Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman

In 1755 a Cherokee woman named Nanye’hi accompanied a war party, which included her husband Kingfisher. At Taliwa in what today is north Georgia, the Cherokees engaged the enemy Creek Indians in battle. Nanye’hi crouched behind a log while Kingfisher fired at the enemy, but a Creek bullet found its mark. Kingfisher dropped dead beside his wife. Seizing his gun, Nanye’hi joined the battle and fought bravely until the Cherokees had driven off the Creeks. Her behavior was contrary to the usual gender expectations in Cherokee society. Rather than criticizing her, however, the Cherokees honored her with the title “War Woman.” As she aged and became renowned for her wisdom as well as her bravery, she became a “Beloved Woman.” Nanye’hi—or Nancy Ward, as Americans knew her—was not a typical Cherokee woman, but her life shines a light on how the Cherokees constructed gender. That construction shifted over time but retained the centrality of women to Cherokee society.

Cherokee women and men had very distinct roles and, in many respects, lived very separate lives. The household was the domain of women, but they also cultivated large fields of corn, beans, and squash. The forest, where men hunted and made war, along with the council house were the domain of men. Respecting these boundaries was key to community wellbeing. War, in particular, required a spiritual purity that crossing gender boundaries jeopardized. But war parties that traveled great distances needed the food, water, and firewood that women appropriately provided. Therefore, a woman who could be trusted to respect gender boundaries sometimes accompanied far-flung military expeditions. Nanye’hi was such a woman.

Nanye’hi was not the only Cherokee War Woman. Following a battle with the colonists in the American Revolution, for example, soldiers discovered a woman “painted and stripped like a warrior and armed with bows and arrows.”[1] Although warfare between Cherokees and Americans ended in the 1790s, later visitors occasionally encountered elderly women who had been in battles. They stood out because they were the only women who participated in the Eagle Dance, which commemorated military victories. They sat apart from other women on ceremonial occasions and partook of food and drink normally reserved for warriors. Sometimes they even spoke in council, which was made up of men. They possessed spiritual power, transcended gender lines, and moved between male and female worlds without disrupting cosmic balance.

Women were the gatekeepers in Cherokee society. They derived this power from the Cherokees’ matrilineal kinship system as opposed to the bilateral system of Europeans. Following Kingfisher’s death, for example, Nanye’hi married Bryant Ward, an Irish trader, and became known as Nancy Ward. The couple had one child, a daughter named Elizabeth. Like all Cherokee children, Elizabeth belonged to her mother’s clan, and when Bryant Ward left the Cherokee Nation, she stayed with her mother. Even if Ward had been a Cherokee with a clan of his own, he would have had no claim on Elizabeth because Cherokee children belonged to their mother’s clan, not their father’s, and not both. Cherokees, like other matrilineal societies, trace clan affiliation through women, and children of both sexes belong to only the clan of their mothers. Of course, children knew their father, but they lived with their mother in their mother’s house and regarded only her relatives as kin.

This kinship system gave Nancy Ward and other War Women an important role in determining the fate of prisoners of war. The Cherokees usually adopted young captives or held them for ransom, but they sometimes tortured and/or executed adults. Women often played a role in determining the captives’ fate. An account from the American Revolution reveals that in 1776 Nancy Ward rescued a white woman, Mrs. William Bean, who had illegally squatted with her husband on Cherokee land. The Cherokees attacked their homestead, killed William, and captured his wife. The warriors took her to the town of Toquo and bound her to a stake. Ward arrived as they were about to light the tinder at Mrs. Bean’s feet and demanded her release. The warriors complied. Ward took Mrs. Bean to her house, where the white woman stayed until hostilities ended. Usually, however, War Women acquiesced to torture. When Ward rescued Mrs. Bean, for example, she left a boy tied to the stake, where he perished.

Cherokees sided with the British in the American Revolution and suffered both invasion and land loss. At the postwar treaty negotiations between the Americans and Cherokees, Nancy Ward spoke publicly. Revealing a familiarity with Anglo-American attitudes toward women, she told the US treaty commissioners, “You know that women are always looked upon as nothing.” Then she transitioned to a Cherokee perspective that implied respect for women: “We are your mothers, you are our sons.” Linking politics and family, she continued: “Our cry is all for peace . . . Let your women’s sons be ours, our sons be yours.”[2] The Beloved Woman was offering kinship, an honor none of the Americans present understood. Instead, the new nation soon sent agents to “civilize” the Cherokees, a process that required men to become peaceful farmers and women subordinate helpmates.

Without war, there would be no War Women who exercised some political authority, and without primary responsibility for home, hearth, and harvest, the economic importance of women threatened to wane. But as long as Cherokees held to matrilineal kinship, common land ownership, and spiritual ties to the land, women retained a public voice. In 1817, the United States pressed the Cherokees to cede a large tract of land and move west of the Mississippi. Nancy Ward was too old to attend the conference, but she and twelve other women sent a message to the Cherokee Council: “We have raised all of you on the land which we now have . . . We do not wish to go to an unknown country . . . Your mother and sisters ask and beg of you not to part with any more of our lands.”[3] The Cherokee government ended up ceding some of their land, but not all that the United States wanted. Furthermore, the Cherokee Council rejected individual ownership of land, which would have permitted owners to sell their plots to whites, and reaffirmed the tradition of common landholding. Council members gave notice that they would cede no more land. The Cherokee Nation maintained its position so firmly that the United States had to turn to an unauthorized faction of Cherokee politicians to obtain the 1835 cession of the Nation’s land in the West. This betrayal forced the Cherokees west on the Trail of Tears to what is today Oklahoma.

Nancy Ward died in 1822, leaving behind a nation in which women’s public political power rapidly deteriorated as missionaries and federal agents pressed them to become “civilized.” In 1827, the Cherokee Council adopted a constitution based on that of the United States that limited the vote and public office to “free male citizens.”[4] But Cherokee women did not become invisible. In 1838, one-third of the heads of household listed on the roll prepared for the Trail of Tears were women’s names. In 1851, scarcely a decade after the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee Nation opened the Cherokee Women’s Seminary modeled on New England women’s colleges. When the Civil War erupted and Cherokees divided their allegiance, women took their families to safety in Texas or Kansas while Cherokee men joined opposing armies. After the war, Cherokee women became involved in reform efforts, especially the national temperance movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And women have served on the tribal councils of all three modern Cherokee tribes (Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band, and Eastern Band of Cherokees) and as chiefs of two of them. Cherokee culture changed, but the past—and Nancy Ward—remain an important touchstone for Cherokee women.