You might picture teepees and buffalo hunts. Wrong picture! The Cherokee are from the Southeast, not the Plains. Their original homeland is what we now call Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama.
That’s right—think mountains, not flat prairies. They built villages, farmed corn, and had a written language before most European settlers could spell their own names. Cherokee is a Iroquoian language, totally different from the languages around it. Weird, right?