Nanye’hi aka Nancy Ward

Vulgar History Podcast 

Nanye’hi AKA Nancy Ward 

July 24, 2024 

Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is Season Seven of Vulgar History, and the theme of Season Seven is How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? And this is where we’re looking at various women and other people from the 18th century and all the various revolutions that were happening and rebellions that were going on, the ones you’ve heard of and the ones you haven’t heard of, both people and revolutions and rebellions. 

So, this whole first part of Season Seven, we’ve been connecting back specifically to the American Revolution. And the American Revolution is really connected to what happened a few years later, which is the French Revolution and that’s how Marie Antoinette met her end. But the way that we do things in Vulgar History is always to look at these world events from the point of view of women and other people who are not necessarily often talked about in context of these events, but who were so affected by it and who were so involved in it, and you just don’t know their names. 

The person we’re talking about this week is a Cherokee woman, an Indigenous woman from America named Nanye’hi, often called Nancy Ward, which was another name that she went by. And I really wanted to include an Indigenous American woman in this part of the series, because when you think about the American Revolution, or when I, previous to doing all this research, thought about the American Revolution— I’m a Canadian person, so everything I’ve learned about the American Revolution has just been from comic strips and memes and just mentions on, I don’t know, Sesame Street or whatever. What I had gleaned was just, it’s always all about the Founding Fathers themselves and if and when any women are involved, it’s usually the women who are involved with the Founding Fathers. But there were so many people in America at this time, and a lot of them, like Nanye’hi, did not have the amount of power or influence as these rich white men did. 

So, what were the women of colour up to? What were they dealing with? And when we talk about the American Revolution, again, a lot of it that I have just absorbed through living my life as a person in Canada, so much of it comes back to the “patriotism,” of the American “patriots,”, versus the British people and it’s just kind of like one group of white men versus another group of white men. And where I think the story of Nanye’hi is so important and really helps expand that point of view is, like, these groups of white men were fighting over land that people already lived on, people like Nanye’hi and her ancestors, and all the Indigenous people of America. 

Prior to Season Seven, I did have an episode about Matoaka, AKA Pocahontas; we’ve also talked about Thanadelthur, who was a woman from northern Canada, an Indigenous woman. And I did those episodes prior to Season Seven to kind of get us all prepared for the Nanye’hi story, just to kind of show and to remind us all of who lived on this continent first and how… We’ll get into this in the story. So, I don’t want to ruin what we’re going to talk about with Nanye’hi, but she does… She and the people who are around her, her family and her friends and her colleagues, they were just being, like, these are all just white men. To them, it’s like whether it’s the American patriots versus the British people versus the French, they’re like, “These are all just white people to us.” The arguments that they were having amongst each other were so devastating to the Cherokee and to other Indigenous people. But anyway, so just kind of turning the lens around, what did this whole situation look like from her point of view? 

So, this week, we’re going to be talking about Nanye’hi, AKA Nancy Ward, and let’s get into it.  

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So, like so many people we’ve talked about on this podcast, and especially, for some reason, this season, this is a person who has been known by various, various different names. And so, I needed to make a choice because I wanted to use one name throughout rather than switching back and forth. So, the name I’m going with is Nanye’hi, which is the name that most often came up when I was just in most of the research I was looking at, although she is AKA Nancy Ward, which seems to be how she is more widely known by people in Tennessee and in Oklahoma, and places where descendants of her live mostly. 

So, this is one I got more sources than sometimes because I really wanted to dive into from as many angles as possible, primarily from the angle of Cherokee people and what their narrative is. So, although in the course of researching, I did find that if you ever watched the show Finding Your Roots on PBS, which I love, which is where celebrities come on and then a team of genealogists reveal their family trees to them, and there’s always so many interesting stories about their ancestors. The actor Wes Studi was on an episode called “Fathers and Sons,” turns out he is a descendant of Nanye’hi. So, I watched that episode just to see how they explained the story and also how they pronounced her name, which was another question that I was wondering about. 

Also, a major source, and the first thing I read where I was like, “Oh, I think I could, I have enough information here to do a whole episode,” was a paper by the late Michelene E. Pesantubbee, who wrote an article for American Indian Quarterly in 2014 called “Nancy Ward, American Patriot or Cherokee Nationalist?” which really dove into a lot of the issues we’ll be talking about, especially how Nanye’hi is remembered and thought of and how she’s remembered now and how she has been thought of. I also found a paper by Lillie Burke called “Nanye’hi’s Experience of the American Revolution.” Also, as per ever, my go-to source for just, sort of like, a basic chronological history of a person, the entry in Women in World History, which in this case was written by Deborah Jones, who is a descendant of Nanye’hi. Also, the book Woman of Many Names, written by Debra S. Yates, who is another descendant of Nanye’hi. 

And then an amazing book that I got that’s called Cherokee Nation: A History of Survival, Self-Determination, and Identity by Dr. Bob Blackburn, Dr. Duane King, and Dr. Neil Morton, which is a publication by the modern Cherokee Nation. You can buy it from their gift shop, from their website. They ship to the US and not to Canada. So, I want to thank a friend of the podcast, Allison Epstein, for letting me have it shipped to her and then shipping this to me. And now I have this book, and it’s beautiful, and I love it. And an article from AshevilleHistory.org, I’ll put the link in the show notes.  And also, another women’s history podcast I don’t know if you listen to but they did an episode about Nanye’hi on the podcast Long May She Reign, which I also got some more information from because she was looking at some sources I hadn’t looked at. 

So, this is going to… This is an episode that takes place in the United States. I want to clarify and remind everybody, content warning: I am Canadian so I don’t necessarily know where all of these places are, but I know people listening might be familiar with these places. And so, if you are, I’m happy to hear corrections of what I may have mispronounced or misinterpreted, but I’m doing my best… 

Actually, one more person I wanted to thank. So, a bit ago, several months back, I just kind of put out a call on Instagram when I had started embarking on researching this story and some other stories about American history to ask if there’s any listeners, any members of the Tits Out Brigade who lived in these areas so I could kind of understand what you know, people who live in these areas know how famous are these people, what’s going on. And a person named Lisa Marie was very helpful for me in, sort of, contextualizing, even just reiterating that Nancy Ward is the name by which this person is most known. Actually, let me just double-check one more thing because I also did a survey of American listeners of the podcast; it was a very brief one-week survey. So, if you didn’t notice when I was doing it, don’t worry about it. But I feel like this gives me a good overall impression of just how famous various people are to American history. So, out of just over 400 responses, Nanye’hi is one of the least-known people on this list. So, by contrast, George Washington, the first American president, 99.3% of people indicated they knew who he was. Nanye’hi, Nancy Ward, 9.7% had heard of her. And I think where she’s best known is in Tennessee, maybe in Oklahoma, but people in Tennessee seem to be where she’s perhaps best known. 

So, she, Nancy Ward, Nanye’hi, she was a Cherokee woman. So, I want to start off by explaining some stuff that I wanted to learn and understand before I could really appreciate and understand what her story is, which is just the history of the Cherokee. So, the Cherokee territory in the South Appalachian region of modern-day United States has been continuously occupied for at least the past 10,000 years. There’s been people living in this place for an incredibly long time. At the time of European contact, so like 1600s-ish, “the Cherokee people occupied both sides of the South Appalachian summit extending from the Piedmont of present South Carolina to the Ridge-and-Valley area of present Tennessee.” I hope that means things to American people who live in those regions. “The mountains, fertile valleys and streams provided immediate access to resources that supported the Cherokee’s diversified economy.” So, this is a group of people, a people, who are settling around like a valley, a river, like, it’s just a great place to sort of like grow your crops and sort of build up a sense of community, which is why they were staying in one place for so long. And because this is in the Appalachian region, like Tennessee, this isn’t one of the first places that British or French or Spanish first came when they were first exploring the North American continent. So, sustained contact with Europeans, like some people pass by here and there, but like sustained ongoing contact did not begin until the late 17th century. 

And then by the early 1700s, so like shortly after the sustained contact, what had developed was a trade relationship, the deerskin trade. So, this is, if you heard my episode from this past spring about the Thanadelthur, who is a Dene woman from what is now Northern Canada, I talked in that one a lot about the fur trade; that also came up just a few weeks ago, the Marie-Josèphe Angélique. The fur trade was the main trade thing going on in kind of northern parts of North America. Deerskin trade, similar thing more in this region. And so, this developed into a full-blown enterprise in exchange for deerskin, the Cherokees received items including firearms, ammunition, metal knives, axes, and garden implements. This is part of why before I started this season, I did have the episodes about the Thanadelthur and about Mataoka, AKA Pocahontas, just to sort of establish examples of the kinds of things that happened when the British and French came over to North America, what sorts of trade relationships were happening and how, at first, these were trade relationships and things are going to inevitably, because we know the history, go badly. But at first, it was kind of like, “Okay, let’s just trade this. This is kind of helping each other out a little bit.” 

The other side of that, “Ready access to firearms and competition over prime hunting grounds led to conflict between the Cherokees and most of their neighbours.” So, they were getting, like the Cherokees were getting guns and ammunition and tools and the people around them didn’t have those tools. And that’s a bit like what we heard in the Thanadelthur episode, where some groups had access to some technology that others didn’t and then that led to a conflict between the Indigenous groups. 

So, at this time, like the early 1700s, the Cherokee were highly decentralized. So, I described sort of this big region and it’s not that they were nomadic moving place to place, it’s just there were lots of little communities all over the place. So, their towns, like, each town was kind of its own government unit. In 1721, by then there was the position of Royal Governor of South Carolina. And he was just like, “This is getting complicated and confusing to need to,” for him, one person being the governor to need to “negotiate with 37 different chiefs about all the treaties and things they wanted to make.” So, he created the title Emperor of the Cherokee Nation and invited the 37 chiefs to come, and they accepted this radical idea of one leader for all of these really spread apart groups. This was also where they agreed to the first cessation of land, where they first gave up the first small amount of land to the British. And the one leader— I want to focus on Nanye’hi’s story, there’s a lot of other history going on and I really, really recommend the book Cherokee Nation: A History of Survival, Self-Determination and Identity because it gets into a lot of the other people involved in the story. But effectively, ultimately, what turned out is that the one leader will end up being this guy called Moytoy, who was Nanye’hi’s grandfather. 

And then, so this is the early 1700s, a delegation of seven Cherokee chiefs, so Moytoy didn’t go himself, but he sent his son, who was Nanye’hi’s uncle, who was a really, really major important figure in Cherokee history called Attakullakulla, went on his behalf. And so, these seven chiefs went to England to further this agreement because this was, like, decades before American Revolution era. This is where the British were in control in terms of the colonial stuff of stuff. So, this is the Cherokee who were making this treaty with the British. So, Attakullakulla and six other chiefs went over to England and signed a treaty. At this point, the king of England was King George II, who was the father of King George III, who is the one from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Farmer George. So, it’s his dad. 

When they came over, I mean, this language pops up a lot, like the paternalizing, sort of, speaking about the Cherokee and other Indigenous groups, like as though they were less smart, as though they were sort of children. He literally calls King George expressed love for his Cherokee “children” as their father. “He proclaimed a chain of friendship between the two nations. He overtly expressed his intent, the Cherokee should live where they please and that South Carolinians should trade with them.” I mean, we’ll see this a lot, like you can say a lot of things in a treaty and then we’ll see what people actually do. “This agreement also bound the Cherokee to return captured enslaved people in exchange for guns. Critically, it bound the Cherokee to fight against any group, Native or white, which threatened the British settlements.” So, it was really just them being like, we… I don’t know if this is exactly the same thing, but you know, in Game of Thrones, they’re always like, “I will not bend the knee!” This is them saying like, “We will be on your team,” like they’re bending the knee. 

They promised that “If any group, other Indigenous people, or other white people threaten the British settlements, the Cherokee would defend on team Britain.” And they said, “They would prevent any other group or nation from living among them.” They did all this stuff in England and then came back, and they found that many of the towns were angry with this agreement. I mean, understandably, it had been at least 37 different towns, each with their own leader, then they became all under one leader. And then within 10 years, that leader went to England and made this deal, and maybe that works for his group, but in any sort of organization, there’s always dissent and there always was dissent in this whole story. It was hard to get everybody on the same page. 

So, I found it interesting that it was seven chiefs who went to England. And I presume that’s partially because, to the Cherokee, seven is a sacred number. There are seven clans: the Bird, Deer, Wolf, Long Hair, Wild Potato, Blue, and Paint Clans from which all Cherokees descend through their mother’s lineage. It’s a culture and that… I don’t know if that necessarily means it’s a matriarchal culture. I guess it does, like literally, whatever clan your mother is in, that’s what you then become. The main character of today’s episode, Nanye’hi, was a member of the Wolf Clan. 

And so, I was reading up about what does that mean? What does the Wolf Clan… What does that mean? So, the Wolf Clan was noted, and I presume still is, for its healers. 

Women of the Wolf Clan had knowledge of plant medicine and with the aid of the wolf, could diagnose and treat the sick. In traditional Cherokee life, in times of war and also in times of peace, women held the power of life and death. 

So again, it’s a culture of really strong, important women. 

As a member of the Wolf Clan, Nanye’hi inherited a legacy of helping captives during times of war. Prayers used to assist captives may once have been the exclusive possession of the Wolf Clan. These were Clan responsibilities. 

And it’s interesting too, in the episode of Finding Your Roots, where Wes Studi is informed that Nanye’hi is one of his descendants, he reads some quotes that she wrote. He says something like, I didn’t write down exactly what Wes Studi said, but he said something just like, “Oh, this is like a powerful woman, a strong woman.” And he’s like, “That’s what the culture was like that I grew up among,” like the Cherokee people he grew up with. The sense of, like, the powerful matriarchs seems like it’s still a thing within that society. 

So, Nanye’hi herself, like having laid that sort of background information, she was born in 1738. So, in terms of Native American, Indigenous people of North America, we’ve talked about on the podcast, this was 142 years after the birth of Matoaka AKA Pocahontas. British people had been in North America for, effectively, 142 years by now, like, this is just, it’s happening, it’s not new. People are still figuring out what it’s going to mean but for generations, this has been happening. This is also 41 years after the birth of the Thanadelthur in northern Canada and 50 years before the birth of Sacagawea, who we’ve also talked about on the podcast. 

I mentioned that partially because we’re going to get around to this and why this happens, but Nanye’hi is sometimes referred to as “Tennessee’s Pocahontas.” Thanadelthur I’ve seen referred to as, like, “Canada’s Pocahontas.” Or people compare Sacagawea and Pocahontas. Like Sacagawea and Pocahontas’s stories, we’ve talked about them on the podcast before, but they’re very much defined by the white colonial man who they acted partially as translators for and also who kidnapped and ultimately were responsible for their seeming deaths. But they’re sort of held up, Sacagawea and Pocahontas, by many people as sort of like, look at them, like they saw that the white people came in and they sided with the white people against their own people. So, this is where the controversy comes in. Similar to two years ago, three years ago, on this podcast, we did a story about Malintzin, AKA La Malinche, who was a similar Indigenous figure from the Nahuatl people of what is now Mexico, and she also was entangled with… with her as the Spanish settlers. 

So, these are maybe the best-known Indigenous women to broader mainstream culture. And they all have interactions with white settlers. And so, part of what I was struggling with and learning the story is just trying to figure out, how is Nanye’hi remembered now by the Cherokee people? And it’s not just in one way, but also how is her story celebrated and by who and what are their goals? But just in terms of the spread, these things weren’t all happening simultaneously. Matoaka is 142 years before this; Thanadelthur is 41 years later; 50 years later, it’s Sacagawea. So, this is a long, like, 200-year period in which lots of situations were happening between Indigenous people and the white colonial people, and this is just one more example. 

So, Nanye’hi was born in Chota, which is a village in what is now modern-day Tennessee. And Chota was, I mentioned there are all these towns/villages that all the different Cherokee were living in, and this is one of the major ones. This is one of the biggest, most populated areas. And during her childhood, as her grandfather became the guy, the main leader, it became sort of the place, the main place for Cherokee power. Her name, Nanye’hi, I read a couple of different things about what it means. One that I came across a couple times is that it means “She who walks among the spirit people,” and that may not have been her name at birth, but it was a name that was given to her when she was maybe around 10 years old because people saw something in her. They saw that this name would be appropriate for her. One of her childhood nicknames was ‘Wild Rose’ because of the pink flush in her cheeks. She gets other names and titles as we go along, including Nancy Ward, the name by which she is best known. 

Actually, I just wanted to put one more comparison out there because part of what I’m trying to keep track of this season, and in every episode really, is just kind of like who was around when. Like, when she was being born in Chota in the United States (asterisk, it wasn’t actually the United States yet) who was doing what and where? So, Queen Charlotte, from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story was born in 1744 so a few years later, that’s when she is born. Other people we’ve looked at, La Chevalière d’Éon, the fabulous, trans, spy/swordfighter who we talked about a few years ago, born 1728. Charles Ignatius Sancho, born 1729. So, this is an era and a time where interesting people are being born in lots of places, shall we say. 

So, according to oral traditions told by some of her descendants, “a white wolf appeared on the horizon the day she was born, which was a good omen,” especially because she’s from the Wolf Clan because her mother was from the Wolf Clan. So, her father, again, this is described differently by different sources so I’ll just give you some of the options of what may have happened. So, her father, whose name may have been Fivekiller was potentially from the Bird Clan. And he asked permission to marry her mother whose name was Tame Doe, because Tame Doe is a member of the Wolf Clan. “Because the Cherokee nation was matriarchal, it fell to the women of the seven clans to decide whether to accept or reject this request for marriage.” And this would be the same as if her father, which other sources said that maybe he was an outsider, maybe from a different tribe entirely, some suggest maybe he was a white man. But anyway, the women of the seven clans would decide whether this marriage would be okay. If it was accepted, which it was, he would be expected to live according to the Wolf Clan and the Cherokee ethics and moral codes. 

So, her mother, Tame Doe. Remember, her grandfather, Moytoy, was like the leader of the Cherokee, her mother, Tame Doe, his daughter. Her uncle, Attakullakulla, was also a high-ranking leader, he’s such an interesting person. I had a lot more about him in this, but we got to stick to our topic because episodes can only be so long. But I really encourage you, if you’re interested, to read up about him. There’s a lot written about Attakullakulla. One thing of note is that he was a short king. He was apparently very physically small and that didn’t hold him back at all, that didn’t get in his way. He was just known to be so powerful and so persuasive and such an influential person. So, she’s coming from this really influential group of people. So, I would presume, similar to in the story of Matoaka, for instance, when you’re the child of this influential leader, then that gives you a certain cachet within the community. People would be looking up to your family. So, probably, just sort of you would absorb that feeling of like, “Okay, I have this responsibility to the group.” 

So, when she was growing up, white traders and also visitors from other nearby tribes were often seen in the village. Because again, like the… Well, Indigenous trade was happening since forever, but the white people had been around for such a long time it’s just like, “Okay, here’s some more white people to trade with.” Like this is just, it was multicultural, I don’t know if that’s exactly the right term to say, but just this is what she would have seen growing up. As a little girl, she would have learned things like how to plant and cultivate the three types of corn, the religious ceremonies that accompanied every stage of its cultivation and harvest. Cherokee life centred around the village, which is why there’s all these different villages and people stayed in them. Like, these were their homes. They were really connected to it. So, traditional women’s work, “Child rearing, meal preparation, and basket weaving, was revered in Cherokee life. And a young warrior who married into his wife’s clan was expected to share in that work.” And I love this. I love reading this just to see it was a place where this sort of work was respected and seen as important, which it is, but there’s so few cultures who see it that way. 

When she was around 14 years old, Nanye’hi got married which, culturally, that is just what happened and no judgment from me. It’s just a bit unexpected in our modern context to think about a 14-year-old getting married. She married a person who is, I think around a similar age. His name was Kingfisher, a member of the deer clan. They had two children pretty quickly, a son called Littlefellow, later known as Firekiiller, and a daughter named Catherine, who was known as Ka-Ti, and they were raised as members of the Wolf Clan because she’s a member of the Wolf Clan, her mother was, this is their family. 

So, around a year later, the French and Indian War broke, like, kicked off. This is part of the Seven Years’ War. I’m not super able to keep track of what war is what, but just, there’s always wars going on in this place and time and it’s just kind of changing who is and what sides of things. But this is where the British brought up, like, “Remember that treaty that you signed 25 years ago?” And the Cherokee, they demanded that they take up arms against the enemies of the King as per this treaty. So, the Cherokees sent several hundred warriors to take part in this war against the French. George Washington – famous person later on, America’s first president; at this time, just kind of a war general guy – he noted of these Cherokee warriors, they were “Twice as serviceable as white soldiers.” Many of these warriors were killed in the battle and then when they were coming back to their villages, many of them were killed by Virginia frontiersmen who thought that they were enemies. And this tenuous alliance was broken. “Outraged clansmen were obligated by traditional law to seek justice for the killing of their warriors.” This led to yet more skirmishes, more war between the Cherokee and the British colonial armies. 

And so, during this sequence of battles, the Cherokee lost crops, lots of people died, and finally, the Cherokee agreed to give up large portions of their land in order to stop these invasions, in order to stop this massacre of their people and their crops and their villages. At around the same time, the Cherokee were also still at war with the Creek Indians, who were another nearby tribe, like who they had just been rivals with, I guess. They were at war because the Creek Indians were trying to invade the Cherokee land. So, the War Council of the Cherokee Nation decided to go on the attack, to attack the Creek Indians. 

At this point, Nanye’hi is 17 years old, mother of two, and she accompanies her husband Kingfisher into the battle. And so, this battle combined kind of everything they had on hand; hand-to-hand combat, along with guns, the blunderbuss guns supplied by the Europeans. And so again, this is like, some stories include this detail, and some don’t, and I’m going to include it because it’s a pretty badass detail. “As the fight raged on, Nanye’hi hid behind a log, and she would chew on her husband’s lead bullets to make them rougher and more deadly for when he fired them.” In the midst of this battle, Kingfisher was shot and killed, she probably saw this happen. “Rather than flee or run away, Nanye’hi, armed with either a hatchet or a gun” – I’ve seen a couple of different versions of this, but some sort of weapon – “screaming, she rushed towards the invaders and struck down all the Creek Indians that she encountered. When the day was done, the Cherokees were successful. They had chased the Creeks from their homeland.” 

For her extraordinary courage, Nanye’hi, now a 17-year-old widow with two young children, “She was given the title of War Woman for this, and she also was invested with the highest honour her nation could bestow, that of Supreme Beloved Woman, which is a title associated with peacemaking.” So, this title made her head of the Woman’s Council, gave her voting rights on the Council of Chiefs, and granted her supreme pardoning powers for the tribe. Essentially, she assumed the responsibility of the most important person in Cherokee Nation at age 17, just because of how badass she had been in this battle. Once she had this title of Beloved Woman, it became her responsibility to head the seven-member Women’s Council which, part of their responsibility was to “determine what would become of any prisoners of war, and to decide when and with whom Cherokee Nation could engage in treaty negotiations or battle.” 

What did she look like?! I mean, there’s no portraits of her. There are some portraits of some other Cherokee people living at the same time, but none of them are her. She was described as “Tall and beautiful with long, silken black hair, large piercing black eyes, and an imperious yet kindly air.” I think she must have had such an energy around her, such a… I don’t know, just somebody who you just meet them, and you see them and you’re like, “Oh, I trust you, you’re the leader. You’re 17 and I don’t even think about that. You’ve got this. Like you are just so capable.” She just has that energy. And she also had the outfit. So, as a Beloved Woman, she would have worn “White deerskin leggings adorned with small tortoise shells and freshwater pearls. She carried a swan’s wing as an emblem of her authority,” which is beautiful to think about this, like, white vision. She may have also worn a white crown woven out of long swan feathers and white down. “As the Beloved Woman, she had a right to speak in Council, could negotiate with foreign powers, and could, with a wave of her swan’s wing, save a prisoner already condemned to die.” And as a Beloved Woman, importantly, “she was obligated to mediate for peace, purity, and harmony,” which I think is also in line with being part of the Wolf Clan. Like this is just where she’s coming from, what she’s there to represent. 

And so, the period following her getting this honour, getting this title, is one of the most critical periods in Cherokee history, which was because more British people insisted on settling upon Cherokee land. And by British people, it’s like some of these are like second or third generation. Like, a lot of them were born in America because their ancestors had come over 50 years before, 100 years before. And this is where, in history, we’re starting to see sort of the development of the American culture separate from British culture. But basically, white colonists kept invading and insisting on settling on this land because it was such good land! It’s got the valley, it’s got the river; that’s where they wanted to be. At the same time, relations between the Cherokee and the British and the colonial governments deteriorated. 

So, unlike earlier, like maybe when she was a younger person, when there were the earlier traders who were just like, “Hey, we’ll trade you this musket for this deerskin,” and it all kind of worked out, many of the newcomers weren’t interested in peaceful coexistence with the Cherokee because, as far as they were concerned, the Cherokees were… The same way that King George II had been like, “Oh, they’re my children and I’ll take care of them like a father.” Now, it was more kind of like, they were seen as not human, they were seen as monstrous. The word that comes up is often ‘savages.’ 

So, these new settlers, “They usurped land from the Cherokee and then insisted that the people who lived there,” the Cherokee “be forcibly removed.” The English government supported this because they were preoccupied with… They didn’t want the French to become too powerful in the region. So, they kind of wanted English-speaking people to take over more areas. So, this meant breaking treaty after treaty with the Cherokee. Like, the British people were just allowing more and more settlers to move into this land and to kick the Cherokee out of the land that was theirs. 

In the midst of this, and I came across a couple different explanations for this, and I’ll just say what happened, which is just Nanye’hi got married again in the late 1750s and her husband was named Bryant Ward and he was a white Irish settler and so, at this point, part of the British group. So, he already had a white wife and children, but polygamy was not a problem to the Cherokee. And this was also maybe a political alliance sort of situation where it’s just like, “Maybe if we marry Nanye’hi…” who is the daughter or the granddaughter of the leader, her uncle is Attakullakulla, like it’s sort of like a peace alliance, which we see so much in like European history, for instance, where two warring factions, like you marry two people to each other to try to show like, “No, we’re family. Maybe we won’t attack each other so much.” In the book, Woman of Many Names by Debra S. Yates, she interprets it as Bryant Ward was like, “I saw you screaming in that battle and I couldn’t get you out of my mind and I need to marry you because you’re amazing,” which maybe that happened also. But so, these two people get married. And so, the Council approves it. Bryant Ward was accepted into the Wolf Clan, and they had a daughter together called Elizabeth Ward, AKA Betsy Ward, who would later be the ancestor of actor Wes Studi and lots of other people. 

So, Betsy, their daughter, was raised as Wolf Clan, like, as part of the Cherokee, even as many of the people around, like, within the Cherokee culture were becoming increasingly uneasy with mixed marriages and also with any close association with white settlers because it was really becoming enemies. It’s like an “Us and them” situation because it was now apparent that white people did not honour their word. So, perhaps this tension is part of why, ultimately, Bryant Ward returned to his white wife after a few years of marriage to Nanye’hi. Although he and Nanye’hi apparently continued to be on good terms co-parenting their daughter Betsy, who would go and hang out with him sometimes, stay with Nanye’hi sometimes. He never returned to live with his Cherokee family, but I appreciate for once in an episode of this podcast that people are being grown-ups about the dissolution of a marriage. It was 100%, for sure during the time of her marriage to Bryant Ward that Nanye’hi began to be known as Nancy Ward, which is how she is often still known today. So, we’re still not in the American Revolution, BT dubs, like, we’re still… This is still what’s going on beforehand. 

So, by 1761, “Three years of the destructive Anglo-Cherokee War had killed or wounded hundreds of people, destroyed dozens of settlements, and left thousands of people on both sides, houseless.” A new peace treaty was signed between the Cherokee and the British and three Cherokee leaders, whose names were Ostenaco, Cunne Shote, and Woyi, accompanied the British emissary, Henry Timberlake. Don’t know if this is an ancestor of Justin Timberlake, but I can imagine it’s not because that’s a specific last name. So, they, again, went to England to meet with, the king was now, I think, 24-year-old George III, which is king Farmer George from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, and they were just going to reaffirm the peace treaty that had been signed 30 years before by his father, George II. 

While they were there, these three men had their portraits painted, which you can find those images in various places. I think they’re housed either in the National Portrait Gallery in London, England or in a gallery in America. But I find it really interesting to see these portraits because, just, what details were put in there. What emblems and medals and things are they wearing? How is their hair done? What do they look like? Just to picture what did these people look like, and to presume like, okay, and so what did maybe Nanye’hi look like? What did Cherokee look like in this period of time? 

Anyway, while they were there, they also met Queen Charlotte from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, who was nine months pregnant when they arrived and they were there for a few months, which meant that they were present and took part in the festivities celebrating the birth of Queen Charlotte’s first child, who later King George IV, AKA the husband of Carolina Brunswick, AKA Prinny, who is a person who throughout – and you’re going to hear this other times in this season, too many times in the season of episodes – I’m researching anything and suddenly Prinny is just like a jump scare. I feel like I’m being rickrolled every time Prinny shows up in a story. Anyway. So interestingly, these three guys were in town during his birth. 

So, the Cherokee, reaffirming their commitment to the British, but like not all the Cherokee agreed with this, but their leadership was. And they also, the Cherokee, were aware of what was going on around them, which included that there were these lines being drawn between people loyal to Britain and to the American patriots. And I like the description of this… Oh, I forget which book it was from, but one of my sources said, “War between whites who spoke the same language seemed incomprehensible to the Cherokees.” I like that description because they had seen, you know, the English versus the French and things like that. But just to see, like, to them, what difference is there between British loyalists and American patriots? They all look the same. They probably all have the same accent. How can you tell if they’re on one side or the other? And they’re like, “These two sides are at war with each other? These two sides who are both against us?” 

The priority for the Cherokee in this was to maintain trade relations, protect their land. And so, the Revolution was like, you know, it kicked off in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, I think. But like, clearly, things were headed towards this sort of war between the British loyalists and the American patriot white people. To the Cherokee, they were like, “Kind of doesn’t matter to us who wins this revolution because they were sovereign.” Like the Cherokee nation was sovereign. Like whoever won this, they were like, “Doesn’t affect us really. This is just an issue between these two groups.” What did affect them was trade so they wanted to make sure that they were on the side that would be most advantageous for them in trade. So, most Cherokee chose to side with the British in the situation. But again, there’s like tension and arguments within the tribe itself. 

For instance, Nanye’hi’s cousin, Dragging Canoe, who I need to tell you the story quickly, why he’s called Dragging Canoe. He’s the son of Attakullakulla, and he, as a young boy, wanted to go with his dad and with the other men on, like, different trips they were taking. And they’re like, “Okay, you can come with us, but you have to carry your own canoe.” And he was such a little kid, he couldn’t carry the canoe, but he was so determined to join them. He ended up dragging the canoe and going with them and that’s why he’s called Dragging Canoe. Anyway, he’s also a really notable figure in Cherokee history, you can read up about him more. He was at odds with what the leaders thought a lot of the time. He did not want to side with the British, he felt that this was a threat, and the Cherokee should do more attacking, basically. 

Nanye’hi, member of the Wolf Clan, a Beloved Woman, she advocated for neutrality during this revolution because “she hoped that remaining neutral would allow the Cherokee to establish good relationships with both the colonists and the British, which would then defend them against abuse from either one.” And if this neutrality was kind of the position taken over by the Cherokee, it would not matter who won the war because both sides would see them as potential allies. 

So, when the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, this document was intended to defend universal natural rights. And where it’s saying things like, famously from Hamilton, it’s saying like “All men are created equal,” it doesn’t mention women. But also, the language of it demonstrates racism and prejudice against Indigenous people. There’s a passage where they referred to, “The merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” So, this is, I don’t know, it’s a document. I’m Canadian. I’m not American. I don’t know how it’s discussed generally by people in America, but it’s like this document is kind of not cool to the Cherokee, or any Indigenous people, or women. 

So, the authors of the Declaration of Independence also use the phrase, “Our frontiers,” like defining America as belonging to them, to white people, which meant they were disregarding Native claims to the land. And so, in this immediately pre-revolution, early revolution time, these beliefs and sentiments that the white people deserve the land, that it was their land, were so strong that there was just not at all even the possibility of coexisting peacefully with the Cherokee and with other Indigenous tribes. Nanye’hi and other peacemakers were hoping to remain neutral, but you can’t be neutral when all the white people view their presence, like just being there at all, as a major problem. This same month, the same month as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, there was a violent encounter between the British and the Cherokee. And so, the tribe who was being attacked, no choice, but to fight back. So, they brought it to the Council of Chiefs, who voted unanimously for war, including Nanye’hi. They’re just like, “Yeah, we have to, we can’t be peaceful in this situation. We have to defend ourselves.” 

What happened next is part of what is most famous about the story of Nanye’hi. And I’ll tell you what happened, and you can interpret it as you will. But I will note the traditional Cherokee moral code, absolutely forbade the killing of women and children in war scenarios. So, what she did supports the notion that she was observing this ethical tradition. 

So, this battle is happening where the Cherokee had agreed that they were going to attack this British settlement. So, women and children had mostly… They knew this was happening, and so they had fled, so they wouldn’t be there at the time, except for there was a woman named Lydia Bean, who was captured by the Cherokee warriors, a boy named Samuel Moore was also captured at the same time, and he was apparently tortured to death. So, it’s unclear why the two of them were being treated a bit differently. Part of it could be that Samuel Moore was in the fort when the Cherokee laid siege to it, and Lydia Bean was, kind of like, already running away. But also, the boy as a male, was subject to retaliation for the death of Cherokee warriors. Lydia Bean was captured as she was making her way toward the fort, so she wasn’t actually involved in the actual confrontation. 

So, what seems to have happened is that Samuel Moore, the boy, was killed, and then the Cherokee warriors were preparing to kill and or torture Lydia Bean, and the Nanye’hi intervened. She popped in with her swan’s wing, the symbol of her office, and insisted that Lydia be freed. She said, “No woman shall be burned at the stake while I am the Beloved Woman.” So, it’s possible… One of the questions is like, why did she save Lydia Bean and not the boy? But it seems like potentially the boy was already dead when she arrived. As a Beloved Woman, she chose to protect Lydia Bean’s life. 

And so, part of this is the ethical duty, like as being part of Wolf Clan, like that she was the Beloved Woman, she was able to make these decisions on behalf of everybody else, who to save and to protect life and women shouldn’t be killed, and all those sorts of things are all wrapped up in this decision. She also, as a Cherokee woman in general, and as a Beloved Woman specifically, would have felt a responsibility to care for the land and all it provided, which means the towns and the crops. She knew that if the Cherokee warriors tortured and/or murdered a white woman, this would outrage the other white people and could lead to retaliatory attacks. She knew that the only way to facilitate a potential peace talk was if she demonstrated goodwill by protecting Lydia Bean. So, they listened to her because she’s the Beloved Woman and so she came in with her swan wing and they’re like, “Okay.” 

So, rather than immediately returning Lydia Bean to her people, Nanye’hi kept her with her in Chota. Given the hostilities, this is possibly just, it was too dangerous for Lydia Bean to travel in this really tense situation. So, during the time that they lived alongside each other – and I like that this was described in, again, I read so many sources, but one of them mentioned that maybe this was like Nanye’hi wanted to… Lydia Bean was freaked out, she’s panicked, she’s lived through this really scary thing. And it’s like, what are some things that she does? Like, how can we make her feel better? You know, it’s like if somebody’s hobby is knitting or if it’s, like, watercolour painting, it’s like, “Okay, well, here we have some paints. We have some canvas. Like, let’s just like, what can calm you down?” And Lydia Bean liked or was used to churning butter. And so, she just started doing that. As part of this, Lydia Bean made herself useful during her stay by teaching Nanye’hi the value of raising dairy cattle about how to make butter and cheese. And this was a custom that had previously been shunned by the Cherokee. “Nanye’hi from Lydia Bean learned to make butter and cheese and then began keeping her own herd of cattle.” And so, this is a crucial… I’ll talk after about the two crucial parts of the story, but this cheese part is important. 

So, the Cherokee used to have so much land where they could go, and they could hunt, and this would help them meet their dietary and material needs. But by now, they’d ceded over 50,000 square miles of hunting areas, the animal populations were severely depleted, and because of these ongoing wars, they could no longer count on the British trading with them to get food and goods. Nanye’hi, through her friendship with Lydia Bean, she learned, “Okay, this is an alternative protein source: cows. We can get milk and cheese for protein, but also this will be a familiar food like beef for white people. This could make them feel welcome if we’re inviting them for dinner. This could be a potential trade item.” In this way, she found a way to sustain the Cherokee economy that had been inextricably… Like, they could no longer go back to before the British were there. They had to have an economy that was based on things that British people wanted to trade and cows and dairy products were it. 

So, the two crucial things here are that she saved Lydia Bean and that she introduced dairy, cow stuff to the Cherokee. So, the cow stuff kind of saved and helped revive the population and helped them to continue on in the absence of the previous way, the previous lifestyle, the previous things they’re able to eat and hunt. The Lydia Bean thing gets really complicated. Some people present it as sort of like the myth of Matoaka, AKA Pocahontas, throwing herself on John Smith to save him, like, it’s sort of shown as Nanye’hi choosing white people over the Cherokee. Crucial difference here between what you might imagine is, like, a woman who sides with the white people against her own people versus what she actually was doing is she was always advocating for peace. She was always advocating to continue the ethical traditions of the Cherokee, which are like, “Let’s not kill women, let’s not intentionally antagonize people.” 

She also, crucially, was not just doing this on her own. Like the way that the Matoaka story is told incorrectly suggests that she, Pocahontas, AKA Matoaka, went off on her own, independently of the rest of her tribe, to side with the white people, which isn’t true, but you can listen to my whole episode about that. And here I think when people talk about Nanye’hi is like Tennessee’s Pocahontas, it’s like, “Look at her. She’s like protecting the white people against her own tribe.” And yeah, the warriors who were Cherokee people, who were her tribe, were prepared to kill Lydia Bean, but Nanye’hi wasn’t representing just herself, she came in there with the authority of being the Beloved Woman, of speaking for the Women’s Council. And when she said, “Save her, free her,” they did because they listened to her. She wasn’t doing this on her own, she wasn’t doing it against the wishes of all of her culture. 

During this era of just constant war between the colonists and the Cherokee, I mean, we see that what she did by saving Lydia Bean and then by also providing a warning to the white colonists, which is another thing she did, she heard that they were going to be attacked and she told them so that they could have a chance to leave. Her village was spared from counterattack. So, she was correct in the sense of, like, by doing these actions, she would save the land, she’d save her village, at least for now. But “This initial Cherokee raid started a full-scale war, which lasted for the next three years between the Cherokee and the American colonists.” During this era, she continued to advocate for peace in the way she knew how to do. Like, she would warn sometimes the Americans of impending attacks in order to prevent further retaliatory attacks against her people. There’s one story that she may have sent some of her cattle to help feed starving American patriots at one point. And again, in these acts, she was not working independently, she wasn’t working against what the other Cherokee were doing. It’s not like every single other person was like, “Yeah, let’s attack,” and she’s like, “I’m going to sneak these cows over here.” There was division within this large group of people, the Cherokee Nation, and she was representing everyone else with her point of view. Like, there’s different points of view here. She wasn’t just doing this herself. She spoke on behalf of a large number of people who trusted her as a leader. 

In 1778, her uncle Attakulaukulla died, “Leaving Nanye’hi as one of the only remaining Cherokee leaders interested in reaching a negotiated peace treaty” with the increasingly shitty white people. But even her beliefs were tested in 1780 when the British attacked her beloved village of Chota, burning it to the ground. So, she and her family lost all of their positions and she and her family, like her children and her extended family, they’re all taken prisoners by the same, like to her, the same white settlers she had previously been helping that she’d befriended. 

She was released pretty soon after this, but the destruction of Chota, her beloved hometown, the heart of the Cherokee nation, devastated her. So, for the first time since assuming the position of Beloved Woman, she broke all ties with her white friends and allies. She went into seclusion for a year, even halting trade with the white settlers, which was a dramatic step because trade had become a necessary element in the Cherokee economy. She saw how things were going and she knew that this, like, what a time to be a leader, honestly, and to be still, like, a young woman with young children. And again, the Cherokees were divided on issues of war. Many warriors, like her cousin Dragging Canoe, wanted to drive the white people from the land, regardless of the Cherokee moral code that honoured harmony above all else. Others, weary of the fighting and bloodshed, decided the best course would be to just like peace out, leave this land, move West, start new somewhere over. But everyone agreed it was becoming impossible to behave in an honourable way with people who constantly broke the word. These treaties, like how many treaties were there and how many, like 100% of them were broken by the white people. 

So, Nanye’hi was just like, “What are we going to do?” And then she got word that the English, the British— Some of the sources I will say use the word English a lot. And by that, sometimes it means like white people, and sometimes it means like British people. And I know there are listeners in other… So, the British Isles, today, or then, it’s like England is different from Scotland, is different from Wales, Northern Ireland sometimes involved. So, sometimes I’ll say “English,” but I’m going to try to always say “British” because a lot of these people were Scottish or Welsh or Irish as well. Anyway, these guys, white people, wanted to negotiate another peace treaty. And so, this is still mid-American Revolution. So, it’s still kind of like, which side is going to win? Which is why Britain is still involved. 

So, in 1781, the US treaty commissioners were working with some Cherokee leaders to negotiate a treaty to end this ongoing three-year war. And they, the white people, they knew that the Cherokee were divided on what to do with the land and that a lot of the leadership was aging and/or dead. So, they might have been, they were probably confident that they faced a nation in turmoil, that they probably would be able to do this pretty easily. But in fact, in this, the Cherokee were united. Nanye’hi was one of the people who attended this negotiation. “She felt that peace would only come if the Cherokee and white settlers saw themselves as one people and she thought the only people that could make such a peace negotiation was women,” on both sides. So, she showed up expecting there to be women on the white people’s side as well. To her surprise and dismay, she was the only woman at these talks. The rest were all men. 

So, the negotiations, not going great; it seemed like they were going to end in failure or worse. But then one of the people there, one of the white men wrote, “There was an occurrence that is without parallel in the history of the West. An Indian woman spoke in treaty negotiations,” and that woman was Nanye’hi. So, she rose and said, “We are your mothers. You are our sons. Our cry is all for peace. Let it continue. This peace must last forever. Let your women’s sons be ours, our sons be yours. Let your women hear our words.” So, just having a woman speak freaked out all of the men in general, but also her words were so powerful. So, in response, this had an emotional effect on the men and the white men promised to respect the peace if the Cherokees likewise remained peaceful. So, this speech influenced the negotiations in a fundamental way because the resulting treaty from this meeting was one of the few where settlers made no further demand for Cherokee land. And then her life is just kind of like being this kind of diplomat, ambassador, speech-giving, amazing woman. 

So, 1785, the Treaty of Hopewell. This was after the American Revolution had ended, the Americans had won, the British had left. So, this is the first treaty between the Cherokee and the newly founded United States of America. Again, Nanye’hi accompanied the chief and this was the meeting where they were formally informed the Americans had formed their own nation and she made a dramatic plea for a continued peace. At the close of the ceremonies, “She invited the commissioners to smoke her peace pipe, wistfully hoping to bear more children to people the Cherokee Nation. She looked to the protection of Congress to prevent future disturbances.” She just wanted to be able to raise her family for everyone to just like live and thrive and not be at war all the time. She said she “hoped the chain of friendship will nevermore be broken.” Although the commissioners promised that all settlers would leave Cherokee lands within six months, the white people ignored this treaty, which forced the Cherokees to give up yet more land. 

During this set of peace talks— So again, was this sort of a diplomatic scenario marriage? Nanye’hi’s daughter, Betsy, got married to General Joseph Martin, who also had another white wife, but polygamy, not a big deal to the Cherokee people although Joseph Martin’s family and friends were like, “Don’t you already have a wife? What’s happening?” So, during the 1790s, Nanye’hi is growing older and she’s AKA Nancy Ward. In her later years, she became known as Granny Ward, and a lot of people still speak of her now as like Our Grandmother, the matriarch of, like, the whole nation. Her Cherokee grandchildren called her Nani, but Granny Ward was her American nickname in later life. Part of this is because she started taking in and providing for orphan children. At the same time, like she had lived such an eventful life, so much like life-changing stuff had happened during her whole life so far and she was observing these changes taking place within the Cherokee Nation itself, as they, by necessity, adopted the same sort of commercial, agriculture lifestyle of the nearby settlers because that’s just kind of how we needed to be to, like, get on in this world that they were now living in. 

The system of governance also was changing within the Cherokee Nation itself. So, the old system was like clan loyalty, like Wolf Clan and tribe loyalty. The new Cherokee government provided no place for the role of a Beloved Woman. This is how and why she is the last Beloved Woman of Cherokee Nation. So, treaty negotiations with white people, like, basically, there had been all these treaties, but they no longer even applied because the white people kept expanding where they wanted to be, they kept moving west even more. So, the Cherokees were forced further into the Tennessee Valley because the white people were pushing them that way. Resistance on the part of the Cherokee was becoming impossible because they were increasingly outnumbered by white people, but also because outbreaks of smallpox had decimated the population. 

1817, the remaining Cherokee council had to decide, once again, the fate of its nation. “Nanye’hi was too old and too ill to attend, but she sent a message to her fellow,” the people there, “urging the Council to do whatever it must to hang on to the remaining Cherokee land, even if that meant certain death.” So, we see how her philosophy and her thoughts and her… How it changed based on just life events and what was happening. Initially, she started off being like, “Yes! We’re going to have these negotiations,” like she’s neutrality and peace, and now she’s just like, “Fuck these white people, fuck this all.” Basically. She said it much more politely. So, she wrote, 

Cherokee mothers do not wish to go to an unknown country. We raised you on the land we now have. Some of our children wish to go over the Mississippi, but this act would be like destroying your mothers. We beg of you not to part with any more of our land, but keep it for our growing children, for it was the goodwill of our creator to place us there.

But her wish did not happen. In 1819, the Cherokees could no longer resist the white invaders. So, the Hiwassee Purchase took Nanye’hi’s property in Chota, forcing her to move to a village called Womankiller Ford, where she opened an inn on the federal road running through Cherokee Nation. And this is where she kept raising Cherokee orphans. And then her son, Fivekiller, cared for her in her final years. 

So, in these final years, like, she is still going. She’s still passionate about her people and about the land and just still being a leader. And at this point, what she wants more than anything is just for people not to give up any more land. Cherokee oral history says that in her last years, 

Nanye’hi repeatedly had a vision showing a great line of people marching on foot, mothers with babies in their arms, fathers with small children on their back, grandmothers and grandfathers with large bundles on their back. They were marching West, and the white soldiers were behind them. They left a trail of corpses, the weak, the sick who could not survive the journey.

This vision accurately predicted what would happen seven years later when the United States government forcibly displaced approximately 60,000 Indigenous people over the course of 20 years, they ethnically cleansed…

Like, AKA genocide… 

… thousands more in what is now known as the Trail of Tears, as the Cherokee and other groups were forced to make their way to quote Indian territory in what is mainly, now, modern-day Oklahoma. 

So, Nanye’hi died in 1822. Because of the changing tribal structure, no other woman was appointed to take her place as Beloved Woman. So, she’s the last Cherokee to hold this title. Legend has it when she died, a light rose from her body, fluttered like a bird around the room and flew out the door. She and her son Fivekiller are buried at the top of a hill, not far from the site of the inn where she lived, south of present-day Benton, Tennessee. 

The complex reputation of Nanye’hi AKA Nancy Ward. I’m going to quote from the late Michelene E. Pesantubbee, who wrote this article about her because there’s this thing about, did she side with the white people? Was she a heroine to white people? Like, did she betray the Cherokee? And it’s really similar to the discussions of Matoaka and of Malintzin. But here’s what Michelene Pesantubbee wrote. 

In her efforts to prevent bloodshed, Nanye’hi earned accolades from Cherokee and white Americans alike. To the Cherokee, she was a well-respected, honoured leader and culture bearer. To white American settlers, she was a friend and ally who protected them from Cherokee warriors. She became known as the Cherokee Rose or White Rose or Wild Rose, the Pocahontas of the West, and a Cherokee Princess and Prophetess by those who believed her to be the constant friend to the American pioneer. So enthralled did white Americans become with the image of her as the saviour of white settlers that they styled her the “Patron Saint of Tennessee,” and the Daughters of the American Revolution named a chapter in Chattanooga, Tennessee after her. Tennesseans went so far as to group Nanye’hi along with racist colonizers to Cherokee people, Andrew Jackson and Davy Crockett, as symbols of honour for Tennessee. 

Although Ward’s actions have been interpreted in such a way as to sculpt her into an American patriot icon, she was in fact a dedicated Cherokee nationalist and Cherokee patriot like her uncle Attakullakulla, another peacemaker, and her cousin, the war leader Dragging Canoe. Interestingly, Attakullakulla also aided the revolutionaries, but he has not been praised as an American patriot. 

So, just when I was looking just more information about her legacy, et cetera, a contemporary descendant named David Hampton, he’s the president of a group called the Association of the Descendants of Nancy Ward, which is like, stay tuned, there’s a lot of… There’s a lot of them. He spent 60 years doing genealogical research into all the strands of all of her descendants. He estimates that today, something like 40,000 of her descendants are still around, including Cherokee actor Wes Studi, and the authors of two of the books that I used for research in this. So, Deborah Jones wrote the entry in Women in World History. Women of Many Names is by Debra S. Yates. And actually, another one of her descendants named Becky Hobbs, a few years ago, she wrote and produced a musical called Nanye’hi: The Story of Nancy Ward. 

So, I love her story. I mean, it’s incredible to think that there’s this many descendants, but also, like other stories that we’ve looked at that are about Indigenous people, similar sorts of things when you look at the history of some Black people from American history, a lot of it is retained through oral history and storytelling rather than in the actual written records that were written by settlers. 

So, time to score Nanye’hi. So, the first category is Scandaliciousness. And honestly, I feel, to her credit, I don’t think anything she did was scandalous. Like, people within the Cherokee tribe, they saw her as a leader. So, when she decided to do something, they weren’t like, “[gasps] What? Herman, my pills!” Like, they accepted that she was savvy and clever and smart and had a reason for doing this. So, I don’t think even, you know, some people might’ve been like, “Well, you’re helping the white people or you’re saving Lydia Bean,” but none of that was scandalous, I don’t think. I think she was very much just like always upfront and doing what she felt was best. And I mean, the most scandalous anyone ever thought she was, was when she went to a meeting, that peace treaty, and was a woman and spoke. So, I’m going to give her a 1 for Scandiliciousness because of that. Some of the white people were just like, “What?! A woman is talking?” 

Scheminess, which in the context of this podcast is always a positive thing. It means being a person with a plan, being able to assess the situation, be flexible and resilient to changing circumstances. And I think she’s a 10 out of 10 for this. I think, I mean, she was named the Beloved Woman when she was 17 and she hit the ground running. Like she just was so, just in terms of like leadership skills and just being able to assess the situation and see what you needed to do, to always be thinking, like, 12 steps ahead, like what will it mean if we do this or if they do this? I think she was always, like, the way that she wrote, her persuasiveness and speaking and writing. I think she’s a 10 out of 10 for Scheminess. It’s just the people that she was trying to ally with in various ways were just shitty, white colonizers. 

Her Significance, I think is definitely a 10. When Wes Studi in that episode of Finding Your Roots was told that this is your ancestor, like he knew who she was. She was described in that episode of Finding Your Roots as just, like, this hero, as this legend. I was looking at some of the responses to that episode just on I think Reddit or something and people were saying like, “Wow!” People are so proud to be her descendants and they were happy to see Wes Studi is another one of her descendants. I think the name Nancy Ward is maybe to the broader scope of American people surveyed for this podcast, not super well-known, but she is very well-known to modern-day people of the Cherokee Nation. Also, I think to people of Tennessee, I think she’s a really significant figure. I also think that she, not just that she’s remembered and revered so much, but also at the time she was living, I think her impact was so significant. Even just the introduction of dairy production to the Cherokee Nation really helped. 

The Sexism Bonus is where I like to see how many points does she get, how much more could she have accomplished were she not living in a patriarchal world? I think she kind of wasn’t because, within the Cherokee Nation, she was given the role of Beloved Woman at a very young age. People revered her, people respected her, people listened to her. Her sex, her gender did not get in her way really at all. I’m sure in her dealings with white people, with Americans, that came up a bit, but I don’t think there’s… Other things got in her way like racism and colonialism but coming from this matriarchal culture where she was really widely respected, sexism did not play a big part. I’m going to say 2 for Sexism. 

So, that gives her a total score of 23, which on our scale… I just want to make sure I’m not spoiling any episodes that you have yet to hear. I think I can say, safely, that another person with a 23 is a person who lived at around the same time, who was Charlotte Badger, who was the English woman who was imprisoned and then sent to Australia and then spent some time in New Zealand. That’s where she fits, up close to her. I’m just trying to see what, in terms of the other Native American people we’ve looked at, how everybody lines up. Thanadelthur, the Dene woman from Northern Canada is up there with 27, Matoaka AKA Pocahontas has a 27. 

I think it’s interesting for me to consider their stories in relation to each other, just because Nanye’hi lived a lot longer than Matoaka or Thanadelthur or Malintzin were able to, which is great that she’s able to stay around and to be influential and to be helping out for such a long time. Also, I think because she was so respected and revered by her, by the Cherokee people, there’s never that sort of scandalous thing. There’s obviously so much tragedy connected with her and with the Cherokee people and with this whole time period. For her, it’s a different narrative. That’s always important for me to have her story as part of this season, but also to have paved the way for this with her looking at Matoaka and Thanadelthur and Malintzin, the Sacagawea episode we had, looking at the different ways that Indigenous women interacted with the early American settlers and just how the stories all turn out differently. 

That’s Nanye’hi. I found this story… It was one of the more complex ones for me to research because I really wanted to try and approach the story from the Cherokee point of view and a lot of the things, especially online when you’re looking up about her, it’s just like, “Nancy Ward, an American patriotic hero! She sided with the white people. Isn’t she great?” And I’m just like, “What is the actual story?” It took a while to track down the resources that were able to tell the story the way I wanted to. That’s Nanye’hi, Nancy Ward. 

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So, there are a couple of ways… We have a segment in Season Seven called Nothing But Net, where I connect the people who we talk to back to Marie Antoinette herself, because Season Seven is, How Do You Solve A Problem Like Marie Antoinette? And all the people are talking about connect back to her more directly than one might often expect. So, there’s a couple of different ways that we could get from Nanye’hi to Marie Antoinette. One of those ways is that her daughter married an American soldier who had some dealings with some of the Founding Fathers. And then if you go through the Founding Fathers through Lafayette, you get to Marie Antoinette. But the most direct way that I could find is Cherokee leaders named Ostenaco, Cunne Shote, and Woyi travelled to London, England in 1762 as a peace delegation. Nanye’hi knew most of, if not all of these men because they were from the Cherokee culture. They would have been people who she would have known, or her family would have known them. So, while they were in London, this peace delegation of Cherokee people met Queen Charlotte from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, and Queen Charlotte from Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story was pen pals; she and Marie Antoinette wrote letters back and forth a lot. So, if we connect Nanye’hi to these leaders who went to England, to Queen Charlotte, to Marie Antoinette. That is three degrees of separation between these two people. 

And we’re seeing some sort of crucial in-between people in some of these stories, like Lafayette. The Marquis de Lafayette is someone who connects the American Revolutionary Founding Father social circle over to Marie Antoinette, but then also the British royal family, interestingly, like Queen Charlotte, because she was pen pals with Marie Antoinette, like, that connects some people back and forth as well. So, it just kind of shows how no one that we’re talking about this season is… So far, I don’t think anyone’s any further than three degrees of separation from Marie Antoinette herself. 

So, next week, we’re going to continue on with this American Revolutionary point of view and we’re going to be talking about a woman who, at one point, I described all the episodes in this Season Seven, Part One, they’re all either an Act II: Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé episode, which are just kind of like episodes where it’s really like, I would describe this as one of those that are sort of like getting into the complex history of America from the point of view of women of colour. And then some of the episodes are “That’s That Me Espresso” episodes or “Shoes… More Shoes” episodes, where it’s just, kind of like, a young woman who’s just like having a nice time. And next week, we have… It starts off with a “Shoes… More Shoes,” “That’s That Me Espresso” episode, and it’s about an American young woman who I find very compelling, and her life does take a turn. But we’ll talk about that all next week. 

In the meantime, I’m Ann Foster, this is Vulgar History. If you want to get more of my voice, you can support the podcast on Patreon. So, if you go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, that’s a place where you can go to get first of all, ad-free access, and early access to all new episodes of Vulgar History, as well as ad-free access to old episodes. So, basically, you can set up a new feed there if you listen on Spotify or Apple podcasts or whatever, we can get the ad-free stream. So, when you join the Patreon for at least $1 a month, that’s what you get. 

And then if you join the Patreon at $5 or more a month, you get the early, ad-free access, as well as a rich back-catalogue of bonus episodes that I’ve recorded. So, I have a couple different series that I have on there for the patrons at $5 or more. There’s Vulgarpiece Theatre where we talk about costume dramas with friends of the podcast, Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson. I also have episodes on there called So This Asshole, we’re talking about various men from history who are terrible. And then I also have The After Show, where sometimes when I have a guest on the podcast, and I just want to keep talking to them, I just bring them on The After Show to talk more. You can get access to all those bonus episodes by joining the Patreon at $5 or more a month. 

You can also just on the Patreon for free, frankly, just become a free member because I do post shit there, pictures and news articles and just things that are on my mind lately. It’s sort of similar to what you see if you follow me on Instagram, where I’m on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod. But the difference is that my Instagram stuff doesn’t always reach people who are following me, and I assume if people follow me on Instagram, they want to see what I’m talking about. So, I’ve been posting more of that on Patreon. So again, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter; join for free, join for money. You do you.

We also have a wonderful brand partner who is Common Era Jewellery. So, this is a small business. I’m all about supporting small businesses, woman-owned businesses. And this is a company that could not vibe more with the whole Vulgar History scenario. So, what they do is they make beautiful jewellery, necklaces and rings, inspired by women and other people from classical mythology, as well as from history. So, we’re looking at people from mythology, like from Greek and Roman mythology; Hecate is there, Artemis is there, I think, Athena, people like that, as well as figures from classical writing, like Clytemnestra is there. And then also actual women from history so Boudica, Cleopatra, Agrippina. The most recent person that she has there is Anne Boleyn. You can get the Anne Boleyn beautiful necklace, which I have, there’s also rings. It’s all great. She literally has a collection called “Difficult Women,” which is about women in history who, like now, when women stand up for themselves and what they want and set boundaries, people call them difficult. And so, it’s just celebrating women like that from history and from mythology. Vulgar History listeners can always get 15% off all items from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

If you want to get Vulgar History merchandise, including the recently released Peg Plunkett designed by Karyn Moynihan, you can find Vulgar History merch in two different places. If you’re in the US, the US of A, then I recommend going to VulgarHistory.com/Store, that takes you to our little TeePublic store and there’s a whole bunch of designs. You can choose what you want to put the design on; a T-shirt, or a mug, or a sticker, or a pin, or a tote bag, or whatever. And if you live not in the US, if you live literally anywhere else, including Canada, I would recommend going to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com because the shipping is better there for people who are not in the US of A. Oh, and we also have other Season Seven designs are up there. Have a Public Universal Friend design that just says, “The friend has need of these things,” which was Public Universal Friend’s, iconic cult leader adjacent catchphrase. 

If you have ideas for more merch, let me know. You can send me a DM on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod. You can also fill out the form at VulgarHistory.com, which sends an email to me with your comments or thoughts or whatever. Also, if you want to read words I write— Well, I’m writing a book, but that’s not available for a while. But also, I do have a Substack, which is just VulgarHistory.Substack.com. And that’s where I’ve been posting weekly essays. I’m writing about women of the Tudor era, and that’s all free, and you just go to VulgarHistory.Substack.com to get that information on. 

Next week, more American history. Until then my friends, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com. 

References: 

Finding Your Roots “Fathers and sons”

Nancy Ward: American Patriot or Cherokee Nationalist? by Michelene E. Pesantubbee

Nanyehi’s Experience of the American Revolution by Lillie Burke

Women in World History entry by Deborah Jones

Woman of Many Names by Debra S. Yates 

Cherokee Nation: A History of Survival, Self-Determination, and Identity by Dr. Bob Blackburn, Dr. Duane King, and Dr. Neil Morton

Cherokees and British Sign Treaty of Whitehall

Nanyehi (Nancy Ward) episode of the Long May She Reign podcast

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