One of the last migratory American Indian tribes, the Tihanama people of Tennessee ranged from the Great Lakes to the Florida Panhandle. Other Southeastern peoples called them the Big Medicine tribe. They were known for their legends, antiquity, trail markings, knowledge of herbs, funeral ceremonies, songs, paints and dyes. This collection by Donald Panther-Yates is as unique as its subject-there is no other like it. The Eighth Arrow story will completely alter your understanding of Native American spirituality. It may change your life.

Phase III of DNA Consultants' Cherokee DNA Studies adds more than fifty new participants to what has become a classic project. They'd all been told there was no way they could be Indian given their DNA haplotype or mother's direct line. This book underlines the unavoidable conclusion that most "Indian" lineages in Eastern North America originally came across the Atlantic Ocean, not over any land-bridge from Asia. Update your priors with this sweeping attack on "big box" companies and know-it-all experts. Includes historical Cherokee photographs, genealogies, graphs, charts, references, index and raw data.

Most claims of Native American ancestry rest on the mother's ethnicity. This can be verified by a DNA test determining what type of mitochondrial DNA she passed to you. A hundred participants in DNA Consultants multi-phase Cherokee DNA Study did just that. What they had in common is they were previously rejected--by commercial firms, genealogy groups, government agencies and tribes. Their mitochondrial DNA was not classified as Native American. These are the "anomalous" Cherokee. Share the journeys of discovery and self-awareness of these passionate volunteers who defied the experts and are helping write a new chapter in the Peopling of the Americas. "The Yateses' DNA findings are revolutionary." --Stephen C. Jett, Atlantic Ocean Crossings. "Monumental."--Richard L. Thornton, Apalache Foundation.

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Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U. S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains. Using a combination of DNA analysis, historical research, and classical philology, it uncovers the Jewish and Eastern Mediterranean ancestry of the Cherokee and reveals that they originally spoke Greek before adopting the Iroquoian language of their Haudenosaunee allies while the two nations dwelt together in the Ohio Valley.

Record of interviews with Paul Russell, also known as Chief Two White Feathers of the Tihanama, a Middle Tennessee spiritual practitioner, from 1996.“Paul Russell (Two White Feathers) is a spiritual healer, herbalist, principal chief, storyteller and teacher, ceremony chief, conjurer, traditional grass and straight dancer, keeper of seer traditions, amateur astronomer and geophysicist, painter, leather worker, jeweler, mechanical engineer, computer programmer, third-level Midéwiwin Lodge priest, flue and drum maker, songwriter, singer, composer, recording artist, stone carver, potter, mask and mandela maker, knife maker and gunsmith, bow and arrow maker and woodworker/carpenter.” —American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia, ed. Suzanne J. Crawford and Dennis Francis Kelley (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), vol. III, p. 1043.

From unlikely places like Scotland and the Appalachian Mountains to the Bible and archives of the Spanish Inquisition, this valuable resource published in 2018 is the first to cover the naming practices of Conversos, Marranos and secret Jews along with more familiar Central and Eastern European Jewries. It includes Joseph Jacobs’ classic work on Jewish Names, a chapter on Scottish clans and septs, thousands of Sephardic and Ashkenazic surnames from early colonial records and Rabbi Malcolm Stern’s 445 Early American Jewish Families. Appendix A contains 400 surnames from the Greater London cemetery Adath Yisroel. Appendix B provides a combined name index to the indispensable When Scotland Was Jewish, Jews and Muslims in British Colonial America and The Early Jews and Muslims of England and Wales, all by Elizabeth Caldwell Hirschman and Donald N. Yates. It contains 276 pages and has an extensive index and bibliography. “Up-to-date and valuable research tool for genealogists and those interested in Jewish origins.” —Eran Elhaik, Assistant Professor, The University of Sheffield

Americans have learned in elementary school that their country was founded by a group of brave, white, largely British Christians. Modern reinterpretations recognize the contributions of African and indigenous Americans, but the basic premise has persisted. This groundbreaking study fundamentally challenges the traditional national storyline by postulating that many of the initial colonists were actually of Sephardic Jewish and Muslim Moorish ancestry. Supporting references include historical writings, ship manifests, wills, land grants, DNA test results, genealogies, and settler lists that provide for the first time the Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Jewish origins of more than 5,000 surnames, the majority widely assumed to be British. By documenting the widespread presence of Jews and Muslims in prominent economic, political, financial and social positions in all of the original colonies, this innovative work offers a fresh perspective on the early American experience.

In the world of Native Americans, oral communication takes the place of the written word in preserving their most valued “texts.” By a miracle of transmission, here is the earliest and most authenticated version of the story of the Cherokee people, from their origins in a land across the great waters to the coming of the white man. In olden times, it was recited at every Great Moon or Cherokee New Year festival so it could be learned by young people and the tribal lore perpetuated. It was set down in English in an Indian Territory newspaper by Cornsilk (the pen-name of William Eubanks) from the Cherokee language recitation of George Sahkiyah (Soggy) Sanders, a fellow Keetoowah Society priest, in 1896. We do not have anything anterior or more authoritative than Eubanks and Sanders’ “Red Man’s Origin," presented here as The Cherokee Origin Narrative. Mystic and plain-spoken at the same time, it tells how the clans became seven in number, reorganized their religion in America and struggled to maintain their “half-sphere temple of light.” You will hear in Cornsilk’s original words about the true name of the Cherokee people, the deathless Uktena serpent, divining crystals of the Urim and Thummin, “terrible Sa-ho-ni clan” and other Cherokee storytelling subjects. The brief narrative is edited with an introduction, notes and line drawings by Donald N. Yates, author of Old World Roots of the Cherokee and other titles in Cherokee history. If you own one book about the Cherokee Indians it should be this one.

The Tucson Artifacts document the annals of a forgotten Roman-styled military governorship in Chichimec Toltec Northwest Mexico. Perfectly preserved, complete and unaltered, they are straightforwardly composed in Latin, the official language of records during the Middle Ages. They do not have to be reconstructed, pieced together, deciphered or dated. This illuminating collection of readings translated from Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, Nahuatl, Hebrew and other languages by medievalist Donald N. Yates provides the cultural contexts for understanding these unique witnesses to world history. The finds come from the 1920s and consist of lost-wax, cast-lead ceremonial objects inscribed with medieval Latin historical texts and memorials of leaders with names such as Jacob, Israel, Benjamin, Joseph, Saul, Isaac and Theodore. Some also contain Hebrew phrases like “eight divisions” and “a great nation,” while others display commemorated leaders’ portraits, ships, trademarks in Tang-era seal script, temples, a Mesoamerican glyph, sacrificial fire, an anchor, Romanesque-style angels in glory and other drawings. Their iconography includes the Ten Commandments and cult objects like spice spoons, carpenter’s square, Frankish axes, snakes and trumpets. There are also military anthems and mottos. A series of thick one-sided double crosses, joined like sealed albums present what are clearly records signed by OL (Oliver), with dates ranging from 560 to 900 A.D. The overarching provenance is declared by the makers of the artifacts themselves to be Roman (Romani, monogram R), a term tantamount at this time to European. This claim to nationality is further divided into Levites (L) and Israelites (I). One of the stand-out emblems depicted is a triple tiara, a symbol of Jewish priesthood associated with the Mesoamerican figure of Quetzalcoatl.