The public television series "We Shall Remain" continues nationally tonight. You can catch it on OETA here in the Promised Land or on public television affiliates in your state if you aren't fortunate enough to reside in Oklahoma.
The series airs on successive Monday nights. Tonight's episode "The Trail of Tears" stars Wes Studi, an Oklahoma Cherokee and the most famous American Indian actor working today. Tonight's episode was shot almost entirely on location in Georgia and Oklahoma.
Studi and Oosahwee
Wes Studi. Born in Norfire Hollow, Oklahoma, Wes Studi spoke only his native Cherokee language until the age of five. Early in his career, Studi submitted two short stories for a Cherokee Nation newsletter and at the request of his program director, expanded upon those stories and wrote the children’s books, The Adventures of Billy Bean and More Adventures of Billy Bean. Studi went on to pursue acting and first caught the attention of the public in Dances with Wolves, and then as "Magua" in The Last of the Mohicans. Studi has since appeared in more than fifty film and television productionshttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/wsr/Harry Oosahwee (Cherokee), Language Consultant
Harry Oosahwee was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and his first language is Cherokee. Married with four children, Oosahwee is a graduate of Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Northeastern State University in Tahlequah. Currently, he is the student coordinator and Cherokee language instructor for the Cherokee Language Education Program at NSU. He is also an accomplished artist in pottery, painting and stone carving and was recently interviewed for the book, Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle over Early Education. In 2008, Oosahwee was a recipient of the Principal Chief’s Leadership Award presented by the Cherokee Nation.
On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving them toward Indian Territory in Eastern Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died of disease and starvation along the way.
For years the Cherokee had resisted removal from their land in every way they knew. Convinced that white America rejected Native Americans because they were “savages,” Cherokee leaders established a republic with a European-style legislature and legal system. Many Cherokee became Christian and adopted westernized education for their children. Their visionary principal chief, John Ross, would even take the Cherokee case to the Supreme Court, where he won a crucial recognition of tribal sovereignty that still resonates.
Though in the end the Cherokee embrace of “civilization” and their landmark legal victory proved no match for white land hunger and military power, the Cherokee people were able, with characteristic ingenuity, to build a new life in Oklahoma, far from the land that had sustained them for generations.
