CherokeeNorth American Indian people Indians of Iroquoian
lineage who inhabited eastern Tennessee and the western
Carolinas. Formerly they had lived around the Great Lakes,
migrating to the south after their defeat by the Delaware and
Iroquois. Their population in 1650 has been estimated at 22,500,
spread over constituted one of the largest politically
integrated tribes at the time of European colonization of the
Americas. Their name is derived from a Creek word meaning
“people of different speech”; many prefer to be known as
Keetoowah or Tsalagi. They are believed to have numbered some
22,500 individuals in 1650, and they controlled approximately
40,000 square miles (100,000 square km) of the Appalachian
Mountains in parts of present-day Georgia, eastern Tennessee,
and the western Carolinas at that time.  Traditional Cherokee
life and culture greatly resembled that of the Creek and other
Indians tribes of the Southeast. The Cherokee nation was
composed of a confederacy of symbolically red (war) and white
(pe