“The Cherokees have lived in the Southeastern United States for over 10,000 years.Cherokees developed and cultivated corn, beans and squash – “the three sisters” – along with sunflowers and other crops. Archaeological evidence, early written accounts, and the oral history of the Cherokees themselves show the Cherokees as a mighty nation controlling more than 140,000 square miles with a population of thirty-six thousand or more. Often the townhouse stood on an earthen mound, which grew with successive ceremonial re-buildings.”

“The History of the America Indians” written by explorer and trader John Adair expressed in the 18th Century  how Cherokees who were living in the North Carolina Mountains were known to speak an ancient Jewish language. More so, this language was unintelligible to the Jews in England and Holland. Observing this, Adair extrapolated his belief that  these native Americans were in fact descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Married to a Chickasaw woman himself, Adair had a fond admiration for the Native Americans. Sadly, his observation was twisted during the American Revolution to something very different.

– In the new version, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel had built the thousands of mounds that dotted the landscape of eastern North America, but the Indians had killed all the “civilized Jews.” Frontier preachers gave sermons which demanded that their parishioners go out and slaughter the evil savages, who had killed the “civilized Jews.”

By the late 20th Century, North Carolina was at a new extreme. 1976 saw the North Carolina government direct a team of professors to come to the finding that Cherokees had been in their state for at least the last 1000 years – better known as the “North Carolina History Project.” This saw masses of archaeologists and historians re-labeling all Native American archaeological sites in the western third of the state “Cherokee” or “Proto-Cherokee” to validate their bonus paychecks. The widespread Creek Indian place names were also re-labeled  “ancient Cherokee words whose meanings have been lost.”

Academic fraud on this scale regarding the early Colonial archives saw other ethnic groups living in the region prior to 1715, but the Cherokees were forgotten. The word “Charaqui” first appeared on European maps after 1718.

Subsequently, two generations of archaeologists and historians thoroughly quoted each other in academic papers, not realizing that North Carolina possessed a different history before 1976. This absurdity lead to Coweeta, one mile north of Georgia’s state line to be labeled “Cherokee-Pisgah Phase town,” and it’s sister town south of the state line aptly labeled “Etowah and Lamar proto-Creek” towns by Georgia archaeologists.  The proto-Creek pottery and architecture familiar with us all which is found in these towns has been named Coweta – being a Creek word having no meaning in the Cherokee language.

Taking the situation to a new extreme, some Cherokee and Cherokee wannabe’s agreed to send warriors to battle the French in New York in the 1700’s in return for the British Crown offering them a vast territory in the Southeast. This included all the territory belonging to the tribes who were allied with the French. Almost immediately thereafter, the Creek Confederacy won the 40 year long Cherokee-Creek war, taking back and forth the Cherokee core territory that was captured 40 years prior from the Creeks.

1757 saw the Cherokees attack their former British allies. Great Britain won the war, taking back most of the land formerly given to the Cherokees in 1754 PLUS almost all the Cherokee land in North and South Carolina. All other tribes inhabiting these areas were forced to leave. 1763 saw what is now known as the Cherokee Reservation.

The US Department created the map of traditional Native American territories in 1990 as part of the native America Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Mapmakers labeled the vast “seven state” area handed to the Cherokee people in 1954 as traditional Cherokee territory. They added northwest Georgia along with northeast Alabama which is the land they inhabited from 1785 to 1838, along with huge sections of North carolina, South Carolina and Georgia – places they never lived. Frozen in stone, the NAGPRA laws incited that the Cherokees were descendants of the Indians who lived inhabited this territory since mankind first came to North America.

Late into the 20th Century, Cherokee leaders repetitively said they never built mounds. Suddenly, a new generation of North Carolina Cherokees assumed the map meant that they had in fact built the mounds in the Southeast. This same line of thought was extended to the belief that they were also the first to domesticate corn, beans and squash. The film “the Mayans and Aztecs were the descendants of the Cherokees” claimed so.

DNA tests do not currently exist which can accurately particularly label any particular tribe in eastern North America. Genetically, the people claiming themselves to be full-blooded Native Americans are not the same people who greeted early European explorers. Attempting to create reliable DNA markers for individual tribes, reputable laboratories are mounted with monumental obstacles.

Perceived as a vast market for millions of Americans claiming they descend from a great grandmother who was a Cherokee princess, DNA Consultants Inc. have begun a comprehensive DNA mapping of the Cherokees inhabiting the Qualla Reservation in western North Carolina.  North Carolina Cherokees were selected as after 180 years inhabiting the west, they are thoroughly mixed with other ethnics, rendering any DNA test marker so far obtained useless.  Doing so, they have stumbled on a hornet’s nest.

The Cherokee princess was most likely Jewish  or North African. This has left the Cherokees more aptly labeled as Middle Eastern or North African. Their test markers strongly associate with the Berbers, native Egyptians, Turks, Lebanese, Hebrews and Mesopotamiams. This makes them genetically more likely to be Jewish than the typical American Jew of European ancestry. These so called “full-blooded” Cherokees possess high levels of European DNA with small traces of Asiatic (Native American) DNA. Even their skin color and facial features differ from Native American aesthetics, primarily looking more Semitic in origin.

Both DNA consultants and journalists now state that these research results apply to all Cherokees from the Qualla Reservation. In several countries, the Cherokees observed had profiles more likely representing Georgia Creeks, often carrying Maya DNA like the Georgia Creeks. In one country, the Cherokees were in fact predominantly Quechua from South America or at the least, mixed Quechua, Maya and Creek. Known as “Moon Faces” by the Cherokee, the residents of the Snowbird Reservation in Graham County possess features more like the Zoque of Mexico who created the Olmec Civilization.

Researchers at DNA Consultants seem currently unaware that throughout the 1600’s, Iberian Sephardic Jews along with Moorish Conversos colonized parts of the North Carolina and Georgia Mountains mining gold and silver.

It is a mystery as to how the North Carolina Mountains became such a mixed Semitic, North African, European and Native American population now known as the Cherokees. Slave raids may have contributed as the 18th Century Cherokees were known as the biggest players when it came to the slave trade. it is thought that young Sephardic females may have been captured by slave raiders to become concubines and wives.

It is known that the British around 1693 forged an alliance with 8 small Native towns holding Creek names along Northwest Carolina and the powerful Rickohockens of southwest Virginia, thwarting the French colonies expansion.

Modern times sees the Cherokee language to be a mixture of Rickohocken, Creek and Shawnee. There is much that anthropologists and historians lack about the early history of the Southern Highlands. Who knows what will still be uncovered?

Thank you to Native American News for the insights provided for this piece.