Before It Was Georgia

This segment shows ways in which today’s Cherokees are transmitting the remnants of their culture to the younger generation in an attempt to preserve what is left. Cherokee cultural traditions in food preparation, language, and songs and dances are shown.

Should the Cherokee maintain their own culture resisting that of the white man, or should they give up their ways and adopt those of white settlers? They tried to adapt to white society with the ultimate result being their virtual disappearance from Georgia. Cherokee John Standingdeer recounts the legend.

Cherokee John Standingdeer describes how his family was named and why knowing it mattered to him. He explains how Native Americans were self sufficient and lived off the land prior to the arrival of Europeans and how a growing dependency on the white man’s steel tools and weapons led to Indians adopting the white man’s ways, eroding their culture further.

Archaeologist John Worth of the Fernbank Museum of Natural History takes us on a dig at Raccoon Ridge near Madison, in Morgan County. He explains how the shapes, designs, and the composition of artifacts can be interpreted to tell the story of native cultures.

Hernando de Soto and his men, already rich from fighting with the Incas in South America, arrived in La Florida searching for gold. Jerald Milanich, an archaeologist at the University of Florida, explains the conquistadors’ success.

Diamond Brown, a Cherokee dancer, describes how corn is the foodstuff responsible for prehistoric Native Americans flourishing in Georgia. Through interviews, reenactments, and visits to significant Native American sites in Georgia, the story of the changing culture of Indians from their arrival and existence as wandering hunters to the development of the mound building culture unfolds.

Primitive cultures living in Georgia thousands of years ago made everything they needed. Today it is important to the surviving native cultures to continue practicing the skills and sharing the traditions that ensured survival. A Cherokee carver, and a storyteller and musician describe ceremonial mask, weapons, tools, and the language of Georgia's Native Americans.

Native Americans used stories, many still told today, to explain the unknowable and to help them understand the world. Because they believed that everything in nature had life, even rocks, clouds, and thunder, many Indian stories or myths personify objects in their explanations of events.

Cherokee stone carver Freeman Owle, Cherokee potter Amanda Swimmer, and Driver Pheasant, a storyteller, explain how prehistoric cultures taught their art and stories to the next generation, passing down cultural traditions so they will survive in the absence of written language.