CHEROKEE STORY

So much of the sensibility of this so called Cherokee proverb, I suspect, cannot be taken at face value. The Cherokee met and sustained relationship with the Whites much longer than most tribes. So much so they developed survival tactics that profoundly altered their culture and their traditional worldviews. Many people from other tribes think the Cherokee people lost too much of themselves to the whites. If true it was inevitable because relationship with whites exacts a high cost upon villages, tribes, people, customs, and sense of self, and values, and one's relationship with and understanding of the Creator. Other tribes are grateful for the Cherokee nation because their losses to the whites left some tribes without land, identity, or any customs to remember, practice and follow. The Cherokee's resilience is renown, and their spiritual practices are deeply embedded within the Earth, their Mother. The fact and the power of their survival as the Principal People has helped thousands of Native people regain a sense of 'Indianness" and helped many whites married into the tribe to be People.

The feel of this alleged Cherokee proverb which reads, "A woman's highest calling is to lead a man to his soul, so as to  unite him with Source. A man's highest calling is to protect woman, so she is free to walk the earth unharmed." doesn't understand the relationship Cherokee people have with blood. The traditional woman's relationship to blood is through her menstrual cycles, and birth. Men's relationship to blood is through war and hunting. This is a mirror into a fundamental difference between European and matriarchal nations like the Cherokee (Tsalagi). Matriarchal societies didn't just wake up deeply engrossed and engaged in the mystery of blood in relationship to community, and marriage and the Earth, our Mother and to each other. These cultures didn't indulge in sentimental pining about romantic notions of marriage 20th and 21st century Americans are fond of attaching themselves to instead of plunging into the deeper aspects of power, communing with Nature, and the mysterious depths linked to the art of love, the primal elements, and so on...

Cherokee medicine is deep. It is powerful, and somehow they learned how to keep their Medicines alive through the hard centuries of relationship with the whites, and managed to retain secrets. I won't go any further with this teaching, but it is good to gain a sense of the relationship the Cherokee people had that made them strong enough to survive as a people amongst the whites. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories