05/23/2025
Midnight Ninja: There Were No Cherokee Tribes...
There are no official documents or records, except that of the white man who came later and based his accounts upon his interpretations and preconceived ideas.
There are no artifacts that can be definitively attributed to the Cherokee specifically and there is no way to prove that a group known as the Cherokee did anything in a distinctly unique way or even if they existed at all, only oral traditions, legends and folklore.
There are of course people we called Cherokee, but we defined them according to our understanding and honestly they could have been any number of unrelated indigenous people who self identified based upon nothing more than common territory and common beliefs, certainly nothing that would qualify as a ryuha.
So with such scant evidence for the existence of various tribes in America, that we accept based almost solely on the accounts of people who barely understood them, why are some so quick to reject the existence of a group that was even harder to understand and document?
Certainly various 20th century ideas of ninja and ninjutsu have little or no historical validity, and the more we learn the more we accept that many modern conventions and assumptions may have to be discarded in whole or in part, and we may have to accept that we may never be able to form a complete and accurate picture of secretive groups who lived detached from society and engaged in various acts of espionage in a clandestine manner.
But just was one cannot disprove a negative, lack of evidence is not evidence that something doesn't or didn't exist. We just need to be honest about what we know, don't know and what we think is most likely.
