The Cherokee people inhabited parts of what is today Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee of the United States. Cherokee are traditionally a woodland folk, building permanent or semi-permanent villages along streams and rivers in the mountainous country of the southern Appalachian Mountains.
These “Principal People” (as the Cherokee call themselves) migrated south from the Great Lakes 1,000–2,000 years ago to settle in the Appalachian Mountains.
Among the Cherokee, women traditionally hold a great deal of power, both politically and spiritually. Many women are holy women, or medicine women. The medicine woman is part healer, part advisor, and part spiritualist.