Religion According to Chief Jahtlohi Rogers
A PEOPLE IN EXODUS
By Chief Charles Jahtlohi Rogers, M.D.
Cherokee Nation of Mexico
INTRODUCTION
I WILL TELL YOU A TRUE THING!
Since 1 B.C., there has not been a Christian who
does not tell of “Jesus” by using that very same name. Since 500 A.D.,
there has not been a Muslim who does not tell of Mohammed by using that
very same name. In 1750, the Cherokees knew Jesus and God by five
commonly accepted Old Testament names, yet knew nothing of the New
Testament name “Jesus”. Where and how did the Cherokees obtain such
ancient knowledge? When asked, upon first contact with Europeans, they
replied “directly from God”.
Go Hee Dah
(A Long Time Ago)
“We Cherokee knew long before the Good Apostle John
that what ever is true is from Unayklanahi, the one creator of all
things, God.” “You need not bow to other human permission to believe in
anything you believe to be true; as a Cherokee it is your responsibility
to do so without fear, for this is the most traditional way of the
Cherokee.”
The one God of the Cherokee was not the vengeful god
of a small tribe of war loving people. The one God in whom the Cherokee
believe is benevolent and has no specific chosen people. Of all living
things, only people have been chosen by God, in that they were created
with the ability to choose their path. The path to God is by using their
heart, soul, and mind for that which is good to be a “good” or “godly”
person a “principled” person, whom the Cherokee called “A ni yun wi
yah”. To strive to become A ni yun wi yah is to acknowledge the desire
by a Cherokee to become a principled person, but they must first choose
God’s white path of peace, which is what the ancient Cherokees sought.
They saw themselves as children of God. Blessed are the peacemakers for
they shall be called the children of God. Cherokees spoke the Old
Testament names for Jesus thousands of years before he appeared two
thousand years ago. However, this early knowledge does not give
privilege, only the responsibility which all of the Creator’s human
creations have and share, which is to move toward God and goodness in
thought and action. Of course, some individuals, groups or nations may
choose the opposite. All histories, written and oral, of all peoples
show the drastic cost of human actions based on divine right, skin
coloration, religious differences, and the belief that you are chosen
and thus released from responsibility of being civilized which is to
treat others as you want to be treated, or in the words of the New
Testament, to love thy neighbor as thyself.
(Photo - Right)
The great Cherokee educator and social activist Sequoyah urged Cherokees
to come & live in freedom and dignity in Coahuila.
Approximately 3500 to 4000 years ago, Cherokee
legend says that they were visited by a spiritual being who taught these
principle people how to live in peace with animals and humans, and how
to have the proper respect for nature. The legend has caused many
Cherokee and other people to believe that it was Christ, or a
manifestation of someone like him, who chose to appear, giving
instructions and prophecies to the Cherokee people. Is this possible? If
we compare it to the similarity of the accounts of God appearing or
making Himself known unto men in the Old Testament Christian Bible, then
we can only agree that the legend of the Cherokee people is possibly
accurate and true. Because this instruction is widely believed to have
already occurred once in human history, another appearance to other
humans is less difficult to understand and believe, as there is
supporting evidence of tribal stories exactly like the Old Testament
Bible within several Semitic tribes, and globally in many indigenous
tribes.
Remember that all things true are not contained
within the Bible, which is not to say that what is in the Bible is not
true. A map of the United States is not in the Bible; it is not relevant
to the core message of the Bible. The historical Bible’s setting only
allows the reader to better understand the intended message. Thus, when
the ancient Cherokee sang, spoke, and chanted, as was heard and
documented by several Europeans as late as 1755, the names “Shiloh”,
“Head of All Things”, “Ye ho wah”, “the Sun of Righteousness”, and “the
Morning Star”, they were using names or titles which were both Old
Testament and Cherokee religious words or phrases for God. These
Cherokee words are considered by most modern Bible scholars as also
being Old Testament names used for Jesus before his coming and in that
time before the New Testament said that the Angel first said his name,
“Jesus Christ”, to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Cherokee, God was
called “U nay klah nah hey”, the “Creator of All Things”; the other five
names were also used to describe God or the spiritual person the
Cherokees believed that he sent to earth to instruct them.
The ancient Cherokees also knew what a swine was
before the Europeans imported such, and had a prohibition against eating
swine and many other foods considered unclean. Cherokees would keep one
day without work for prayer. Cherokee would marry only outside of their
clan. A Cherokee woman could divorce her husband without physical
violence to her. Other tribes cut off her ears, or burnt her. Cherokees
apparently had New Testament compassion. When a man died, his wife could
be taken as a second wife, after the passage of time, by a surviving
brother of the deceased husband, which was exactly the process
documented by several different Semitic tribes in the Old Testament.
Also occurring approximately 3500 to 4000 years ago,
the Cherokee language separated from the Iroquois language group and
stayed separated, because the vast majority of Cherokee words changed
radically with the addition of new words, logically because of
integration with some other peoples and their language. This explains
why other indigenous groups, for example in the Iroquois family of
languages, do not have the same belief system which includes Old
Testament words and concepts in their ancient religious practices (from
1750 and before).
(Photo - Left)
Cherokee Medicine Man Swimmer. A noble Cherokee.
All people bring language, culture, and religious
beliefs with them Where did the Cherokee obtain these early Old
Testament names for Jesus, but, most importantly, not use or know the
actual New Testament name of “Jesus”? There is no Christian missionary
of My Christian church known that did not or does not teach the name of
Jesus Christ, yet the Cherokee used five other commonly accepted Old
Testament names for Jesus. Some Muslim groups have recently claimed
early contact with North American Native people, but what Muslim does
not speak of Mohammed? Christians talk about Jesus, Muslims about
Mohammed it is the mandatory core of their belief. Thus, logic and
common sense would dictate these choices: that the Cherokee received
into it’s tribe a people who brought these Old Testament words and
concepts with them from outside the Americas, that the Cherokee received
such instruction and knowledge directly from U nay klah nah hey, the
creator of all things, or that they were received from Jesus (even
though they did not use his New Testament name) who brought these names
and instruction from God to the Cherokee. The written historical records
of the ancient Cherokees claim that all three of the above scenarios are
exactly what occurred.
Also consider that the oldest Cherokee migration
story reflects that “they traveled over land a great distance, came
to the ocean. built rafts, and crossed. They landed and then went west,
north, and south.” Please note that a Pacific crossing, upon
arriving in the Western Americas, cannot go west, only east, north, and
south. Logic, geography, and oral traditional support the opposite: an
“Atlantic crossing” of some tribe of people who may have considered
themselves a principle people, who knew the One God that was benevolent
and taught forgiveness, and who were against human or live animal
sacrifices or, cannibalism, as was reflected in actual ancient Cherokee
law. Different physical traits existed and were documented within the
Cherokee-variations in eye and skin colors, straight and curly hair,
facial hair among the men which make them somewhat generally different
from most other Native American groups. In 1541, Commandante Alva, under
Hernan DeSoto, the first historically documented (but not the actual
first) Europeans to see the Cherokee, wrote that many of the Cherokee
were as fair skinned and blond as the Spanish soldiers under him. Of
course, in North America, the majority were a very handsome reddish
bronze cast. Only the Cherokees, Mayans and Incans had a word for the
number one thousand; no other Native American groups had this concept.
“One thousand” in Cherokee was called “the ancient ones’ one hundred”,
meaning that their ancestors had at one time higher mathematic
capabilities than the Cherokee of the mid 1700’s when this ancient
Cherokee phrase was historically documented. Other differences included
the practice ritual of daily bathing going to water regardless of the
weather not unlike the Essenes, who also religiously bathed. The
Cherokee also had an Ark, a chest containing sacred items, and they
built mounds with temples atop. The Cherokees are the only intact
surviving Native American group to have been documented as living on a
moun at the headwaters of the Ohio River. This is seen by the writings
of the Walum Ollum, which is a history of the Delaware people who fought
the Cherokee for this land for over a period of 160 years, ending in
approximately 700 A.D.
(Photo - Right)
Chief Rogers’ great grandmother, Mary Price, who taught her sons
Cherokee ways & incantations for health problems.
Unlike most of the mound builders, who practiced
ritualistic cannibalism, the Cherokee had strict laws concerning such,
in that they would put to death (before the sun that day went down)
anyone caught practicing it, inside or outside the tribe. The Cherokee
word for cannibal in English is “raven mocker”; you will find this in
the oldest Cherokee stories, however the above is an ancient law and the
old stories are the vehicles for remembrance of the law.
When a Cherokee is asked, even in this present time,
whether part blood or full blood, if they strictly consider themselves
subjectively a Native American and/or something else, a great many of
these Cherokees will reply that being Cherokee is being “something
else”, or Native American plus something else. Ancient Cherokees didn’t
know Jesus by that name, but they said in 1750 that they knew God was to
appear on earth as a man and they called this person by five different
Old Testament names for Jesus. Also consider that the Cherokees had
three actual cities of refuge, they had the stories of the flood, and
many other Old Testament stories, and that they also had the
prohibitions found within the Ten Commandments. These ancient Cherokee
religious words and teachings, as practiced and followed by the ancient
Cherokee, were apparently from a time period of between 500 B.C., when
the Jewish tribes (one of several Semitic language groups) first
obtained the ability to read and write in Aramaic and started writing
down what we call the Old Testament, and 4000 B.C., where the story of
Noah (which was known by all of these Semitic language tribes, both
Jewish and non Jewish) first appeared in Semitic (non Jewish) writings,
the Gilgamesh scrolls. The second oldest known writing of the story of
Noah and the flood is in India. Clearly, these early stories are the
actual and physical property of mankind, not any specific people, from
the beginning of history, which was oral tradition before writing came
into being.
The Cherokee language is, in structure, like the
Iroquois language; however, almost all of the words are different. Osivo
in Cherokee means hello; Casiho in Sanskrit (the oldest mother language
of all European, East Indian, Arabic, and Semitic languages) means hello
also. In prehistoric times, there were Africans in Central America and
southern called the Olmecs who apparently traveled from Africa to
Central America. Whether they were lost or simply superb seafarers is
not known, but they did have what appears to be a magnetic compass with
them, predating the Egyptians by 2700 years. If one group of people can
make that journey, why not another? And if another people did so, would
they not, due to favorable ocean currents being absolutely necessary for
such a journey, be from an area which could be the Mediterranean coast,
the Canary Islands, Egypt, or the Middle East, which are close to these
black Africans who colonized Central America and southern Mexico?
Remember that these are the areas north of Africa where tribal stories
say that God is said to have spoken to man, as is believed by
Christians, Jews and Muslims. These are the exact same religious stories
which are in the first four books of the Old Testament that are, as of
today, read and believed by Muslims, Jews, and Christians, almost a
billion people.
In the writings, journals and reports of various
renowned missionaries to the Cherokee people we learn the Cherokees had
religious beliefs that were much more compassionate than the ways of
many white men that had come over to the Cherokee country from Europe.
Their religious festivals, although different from the ways of the world
outside the Cherokee Nation, reflected their love for one another and
devotion to the one Author of creation, God.
The Cherokee people, by any standard or measure of
civilized values, were not uncivilized savages as portrayed by popular
media and even some missionaries who had labored under denomination
blindness. The Cherokees occupied a large percentage of this great land
of America. America was as much their land as the Promised Land was to
the Semitic tribes or earlier peoples as recorded in the Bible. Like all
good tribes, the Cherokee people fought with a vengeance to keep their
property, whether land or culture, with both the Europeans and long
before them with other Native American tribes when they and their
religions encroached. Eventually the Cherokee people became once again
A People In Exodus; the Trail of Tears from the Eastern U.S. to
Indian Territory was exodus number six in Cherokee history. The first
exodus was the migration myth; the second exodus was from an island in
the south going to the north; the third exodus was from a Cherokee city
mound at the headwaters of the Ohio; the fourth was from the Atlantic
seaboard south to Georgia and North Carolina; the fifth was when twenty
five percent of the tribe left for Mexico in 1720; the sixth was the
Trail of Tears (1839) to Indian Territory; the seventh exodus will be
(as Sequoyah prophesied) when all Cherokees come back together and form
Kituwah, which was told to me by a Cherokee holy man from Tahlequah,
Oklahoma who is now in heaven. “Kituwah” is an old sacred pronunciation
of the number fourteen, which mans the seventh heaven of the seventh
heaven, a cross between Eden and Shangrila, a place of peace and
harmony. The ways of other Native Americans and the white man would over
the course of time transform their culture and cause them to almost lose
the fragments of their noble ancient beliefs. At this writing the
Cherokee people are just starting to move back together.
The Ancient Religious Beliefs of the Cherokee People
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