to this, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah devised a Cherokee
syllabary, based partly on the English alphabet, but which was designed
to match the Cherokee language. This was before the Trail of Tears. Most
Cherokees quickly adopted Sequoyah’s system. Some petitions from the
Cherokee tribe to the United States government were signed by numerous
Cherokee citizens using this syllabary. Even before the Trail of Tears,
most Cherokees could read and write. After arriving in Indian Territory,
they established schools, and by the end of the nineteenth century
achieved one of the highest literacy rates in the world—in their own
language. We have no direct evidence that Edd could read and write
Cherokee, but if he could not he would have been unusual.
One thing Nancy Ward would be satisfied to hear. When
we hear about the Battle of Taliwa, between the Cherokee and Muskogee
tribes, our response is, Huh? What was that all about? Cherokees and
Creeks have no animosity today. And today, whites and Native Americans
are no longer fighting, although this has resulted more from conquest
and intermixture than from justice or resolution. Also today, the
nations of Europe, which were locked in the bloodiest war in history
just a few decades ago, now work together almost as a unit, the European
Union—which recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. The people of France
and Germany today look at World War II and think, What was that all
about?
Nancy Ward carried a vision of peace from childhood,
when she heard the little voices in the stream and susurrus of the
leaves, and through her whole life. She consistently called for peace.
She never said it was simple or easy. But it is the only path we can
ethically pursue if we believe in a Great Spirit of love. Sometimes it
works, as it did with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and sometimes it
doesn’t, as with Neville Chamberlain who failed to prevent World War
Two. The world still hears the voices of Gandhi and King, but does not
hear much about Nancy Ward. Every culture needs, and probably has,
prophetic voices of peace.
There is a family legend that connects Edd with his
ancestor Nancy Ward. When Nancy Ward died in 1822, some witnesses
claimed that a light arose from her body. There is a similar account for
Edd’s death in 1959. Some of his children saw a light arise from under
his hospital bed and go up the wall. They did not believe that it was
simply the headlights of a car, though nobody today can say.
