The Cherokee people used to live around the Great Lakes and later in south-eastern USA, in Tennessee and the western Carolinas. When Europeans first encountered the Cherokee, in the mid-16th century, the Cherokee possessed stone tools including axes, knives and chisels. They wove basket, made pottery and cultivated corn, beans and squash. They hunted deer, bear and elk for food and for their skins. 

Cherokee homes were windowless log cabins, with a single door and a smoke-hole in the roof. A Cherokee town was made up of thirty to sixty such houses, along with a council house where clan meetings and religious ceremonies were held. The Green Corn festival, celebrating new fires and the first fruits of the year was an important religious event.

Contact with the Europeans and the formation of the USA in 1776 adversely affected the Cherokee nation; after much persecution and discrimination, the Cherokee were forced to move to north-eastern Oklahoma, where most of their descendants live even today. A small number of Cherokees live in western North Carolina.

The Cherokee have several beautiful stories explaining the origin of the world and the creatures in it.