The Cherokees made their own dye. They made the dye from weeds and barks of trees. It seems that the yellow, brown and red was their chief colors.

Copperas was mixed with soap and made yellow dye. Yellow Prairie Weed bloom mixed with Alum made brown dye. They used this dye to dye home-spun cloth. Yarn was also sometimes dyed.

[Info provided by the Cherokee Nation Cultural Resource Center, excerpts taken from the Indian Pioneer Papers. Please contact cultural@cherokee.org for any questions. The Indian Pioneer Papers are the product of a project developed in 1936. The Oklahoma Historical Society teamed with the history department at the University of Oklahoma to get a Works Progress Administration (WPA) writers' project grant for an interview program. The program was headquartered in Muskogee and was led by Grant Foreman. The writers conducted more than 11,000 interviews and after editing and typing the work, the results were over 45,000 pages long.]

*Note: Cultural information may vary from clan to clan, location to location, family to family, and from differing opinions and experiences. Information provided here are not 'etched in stone'.