My Grandmother's Great-Grandfather Was Sally Waters's Brother. So Why Do I Care?

My grandmother, Ella Waters, was the great-granddaughter of Mike Waters. Mike's sister was Sally Waters, the wife of Sequoyah. That family line matters to me. It also points to a bigger problem in how Cherokee history gets told.

While researching the Cherokee Trilogy, I kept finding the same pattern. Historians tend to write Cherokee history as a story about men: war, politics, treaties, lost land, and imposed "civilization." Women like my grandmother, the women she descended from, and even Sally Waters get filed under one tidy heading: the "decline of women's role" in Cherokee society from the late 1700s through the next century.

I think that heading is another way of whitewashing Cherokee culture and history.

It's true that the federal government's program to "civilize" Native peoples, organized Christian missions, and land-hungry, mostly white supporters of Manifest Destiny pushed Cherokee women out of public political life during the years my books cover. But stripping women of political roles didn't strip them of who they were. My grandmother, Sally Waters, and thousands of Cherokee women like them stayed what they had always been: farmers, mothers, and keepers of clan and community.

So, Who Was Sally Waters?

Sally married Sequoyah in 1815, the year after he fought with the Cherokee against the Red Stick Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. (If Sequoyah's name doesn't ring a bell, look up the Cherokee syllabary. He created the writing system that made the Cherokee one of the first literate Native nations in North America.)

The records don't agree about her family. The Georgia Historical Society says Sally belonged to the Bird Clan and names her parents as Robert and Lydia Otterlifter. I'm not convinced. The Cherokee Nation, which I trust more on this point, identifies her as the sister of Mike Waters, son of Andy Waters and Mary Elizabeth King.

Sally was born around 1789. She lived longer than Sequoyah, who died in 1843. In 1842, Principal Chief John Ross called her "Sequoyah's only surviving wife." In 1855, at age 66, she filed a claim with the U.S. government for bounty land based on her husband's service in the War of 1812.

Sally and Sequoyah's daughter, Ayoka, is traditionally remembered as his first student. She helped him prove to Cherokee leaders that the syllabary actually worked. There's another well-known story that Sequoyah left the farm work to his wife while he worked on his symbols, and she got so angry she burned his writings. That story is passed down as tradition. Nobody has verified it.

Cherokee Women in History's Shadows

Almost every written source on the Cherokee before the mid-1800s was written by European and American men: traders, soldiers, government agents, and missionaries. They had little access to women's lives, and they often described Native women in one of two degrading ways. They saw them as overworked drudges or as women without morals.

What those writers missed was that Cherokee society ran through women.

As historian Theda Perdue documents in “Cherokee Women,” kinship, not territory or government, made a person Cherokee. The seven clans were matrilineal, which means descent was traced only through the mother. Under clan law, a father wasn't even a blood relative of his own children. Households were matrilocal. A woman lived with her daughters, their children, and the daughters' husbands, and the husbands stayed outsiders. A woman could divorce whenever she chose, and the children always stayed with her. Men sometimes married sisters, which strengthened the bonds among the women of a household.

Clans gave every Cherokee relatives in every town, and they set the rules for how to treat everyone. Their most important job was justice. When a Cherokee was killed, the victim's clan took a life from the killer's clan. That restored balance and kept blood feuds from spreading. War also began as revenge for kin, called for by the restless spirits of the dead. Women urged warriors on or held them back. They received captives and scalps, and they decided a prisoner's fate, either torture or adoption into the clan to replace a lost relative.

Because both birth and adoption into a clan came through women, motherhood meant power. Women attended town councils, where decisions were made by consensus. The Cherokee leader Attakullakulla once asked South Carolina's governor why no women sat on his council. Unmarried women had sexual freedom, adultery wasn't a crime, and the women of a town enforced mourning customs and other ritual rules. Only people with Cherokee mothers counted as the Ani-Yunwiya, the "Real People."

Women were at the center of Cherokee culture. But the mostly white, mostly male writers who recorded history either didn't understand that or refused to accept it. That's why so few Cherokee women show up in the record.

Which Brings Me to Ella Waters

My grandmother, the real Ella Waters, raised five boys and two girls on a subsistence farm near Paris, Texas. She died in 1935, worn out by hard work and many pregnancies. She is just one of the countless Cherokee women who shaped two centuries of history without being written into it.

She also inspired me, her grandson, to write my first book, Cherokee Rose, and to name its heroine Ella Waters. Through these books, I hope my grandmother and Cherokee women like her will be remembered.