This person could use some love. Onai-1 is full-blood Cherokee

Question

There's no information on her name of Onai.  Her Find A Grave page has Ani'-Tsi'skwa "Bird Clan" Conrad.  I found a marriage source and little else.

Answer 1

Next to nothing is known about this woman, other than her name, her husband, and possibly her children.  She appears in Emmett Starr’s “History of the Cherokee Indians”  (p. 426 in the Oklahoma Yesterday Publications 1993 edition).   The Moravian Diaries, information that Starr did not have access to, strongly suggest that Starr missed a generation, and that the children named were the grandchildren of “Onai” not her children.  The Moravians speak of a half-German Cherokee named Gunrod [assumed by them to be a corruption of Conrad], son of a well-to-do Indian trader who was killed by Indians in a war when Gunrod was three or four.  In a March 1810 entry they record that Gunrod had four sons, one of whom was named Youngwolf.  (Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees, Crews and Starbuck, eds. Cherokee National Press 2011, Vol. 4,pp. 1375-76). There is no mention of any women’s names in this entry.   This entry would suggest that Gunrod may have been born between 1775-1780, his mother in the 1760’s.  Early (pre-1800) Cherokee geneaology is next to impossible to document.  The Moravians arrived about 1800.  Starr was collecting memories in the 1890’s.

Answer 2

The source for this person and marriage seems to be Emmet Starr's History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore. I am not qualified to judge the veracity of this book. Indian lineages are so often faked, and the supposed Indian ancestor is always a woman and almost always a Cherokee.

Comments

So right!  This woman is not a ‘fake’ although Starr may have erred.  Starr was the earliest person to attempt to record Cherokee genealogies.  He didn’t have access to many Eastern records, so yes, his book has some errors i  the early generations.  Errors notwithstanding, he is the only source for much of this information.  I would not place any reliance on a Find-a-grave entry for any Cherokee person who died before before 1850.  The Cherokee did not have cemeteries before Removal.