Chapter 3
HE CHEROKEE PRIEST WAS WORRIED. Smoke rising from the embers in his clay dish indicated the presence of a witch. He cried to the midwives who were attending the mother, and they hurriedly carried her outside the bark-roofed, mud-plastered house, where her husband, her mother, and her mother’s family waited. Chanting to the fire that had been built in the yard, the adonisgi, his skin stained with gun powder, his head plucked of hair except for a small patch at the back adorned with beads and feathers, pled to the spirits for guidance. He then raked more coals into the small oval dish. From a leather pouch he took a pinch of tsolagali and sprinkled it over the coals. The smoke from the tobacco wafted away from the cabin, towards the woods, westerly to the river.
The mother’s labor intensified. A woman fainted and the Indian midwives rushed in. The priest cried out the warning words that would fend off the evil spirits and protect the newborn baby.
It was a girl. A first born to the British agent and his Tsalagi wife. Born in the eastern foothills of the great mountain chain called Unaka in a town still unnamed, she was christened Anna in honor of her father’s mother; but the Cherokee would call her Otali Egwoni or Mountain River.
A week later there was time for celebration, when the Native Americans and the new family would gather and celebrate the arrival of the new born - an AniWadi princess, granddaughter to Proud Eagle, chief of the Paint clan, and niece to Oconostota, a war chief of the Nation.
While mixed marriages between European traders and explorers and the Indians weren’t uncommon, their relationships had been strained as more and more settlers occupied the native’s lands. Peace treaties, land deals, and trade agreements between the English, and the Cherokee people had been forged and broken many, many times, with both sides losing loved ones, livestock, and their homes in the battles, skirmishes and raids that followed.
But the agent’s settlement on the east side of the Pigeon (Wayi) River had peacefully co-existed with the small clan of Cherokees that lived on the west bank for several years, each naively ignorant of their representatives’ promises and proclamations.Connected only in time, born on this October Sunday in the year of our Lord 1759, across an ocean away in Ulster Ireland, was a boy christened Jakiel MacGwyre. His father was a tenant farmer with Scot ancestry, his mother was a native Irish Celt. Farming was his pre-destiny, like his father, and father’s father before him.
His ancestry had farmed the tree barren piedmonts of Ayrshire county and had emigrated across the strait from lowland Scotland to northern Ireland in search of fertile lands to farm and to escape the trespasses of the feudal lairds. The Stuart King of England, James I, had encouraged settlements by protestant Scots in Ulster as an experiment to tame the "wild" Irish who tormented the English settlers outside the British pale. Some had moved on to greener pastures in America, but others found Ireland to their liking and settled.
With many poor and simple Scots putting aside their inbred segregationist attitudes towards the “mere” Irish, some were enchanted by the charms of Irish lassies and took them as their wives.
Centuries before many English loyalists had migrated to Ireland after its conquest by the Norman King Henry II. But the independent Irish had succeeded for the most part in repelling the British noblesse and converted to their customs most of the imported settlers.
Jakiel was born in Ireland to Irish parents, but was raised as a Presbyterian according to his father's family's political and religious traditions. However he developed his independence towards religious doctrines per se from the stories, related by his Catholic mother, whose family's Celtic spirituality was converted to Catholic by the Jesuits, of religious persecution suffered by the Irish at the hands of English noblemen and their anti-popery.
Jakiel loved his Irish mother, and rejected the ideology of the times that cast the island’s aborigine as savages and heathens. His family was poor, but prideful that their heritage were survivors of the many inequities instituted by the aristocracy in mother England, here and in Scotland.
Restrictive trade practices, drought, taxes and oppressive rents had caused a great exodus from Northern Ireland in the late 1720's. Famine in 1740 sent many more Ulsters to the new world. By the year Jakiel was born, the English Parliament was worried that their Ulster experiment would fail due to the great exodus of thrifty and industrious men and women to America.
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