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A R T I C L E - 6
Reviving
the Classical Wisdom of Islam
in the Cherokee Tradition
by Dr. Robert Crane
We've Come a Long Way!
On September 21, 2004, the Museum of the American Indian is
to open on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., after a highly successful
fund-raising drive, largely among Native American tribal leaders. This
culminates a history of false starts and false pretenses.
As the founding Executive Vice President of the American
Indian National Bank in 1974, and subsequently as President of its consulting
arm, The Native American Economic Development Corporation, I participated in one
of these early efforts to create a national museum for Native Americans.
Unfortunately, this initiative was for them and not by them and for a hostile
agenda.
The bank itself was a creature of three of the big "seven sisters" oil
companies. I discovered this too late after I had hand-carried $2,000 in
cash from Peter McDonald, the new, charismatic, and revolutionary head of the
Navajo Nation, as the initial capital to meet the deadline for incorporation in
the District of Colombia. In the official photo of the original AINB Board
of Directors, I am standing next to the president of the bank, Barney Old Coyote
(Montana Crow), who was honest but had been carefully selected, and the
chairman, W.W. Keeler, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, who was a former
CEO of Phillips Petroleum Company. Within a year I was out on my ear.
My special interest was in commemorating the tradition of
what we today might call broad-based capital ownership in the means of
production, because Native Americans, more than most others, work most
effectively not as hourly laborers but as owners of their own enterprises.
This, however, was the precise opposite of the Bank's dictated strategy.
The purpose of the Bank, as stated then by Marvin L. Franklyn, Assistant
to the Secretary for Indian Affairs (who today would be entitled Assistant
Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs), was to provide employment of
Indians (read "cheap labor" by "wage
slaves") for private firms (read "colonial exploiters"), and to
transfer the billion-plus dollars of funds (the exact amount was secret) held in
trust by the BIA to big New York banks at half the prime rate of interest
(better than the 0% earned previously) for reinvestment de facto by the oil
companies.
The purpose of the Bank, I recommended, and of its consulting
arm should be what President Nixon himself, with a little help from me, called
"Red Power," consisting of all-Indian-owned firms in such fields as
energy and high technology, as originally urged by the visionary Paul Bernal,
the spiritual leader of Taos Pueblo, and backed by Wendell Chino, the highly
respected leader of the Jicarilla Apaches, and the legendary Bob Jim, leader of
the Yakima and a member of the original AINB board until his tragic and untimely
death. The executives of the International Bank of Washington, which in
fact controlled the board of the American Indian National Bank, told me,
"You are talking Chinese." I explained that the purpose of
Indian-owned economic power is to strengthen the inherent sovereignty of the
Indian nations and revive their spiritual
wisdom to strengthen America. The oil company and International Bank
officials curtly informed me, "You have got it all backwards."
Similarly, the American Indian Museum to be sponsored by the
Bank was to serve the agenda of the three special interest groups that
controlled the Department of the Interior, namely, minerals, timber, and cattle,
in order to keep Native Americans in their place, exploit their natural
resources, and maintain the original cultures of America as quaint vestiges of
an irrelevant past.
Much has happened in the ensuing thirty years as a result of
the still hesitant national liberation movements in Indian country. When
asked in January, 2004, what the purpose of the new Museum of the American
Indian is, its director affirmed that every display and every project and every
part of the museum is to affirm the constitutional sovereignty of Native
American nations and to preserve their spiritual heritage for future
generations.
The Heritage of the Ani Waya
Of the original seven Cherokee clans, three were officially
disestablished by the federal government in 1905, when the Cherokee system of
representative government was abolished in favor of a single chief appointed by
the President of the United States and when the Cherokee religion was declared
to be subversive and was officially abolished. One of these three was the
Ani Waya, which means Clan of the Wolf. The function of this clan was to
preserve the religion and the traditions.
After the loss of the written tradition, the oral history of the Cherokee
religion passed down through the Ani Waya to what are called the
traditionalists, including my great uncle Joseph Franklin Bever (who had another
name in Oklahoma). He was one of the last formally trained Cherokee imams.
He called the Athan every morning, but when challenged he replied simply that he
was calling the hogs. Like all Cherokees, he started every prayer with
"Ya Allah." All the prophets, starting with Abraham, are honored
in the tradition. Until 1895, the Cherokees held the hajj, with tawaf, on
the land of Uncle Henry Bever
(spelled Beaver among the Oklahoma Ani Waya) three miles southwest of Hillsboro,
Indiana. The last custodian of this sacred land lived nearby when I lived
a mile away until shortly after Pearl Harbor.
Until the last hajj, Cherokees came all the way from Oklahoma to attend, but
only those with native fluency in Cherokee were permitted to participate,
including my great-grandmother, who was born seven years after the forced
migration in 1839, known as the Trail of Tears, from North Carolina and Georgia
to Oklahoma. She helped raise me. The last of those who were trained
by my great uncle is Ben Mitman, my second cousin, who lives in Indianapolis and
is now in his mid-nineties but, like most of my family in their advanced age, is
still hale and hearty. My great grandmother, who spoke only Cherokee after
she announced that it was time to die, had coal black hair down to her waist
when she was in her nineties. We have a home video of another of my great
grandmothers dancing at the age of ninety-six at one of the last great Bever-Crane
clan reunions.
For the Cherokees, the Trail of Tears
was the last of the great acts of ethnic cleansing that began with the American
Revolution. The first period of genocide came when the younger generation
sided with the British against the encroaching American settlers. The
older traditionalists opposed war in principle and refused to be pawns in
foreign wars. Although the wisdom of the traditionalists eventually
triumphed in a feeble cultural renaissance after the American Revolution, this
strategy of what Gandhi called satyagraha failed in the end. In 1839,
despite the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshal
that Cherokee sovereignty was higher than that of the State of Georgia, the
president of the United States ordered the U.S. Army to drive the Cherokees in
the middle of winter all the way to Oklahoma.
Although reportedly a third of them died en route while the federal troops
watched, not all of this third actually died. Three groups broke off from
the Trail of Tears, one going to Ohio and two to Indiana, because they feared
extermination once they would arrive in Oklahoma. The Cherokee religion
was best preserved for more than a century in an isolated Indiana group, because
the Christian and U.S. governmental drive to stamp out the Cherokee religion in
Oklahoma had significant success. My great uncle went from the other
Indiana group near Hillsboro, Indiana, in 1903 at the age of 22 down to
Oklahoma, where the formal religious training was headquartered.
In 1905, after he had studied for two years at the seminary there, the U.S.
government abolished the Cherokee religion and imprisoned everyone who performed
the salah publically. The Katoowa Society was formed to fight back, but
they were crushed. My great uncle then spent two years trying to organize
all the Native American tribes to fight for religious freedom, but despite some
interest among the Navajo, Hopi, Crow, and Blackfeet, he failed miserably and so
went back to Indiana where I knew him as a boy. I was impressed because he
knew the names of 269 plants.
Pre-Columbian History
The true knowers of the Cherokee religion have kept it secret. The
traditionalists who live isolated in the woods of western Arkansas and eastern
Oklahoma told me when I was last there thirty years ago as a personal emissary
of President Nixon that when anthropologists come to study the religion, the
traditionalists entertain them with a bunch of nonsense and then whoop with
laughter when they see this nonsense printed in scholarly books.
According to the traditionalists, the Cherokee religion came in the form of a
book that was brought in a great fleet of ships out of the east when the
Cherokees lived on an island where it was never cold. After three
generations, the bad people from the south killed almost everyone on all the
islands and destroyed the book. The remainder of the Cherokees immigrated
west to the Great Land.
Their mass migration from a tropical island in the Caribbean to the Yucatan
Peninsula in the late 1300s was verified by the leading Meso-American
archeologist, T. B. Irving (Al Hajji Ta'alim Ali). He was the only person
who had recorded the relevant inscriptions. Twenty years ago, he said he
would write up this history, but he died last year without ever doing so.
I have visited the Yucatan and asked other Mesoamerican archeologists about this
history, but they know nothing about it.
After some more generations, the number of which I have forgotten, the bad
people attacked again. This time the Cherokees all migrated north and
eastwards to find the lost book, because they knew that it came out of the east.
This is the origin story according to the Ani Waya clan.
What this all means is open to modern research and interpretation. There
is now thorough documentation of a great expedition of da'wa that the Emir of
Mali, Abu Bakr, sent across the Atlantic in 1310 A.C. after he met Chinese
Muslims in the hajj. Scholars do not seem to be clear on whether he was
hoping to bring Islam to China or to America, because there is evidence that at
least two earlier Muslim expeditions had visited America, one in 1100 going
westward from Africa and the other in 1178 eastward from China. When the
first expedition did not return, Emir Abu Bakr sent a second expedition two
years later in 1312, reportedly including Mandinga members from what is now
Liberia. The detailed manifests of each of the Emir's ships are now of
historical record.
In recent years hidden libraries have been found in Timbuktu on the southern
edge of the Sahara Desert in Mali. I attended a conference in Mali's
capital Bamako in 1999 but could not get permission to travel the 200 miles
north to Timbuktu, because, I was told, the French-influenced government in
Bamako wants to hide its great Islamic past. These libraries should be
micro-filmed while they still exist in order to compare the practices of popular
Islam with those of the Cherokees.
Although the customs of several tribes, some archeological evidence, and
ethno-linguistic analysis give circumstantial evidence of this early presence of
Islam in America, the only oral tradition, as far as I know, comes from my own
ancestors in the Ani Waya tribe of the Cherokee. We are not supposed to
interpret tradition, because this can introduce distortions, but the ancient
Cherokee traditions of what is called simply the "people" (Ani Yunwiya)
coincide with the devastating attacks by the Caribs from what is now Venezuela
at the end of the 1300s. And Mayan inscriptions of the next century record
the arrival
of a great people from the east. The details about this people may be
buried in the personal papers of the Muslim translator of the Qur'an, T. B.
Irving. Early evidence of Islam may be found only by scholars who are
specifically looking for it.
The Modern Period
The history of the Cherokees after they arrived in the Carolinas is part of
modern America, but it is not much clearer than their history in the earlier
period, despite a wealth of documentary material and shelves of books on the
subject.
Historians acknowledge that the Cherokees when first encountered by Europeans
lived in large towns of several thousand people with two story brick buildings
and an advanced system of legislative, executive, and judicial government.
They also acknowledge that within two hundred years from 1600 to 1800 their
population had been reduced to only a fraction of what it had been. This
was part of the universal history of European colonialism, which managed to
reduce the total native population in America from at least ten million to as
little as a few hundred thousand. With this catastrophic disruption came a
similar
loss of their religious and cultural heritage, including, in the case of the
Cherokees, the dilution of authentic Islam.
Some Western anthropologists have speculated that the Cherokee religion with its
emphasis on a sophisticated divine law and system of government may derive from
a lost Jewish tribe, but this may be merely an attempt by Christian missionaries
to hide the Cherokees' true Islamic identity.
Perhaps the best, recent research may be found in the book by Thomas E. Mails,
The Cherokee People: The Story of the Cherokees from Earliest Origins to
Contemporary Times, published by Marlow and Company. Mails leads the
others in
his conclusion that the remarkable similarities between the Abrahamic religions
and the traditional Cherokee religion precede any possibility of adoption from
European influences.
Like the others, however, he concludes that such similarities
must come from the ancient Hebrews. This probably stems from his ignorance
of Islam and his familiarity with the commonalities with the Jews in the
Cherokee origin stories, including Adam and Eve, the flood, the Tower of Babel,
Abraham, the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses, the wandering in the wilderness,
and the ark. It is difficult to understand how he can ignore the fact that
the traditionalist Cherokees started every prayer with Ya Allah and prayed five
times a day and fasted during Ramadhan, though it is understandable that Mails
does not know the Cherokee rituals of the Hajj, since these have been kept
highly secret.
Unfortunately, only a knowledgeable Muslim would be able to
mine the wealth of very difficult source material to compare this with Islam.
The major original source, since the Cherokees had lost their written language
long before they moved to what is now the United States, is the fourteen volume
collection known as the John Howard Payne Papers, Ayer MS 689, in the Ayer
Collection of Americana, Newberry Library of the University of Chicago.
These are in miniscule handwriting and in script that is very difficult to
decipher. The Payne papers are by Payne and by a couple of others who
authored individual
chapters, especially Daniel Sabin Butrick, who was a Christian missionary to the
Cherokees from 1817 to 1847.
In another file on the Cherokees that probably is in my sister's historic stone
barn in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, I have reference to a typewritten
copy of the Payne originals prepared by his great granddaughter. She spent
an entire year turning the almost illegible manuscript into readable copy.
Payne, who lived from 1791 to 1852, unlike Butrick, was sympathetic to the
Cherokees. His informants among the Cherokees were born as early as 1735
at a time when contact with outsiders had barely begun. Payne was a poet
by trade and lived with the Cherokees during the period of their successful
effort to gain U.S. Supreme Court acceptance of their sovereignty and their
unsuccessful effort thereafter to stop their removal to Oklahoma. One
would have to examine the so-called Payne papers to determine what may be
authentic scholarship on
the Cherokees and what was propaganda and spin to demean them. My
impression is that the unexpurgated Payne writings are available to whoever can
find them or at least were until forty years ago. In all research on the
wisdom of Islam in the Cherokee religion, one must beware of a long history of
cultural genocide.
The earliest account of the Cherokees was James Adair's The History of the
American Indians. He was a trader with the Cherokees in 1736 and first
pointed out the identity of the Cherokee religion with Abrahamic sources.
In 1888, James Mooney's Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the
Cherokees does not discuss these origins but does treat in detail Cherokee
astronomy, which he learned about from Cherokees who were born as early as 1800.
Other books,
such as Haywood's of 1823 and Washburn's of 1869 should be compared with the
more recent books, such as The Eastern Cherokees by William Harlen Gilbert, Jr.
and others, which are stored, together with my most valuable books, in my
sister's barn.
The more recent books in some ways are more objective, but the definitive
history of the Cherokees, and especially analysis of the relation of Islam to
the founding of America has yet to be written. This is the task of young
American-born Muslims, because they know that other Americans fear what they do
not know and that this history would show that Islam is not foreign
to America.
The Original Founders of Modern America
The Cherokee were Grandfathers of the Great American Experiment in the holistic
symbiosis of order, justice, and liberty. Jefferson said that he borrowed
the American system of government from the Iroquois confederation. If the
Cherokee religion and political culture were introduced into America by Muslim
settlers from North Africa two hundred years before Columbus "discovered
" America, then it remains to be researched whether the Iroquois system of
representative government comes from the Cherokee nation.
Jefferson was familiar with the Iroquois and maintained contact with the leaders
of a great religious revival among the Iroquois from about 1800 to 1810.
He spent some time with their greatest religious leader, known as Handsome Lake
of the Seneca, and not only corresponded with him but invited him twice to the
White House. The details are in The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca by
Anthony F C Wallace, Vintage, 1972, 395 pages.
The origin of this religious rebirth, like that of the coeval rebirth among the
Cherokee further south, lay in their response to the destruction of the native
way of life by the white settlers, especially by the introduction of alcohol and
gambling, and by the destruction of the nuclear family and of moral community.
It was also a reaction against the missionary efforts of the Christians who
wanted the Iroquois to assimilate into Western society and disappear.
Handsome Lake was convinced that his people could not adopt Christianity without
adopting everything bad about Western society along with it.
Part of the spiritual quest by young American Muslims today should be to explore
whether the religion that he revived was Islam as borrowed from the Cherokee,
who had been adopted under the tribal name of Tuscarora into the Iroquois
confederacy. By the year 1500, the Cherokee had established a vast trading
empire in eastern North America, and a portion of them, known as the Tuscarora,
moved from North Carolina to Iroquois country before the arrival of the first
European settlers. The Tuscarora who lived with the Iroquois were the
first to adopt Christianity as their religion, but the original religion of the
Tuscarora was not the ancient Iroquois religion but Islam. This origin of
the Seneca rebirth was not known to Wallace, but he recounts in detail the
revival of this religion and Jefferson's admiration of it.
The specifically Islamic sources of the Iroquois revival and much of Native
American religion might be revealed only by knowledgeable people specifically
looking for it. Historians seem to have neglected obvious indicators
referred to by modern Cherokee traditionalists in urban America. For
example, according to research by the Cherokee-Blackfoot Muslim, Mahir
Abdal-Razaaq, who is a Pipe Carrier for the Northeastern Band, the Treaty of
Peace and Friendship that was signed on the Delaware river in 1787 bore the
signatures of Abdul Haqq [spelled Abdel Khak] and Muhammad ibn Abdullah.
According to an article in The Message, published by the Islamic Society of
North America, in July, 1996, the last Cherokee chief with a Muslim name was
Ramadhan ibn Wati, who lived from 1806 to 1871 and governed during the time of
the great split between the Union Cherokee and the Confederate Cherokee in the
American Civil War. Chief (Emir) Ramadhan was a Confederate brigadier
general who shared the South's opposition to the encroaching power of the
industrialized North. He surrendered his command to President Lincoln on
June 23, 1865, and his young son, Saladin Watie, named after the famous
liberator of Jerusalem in 1187, Salah al Din, served in the Southern Cherokee
delegation to sign a treaty of surrender in Washington, D.C.
The traditionalist Cherokee political system was based on governance from the
bottom up, rather than from the top down as was common in Europe. The
ultimate sovereign was Allah and he governed through the individual members of
the Cherokee nation, each of whom carried the amana to be a representative of
the divine on earth. The nation was composed of autonomous bands or clans,
such as the Ani Waya. The members of each band chose their leaders through
a system
of indirect election of at least four communities. One community
represented the warriors, one the religious leaders, and one the merchants.
The fourth I believe may have been the judicial community. These four
elected leaders in turn elected the head of the band, and the heads of the bands
elected the leader of the nation.
This system today is known as constitutional or republican federalism. It
contrasts with the system of absolutist democracy bound by popular majority
rule, which all of America's founders condemned as inherently unjust and
dangerous.
In times of trouble, women rose to prominence, especially to arbitrate between
the young warriors who wanted to risk the lives of their sons and the elders who
preached non-violence in all except the greatest threats to group survival.
This matriarchal custom still existed at the time of the American Revolutionary
War, according to Theda Perdue's "Cherokee Women and the Trail of
Tears," published in Journal of Women's History, vol 1, 1989, pp. 14-17.
But, the butchering of the Cherokees by the American settlers and their
abandonment by the British undercut the traditionalists and nearly destroyed the
entire set of cultural traditions that had survived for centuries since the time
of the origins in the Caribbean. This period of Cherokee history, which
exceeds in its tragedy even that of the Trail of Tears, and the role of the
Cherokee women is
described in Tom Hatley's book, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South
Carolinians through the Era of the Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1993,
pp. 220 ff.
The Cherokee leaders often were known by Anglo names. The most famous was
Nancy Ward, who was known as the principal Ghigau of the Cherokee Nation, a term
translated by the colonialists as "war-leader." In fact, she was
the
principal peace leader, as described in Norma Tucker's article, "Nancy
Ward: Ghigau of the Cherokees," in Georgia Historical Quarterly, vol. 53,
1969.
She persuaded the Raven of Chota, who was the war leader of the principal
Cherokee town, to seek peace. As the official emissary of the entire
nation, she persuaded Jefferson's emissary, Arthur Campbell, to declare an
armistice or truce prior to the signing of a peace treaty. Unfortunately,
according to Campbell's own diary, "I wished first to visit the vindictive
part of the nation … and to destroy the whole as much as possible by
destroying their habitations and provisions." Although he had spared
Chota in the past out of respect for Nancy Ward, he attacked in the middle of
winter and commenced to destroy a
thousand houses, fifty thousand bushels of corn, and all but a few small towns.
The Raven of Chota reported later, as recorded in O'Donnell, Southern Indians in
the American Revolution, pp. 118-119, the Virginians "dyed their hands in
the blood of many of our women and children, burnt 17 towns, and destroyed all
our provisions by which we and our families were almost destroyed by famine this
Spring."
Jefferson was a Virginia politician so he did what was politically correct.
But, at the same time, he was impressed by the Cherokee traditionalists,
including the women leaders at the time of their maximum tragedy, who tried to
practice what Mahatma Gandhi called satyagraha or peaceful defense based on
spiritual power. This is a well established practice in Islamic history,
but needs much further research.
The Iroquois adopted the best of the Cherokee religion, and this is what most
impressed Jefferson in later years. The religion as revived by Handsome
Lake opposed both cultural assimilation, which is suicide, and cultural nativism,
which is the continuation of a culture based on worship of one's own ethnic
group rather than on the enlightened understanding of divine revelation and
natural law. According to Wallace's book, The Death and Rebirth of the
Seneca, Handsome Lake's primary message consisted of four basic principles:
1) All people came from the same source, a transcendent God, and thus are equal
in dignity.
2) All religions are legitimate paths to God. Therefore one should not
blame the Christians for not accepting the divine revelation that he was
reviving. They should follow their religion until they understand that the
religion that he was reviving teaches a truer knowledge of God.
3) Violence results from ignorance of true religion. Therefore knowledge
is the most powerful weapon against war, and war is almost never the best
solution to conflict. And
4) More important than knowledge is love of the transcendent God, because love
is the path to knowledge.
Much research remains to be done to connect Jefferson's then unique concept of
federalism with Islamic concepts of religious and political pluralism. The
efforts of both the Cherokees and Iroquois to conduct interfaith meetings with
the Europeans as equals impressed the Christian missionaries, since such
interfaith outreach without any effort to convert others was almost unknown in
the Christian world.
Jefferson tried to keep his personal relationship with
God secret and largely succeeded, though recent research in his twenty volumes
of hitherto secret personal correspondence should shed much light on this,
including the influence of Islam.
Perhaps his major message was the same as that taught by the Cherokee and
Iroquois. No people, he said, can remain free unless they are educated;
education consists above all in knowledge of virtue; and no people can remain
virtuous except within a religious framework, whether it be Christian or of some
other faith tradition, and unless this framework of respect for the divine
legitimacy of cultural and religious pluralism and for the power of interfaith
cooperation pervades all public life.
This is the profound wisdom of the Great American Experiment, but we have just
begun to explore its ancient roots.
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