Cora Peoples

Cora Peoples was the daughter of John Henry Ray Yournk Corke Bird Peoples & Alice Peoples. Her family had linkage with the Native American of the Cherokee tribe. The Cherokee people were located in two distinct regions representing their history under the United States. The traditional homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee were located in North Carolina and Tennessee. The Ancestors of Cherokee Nation citizens were forcibly removed from their homes in Tennessee and the southeast to the Indian Territory in 1838-39 and the Cherokee Nation contends that no Cherokee clans, bands, tribes or nations were left behind or have continued to exist in Tennessee. There are seven clans defined in the ancient language and John was a descendant of the Bird

By the late 19th century, when over half a million Africans were enslaved in the South, the southern Native American societies of that region had come to include both enslaved Blacks and small numbers of free Black people. Many runaway slaves would find their way into the camps of the Cherokees. There, they were safe from capture and being returned back to white slavery. The Cherokee would sometimes aided runaways, kept them for themselves as servitudes, or adopted them. After the American Civil War (1865), the Cherokee nation concluded a new treaty with the US, granting freedom and Cherokee citizenship to Negro slaves living among the tribe. The ancestors of Cora Peoples was a part of this group. Cora Mae (1902).

Though the harsh treatment of enslaved Africans largely paled in comparison to that of white slaveholders, Blacks still were treated as an underclass among Native Americans. The tribes even established slave codes that protected owner's’ property rights and restricted the rights of Blacks. The Cherokee slave codes were dramatically less severe than the American laws governing slavery at that time. It also may describe whom the Cherokees purchased Africans as slaves and the slaves could eventually become freed or married into the Cherokee

government passed the Indian Removal Act which forced members of the of the Five Civilized Tribes -- the Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles from their ancestral lands in the Deep South. This was to make room for white settlers who wanted the rich soil. The tribes along with their black slaves were forcibly marched west of the Mississippi River to the new Indian Territory during the "Trail of Tears" of 1838 and 1839, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Native Americans. Some Native Americans refused to register with the Bureau of Indian Affairs or to allow them to be "removed" to "Indian Territory" in Oklahoma during the 1800s. They also refused to decide for the Blacks whether they would relocate or not. As a result, many of their descendants grew up in urban environments instead of on reservations. Most freed blacks remained in Indian Territory, and most remained in the nation in which they had lives as slaves. In the decades that followed, the freedmen made economic gains and established lives for themselves faster than the freedmen in the United