Read the excerpt from "Rebuilding the Cherokee Nation.”What’s interesting, I think, and what gives me hope and keeps me optimistic about our people, however, is to look and see how our people dealt with that after removal. After removal, we ended up in Indian Territory. Everything we’d ever known had been left behind, that which bound us as a people: the cultural system, the social system, and the political system, everything we’d ever known had been left behind. Many people were dead, families were bitterly divided over the issue of removal itself, and yet almost immediately after removal, our people began to try to come together and build a community and rebuild a tribe.Courtesy of the Wilma Mankiller Trust