Eastern Cherokee Research Articles

Sitting on the Watcher’s Stage: Networks of Kinship and Sovereignty Among the Corn Rows

Abstract: In the decades following the Civil War, hundreds of Cherokees living East of the Mississippi River were compelled to emigrate west. Post-war poverty, loss of land, and political struggles threatened the survival of Eastern Cherokee communities. Having received an invitation from the Cherokee Nation to be accepted as tribal citizens, many turned away from their eastern homelands after avoiding Removal and outlasting decades of pressures to emigrate. Though the Trail of Tears of 1838–39 is generally understood as the history of Cherokee Removal, this study draws from scholarship on the Long Removal Era to problematize the typical narrative. This postwar emigration phenomenon was a definitive challenge which shaped the newfound Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Contrary to typical characterizations, their survival in the east was not a foregone conclusion, instead facing its gravest challenges in the Civil War era. A power vacuum resulted in divisive factionalism, with rival councils from Qualla and Cheoah competing for legitimacy. The emigration of leading Cheoah politicians signaled their defeat, galvanizing and consolidating the Eastern Band. This article offers a social history of this emigration process, investigating the phenomenon through memoirs and oral histories, tribal council minutes, and petitions and correspondence to Washington. Following the paper trail of emigrants, the study incorporates federal records alongside archival records from North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Interrogating the overlap of the Long Removal era and Long Civil War era, the study offers a new history of the Eastern Band in its harrowing formative years.

A Sun that Never Sets: Eastern Cherokee Tattoo Artist John Henry Gloyne and the Aesthetics of Reimagining

Abstract: This article examines a selection of work by contemporary tattoo artist John Henry Gloyne (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) to understand how tattooing functions as an Indigenous creative practice that can imagine alternative realities and reestablish connections to Native pasts and presents. Gloyne's work redefines contemporary Native tattooing by highlighting its continuing significance and artistic innovations in the present. In doing so, Gloyne's work challenges the settler notion that Native cultural practices are static and stuck in the past. The authors' analysis includes Gloyne's reinvention of Cherokee symbols (water spider and Booger mask tattoos), early/mid-twentieth-century Americana tattoo flash, and his tattoo-inspired painting Sacred Realms: Tobacco Offerings to the Picture Machine . Honma and Francoso employ an analytic of "reimagining" to investigate how Gloyne's work embraces an ethos of experimentation and innovation that moves beyond settler frameworks of comprehension. In order to understand how he challenges various modes of representation and ways of looking that normalize the settler project, they historicize the symbols and motifs found in Gloyne's work. They incorporate interdisciplinary methods of visual analysis, historical recontextualization, and interview data to center Gloyne's unique aesthetic approach, which foregrounds renewed ways of envisioning and embodying Indigenous worlds.

The Nikwasi Mound: Archaeology, Preservation, and Politics in the Eastern Cherokee Heartland

The Nikwasi Mound: Archaeology, Preservation, and Politics in the Eastern Cherokee Heartland

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Evan C. Rothera Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 228. Notes, index.) Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers have assembled a collection of essays that analyze North American state-making in the 1860s by employing a continental perspective "that seeks to look across and beyond the traditional nation-centered approach to this period" (1). As Towers helpfully explains, people typically associate sovereignty with government power and define it as "a right to decide and therefore to rule" (2). However, some scholars have cautioned against ascribing tidy definitions to the term. Moreover, many definitions of sovereignty have roots in the nineteenth century. Thus, this volume is as much about multifarious understandings of sovereignty as about how people contested and remade sovereignty and the relationships between nations and empires. Part I, "Making Nations," contains chapters by Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijongos y González, and Robert Bonner. Hahn analyzes the United States from the "inside out" and the "southside north" to illustrate "connections that have long been difficult to conceive" (32). Smith argues that ideas about racial and ethnic hierarchies played a critical role in the creation of the Canadian Confederation. Mexico and the United States experienced constitutional revolution, Mijongos y González observes, whereas Canada followed a path of constitutional gradualism, but despite the divergent paths, all three nations arrived at a similar endpoint. Bonner notes the importance of images to sovereignty and examines how mass-circulated images "distilled and shaped popular engagement with capital cities" (80). Part II, "Indigenous Polities," features chapters by Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante. Dinwoodie focuses on Eastern Cherokees and Bayou Lacombe Choctaws to reveal how Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southeast "fought to sustain a world of contested and [End Page 351] persistent sovereignties" (122). Hall analyzes treaty-making between the Blackfoot and U.S. and Canadian authorities. Blackfoot leaders attempted to make treaties that preserved their own sovereignty as they faced similar expansionist states on both sides of the border. Terrazas y Basante observes that Mexicans, U.S. settlers, and Indigenous people understood sovereignty, territory, and free transit in different ways and illustrates how Mexicans saw Indian raids as a threat to the nation's sovereignty. Part III, "The Complications of the Market," includes chapters by Christopher Clark, Benjamin H. Johnson, and Mary P. Ryan. Clark explores the relationship between ideas about the role of land and sovereignty and illustrates how farm populations shaped state power and market forces. Johnson focuses on Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to narrate national histories from border areas. Defeat in the Cortina War and the North-West Rebellion replaced "longstanding aspirations for autonomy and self-determination" among ethnic Mexicans and Métis with "violent incorporation into national communities" (215). Ryan concludes by analyzing San Francisco, California, to demonstrate how cities were key political players. Anyone interested in Texas and the Southwest will particularly enjoy Terrazas y Basante and Johnson's chapters. In many respects, Remaking North American Sovereignty is truly a transnational volume. The chapters began as conference papers at a conference held in Canada. The resulting volume features contributions by scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Mexico that focus on Mexico, the United States, and Canada. However, the definition of North America in this volume—encompassing the three aforementioned nations—is too narrow. Weaving the nations of the Caribbean and Central America into this volume would have allowed the contributors to say even more about sovereignty and nation-states. This point aside, the contributors illustrate the richness of their topics and provide models for other scholars interested in exploring sovereignty and nation-states in the nineteenth-century world. These lively essays will appeal to a general as much as a scholarly audience and many would make excellent additions to graduate seminars. Evan C. Rothera The University of Texas at Dallas Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers

Reviewed by: Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s ed. by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers Alice L. Baumgartner (bio) Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s. Edited by Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Pp. 288. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) The 1860s was a decade of constitutional crisis in North America. In 1861, eleven southern states seceded from the Union in defense of slavery. [End Page 429] As Union and Confederate soldiers fought the opening battles of the war, the French army invaded Mexico and installed an Austrian archduke as its emperor. In 1867, the same year that republican forces in Mexico executed the French-imposed emperor, Canadian provinces and territories entered into confederation, resulting in greater independence from Britain. By examining these constitutional crises in relation to one another, Remaking North American Sovereignty not only deepens our understanding of sovereignty and state formation in the 1860s, but also models several different methodological approaches to researching and writing transnational history. Remaking North American Sovereignty is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Making Nations,” examines how sovereignty was reshaped and redefined in the 1860s. Steven Hahn looks at the familiar history of the Civil War from the “inside out” and “the southside north” in order to interrogate our assumptions about the development of capitalism, the abolition of slavery, and the geography of the sectional crisis. Andrew Smith points out the hemispheric factors that helped to convince most Canadians to remain part of the British Empire: British military might promised to guard against threatened invasions from the United States at the same time that the U.S. Civil War and political instability in Latin America demonstrated the dangers of republicanism. Pablo Mijango y González takes up the question of why Mexico and the United States each experienced a “constitutional revolution,” while Canada underwent a more peaceful process of “constitutional gradualism.” Robert Bonner explores the visual vocabulary of sovereignty across North America in order to show how sovereignty was not only conceived but visualized in new ways in the 1860s. Part 2, “Indigenous Polities,” assesses how Native peoples shaped and responded to the constitutional crises in North America. Jane Dinwoodie asks how Native groups who had resisted removal responded to the Civil War, showing that some tribes, such as the Eastern Cherokee, fought for the Confederacy in order to secure their claim to their lands, while others, such as the Bayou Lacombe Choctaws, tried to protect their communities by retreating to remote, inaccessible terrain. Ryan Hall analyzes Blackfoot treaty-making to show both similarities and connections between state expansion in the United States and Canada. Marcela Terrazas y Basante studies how Indian raids shaped the construction of sovereignty at the national, state, and local levels in Mexico. Part 3, “The Complications of the Market,” looks at conceptions of sovereignty at a more granular level. Christopher Clark shows how the [End Page 430] expansion of freeholding, promoted by the distribution of homesteads and the allotment of tribal lands, extended and transformed national power in the United States. Benjamin H. Johnson compares Louis Riel and Juan Cortina to reexamine the consequences of greater national power in Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Mary P. Ryan takes up debates over landownership in the San Francisco Bay area to understand how different scales of authority—municipal, state, and federal—contest and, in the process, construct conceptions of sovereignty. These essays speak to one another in ways that enrich our understanding of state formation and transformation in the 1860s. One of the greatest ironies of Greater Reconstruction was, as Frank Towers writes in the introduction, “the simultaneous drive by President Abraham Lincoln to free slaves in the South and conquer indigenous states in the West” (8). The issue of sovereignty helps to resolve the apparent contradiction. As Steven Hahn explains, the constitutional crises of the nineteenth-century United States revolved around “the various challenges and obstacles to a national sovereignty, about competing sovereignties and their eventual defeats, whether they were slaveholding, Native American, Mormon, or some other” (25). Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in order to defeat the Confederate States of America. After...

Intermarriage, Selection and the Economic Assimilation of Native Americans: Evidence from Historical Panel Data

While intermarriage with non-indigenous people has been identified as a significant predictor of the economic assimilation of Native people, the explanation for this effect is less understood. In this paper, I examine whether the economic assimilation from marrying a Native person with white ancestry is driven by productivity advantages or by selection into intermarriage. The data come from panel data on farm households on the Eastern Cherokee Reservation from 1894 to 1906 linked to information on the racial ancestry of each household head contained in the Eastern Cherokee applications to the U.S. Court of Claims. I estimate an endogenous switching model and find evidence of positive selection into marriages with males with white ancestry. After accounting for selection, I find no evidence of an intermarriage premium. These findings are additionally supported by the results from sibling-fixed effects models.

Eastern Cherokee Creation and Subsistence Narratives: A Cherokee and Religious Interpretation

Eastern Cherokees' mythic and legendary worldview, as refracted through sacred myth narratives, forms a living tradition which grounds their identity. In particular, the central sacred stories of their world—the Creation Myth, Kanati the Hunter, Selu the Corn Goddess, and Stone Coat—embody spiritual meanings, purposes, and values which actually orient the Eastern Cherokee lifeway. These spiritual peoples' traditional religious experience and expressions cannot be reduced to economic, social, psychological, or political structures. This essay explores this Eastern Cherokee mythic epistemology. One author is a historian of religions and attorney for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; the other author is a linguist and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who reads, writes, and speaks the Cherokee language.

New South Indians: Tribal Economics and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the Twentieth Century by Christopher Arris Oakley

Reviewed by: New South Indians: Tribal Economics and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the Twentieth Century by Christopher Arris Oakley Tamara Levi New South Indians: Tribal Economics and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the Twentieth Century. By Christopher Arris Oakley. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 265. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-404-5.) In New South Indians: Tribal Economics and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in the Twentieth Century, Christopher Arris Oakley brings a tribal perspective to indigenous economic history in the twentieth century. Utilizing oral history interviews and private papers, as well as tribal, state, and federal documents, the author traces the role that the Cherokee Tribal Council played in economic development from the 1880s through the 1990s. Oakley ultimately seeks both to [End Page 716] add to the body of historical work on the Eastern Band in the twentieth century and to integrate that history into the broader context of the New South. The book is divided into five chronological chapters spanning from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. In each, Oakley places Cherokee actions within the context of the changes in federal Indian policy, from termination to self-determination. With each major policy, he discusses the impact on the Eastern Band, highlighting the consequences of uncertainty in relation to termination and unreliable federal funding. He also provides context of the broader trends in southern history from Jim Crow to the impact of the civil rights movement. Chapter 1 covers the period from incorporation in 1889 through the 1920s and places tribal actions in the context of late-nineteenth-century Indian reform and the growth of Jim Crow segregation. Following an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision that, in part, ruled that the Eastern Band was not a recognized tribe, the tribal council sought a way to protect the community and its tribal identity. The creation of a corporate charter allowed the tribal council to own land in common and to engage in collective negotiations with outside entities in order to develop the local economy. Chapters 2 through 5 discuss the Eastern Band's efforts to capitalize on the growing tourism industry and the subsequent challenges doing so created from the late 1920s through the late 1990s. With limited sovereignty, the tribal council sought partnerships with non-Indian entrepreneurs and organizations to develop a tourism economy. Oakley also covers the problems the Eastern Band faced in trying to stabilize an economy based largely on seasonal tourism. Oakley concludes the book with a discussion of the immediate economic impact of Harrah's Cherokee Casino. The success of the casino increased the tribal council's operating budget, reduced the Eastern Band's economic dependence on the federal government, and contributed to a reduction of the poverty rate on the reservation. Tribal leaders viewed their increased economic independence as vital to protecting Cherokee identity and tribal sovereignty. Oakley's work succeeds in providing a general introduction to Eastern Cherokee tribal economic history in the twentieth century. He provides context for Cherokee economic development within both federal Indian policy and the broader economic and social histories of the New South. A more detailed analysis of the interplay between Jim Crow segregation and the economic actions of the tribal council, and how this interplay impacted the regional history of western North Carolina, would have been welcome but was probably beyond the scope of the work. Likewise, while Oakley does touch on internal tribal divisions and on the paternalism and racism of many non-Indian economic actors, he does not explore their consequences in any depth. New South Indians provides a valuable basis for future examinations on the interplay between the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the broader region and on economics as the basis of integrating tribal history into the historiography of the New South. It also highlights that Native peoples are not reflections of nineteenth-century stereotypes but are present and integral to modern history. [End Page 717] Tamara Levi Jacksonville State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Exhibits: James Mooney and Displaying Kiowa Culture

Collaborative and Non-Collaborative ExhibitsJames Mooney and Displaying Kiowa Culture Nancy J. Parezo (bio) American anthropology was grounded in museums. This fact makes museums productive sites for examining disciplinary history and its changing practices, including collaborative endeavors with indigenous people. With world’s fairs, museums provided venues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where foundational anthropologists invited visitors to think about native peoples as the primitive before of humanity’s collective past compared to their own enlightened civilization and future. Museologists generally used this evolutionary dichotomy without consulting the peoples being depicted because individual cultures did not particularly matter in this framework. A racialized sociocultural classification combined with a developmental-cultural-technological typology that supposedly explained regimented evolutionary processes was critical. Collaborations were irrelevant, for indigenous perspectives would muddy the simplicity of the theoretical narrative. Some anthropologists thought individual cultures and what indigenous peoples had to say mattered, however. They used exhibition venues to challenge the evolutionary model by displaying the stories (not the universalized abstract narrative) of North American peoples, thereby conveying a differentiated understanding of particular cultures or tribes, social groups that today are called Native or First Nations. This shift would eventually replace the homogeneous representation of “the primitive before” with ethnographic displays of distinctive indigenous people as unique parts of humanity’s present, not simply as survivals of humankind’s past. Moving toward more culturally specific [End Page 72] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Model of exhibit types in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century ethnology approaches, curators eliminated the superficial functional analogies at the core of developmental stages and substituted a depiction of regional difference based on variables such as environment, natural resources, climate, language, and cultural adaptation or choice (culture areas). Emphasis on regional distinctiveness added place as an explanation for variation. But displays were still comparative, based on categorization strategies the curator conceptualized, providing little information based on indigenous perspectives. Soon an interest in variation within the culture area and in cultural particularism for its own sake led to ethnographic exhibits based on a melding of indigenous knowledge with anthropological theories and description conventions. This [End Page 73] approach could be a historical, depicting the cultural present, the actual present, or a particular time. Ethnohistory and inclusion of indigenous memory culture added the dimension of time. Table 1 reflects my model of exhibit types during this period. While comparative displays could be undertaken without indigenous approval, negotiation, or involvement (except for ensuring that an object came from or was used by a specific culture), the quest for scientific accuracy and truthfulness meant that ethnographic approaches required collaboration with the source community during the exhibition preparation process and ideally through all stages of implementation. This did not often happen. When contextualizing history was added to the variables displayed, collaboration with the source community became essential but was rarely talked about in exhibition labels. There was no way for visitors to recognize collaborative efforts (Krmpotich and Anderson 2005). One individual who utilized community collaboration, consultation with the proper keepers of pertinent knowledge, and followed culturally appropriate information-seeking protocols was James Mooney (1861–1921), an ethnologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1885 to 1921.1 During his career Mooney used a mixed methodology in extensive multi-year fieldwork settings to produce ethnographies, specialized topical reports on a wide range of subjects, and documentary and indigenous histories. He studied the historical events and developments that had affected colonized societies, both for those forced onto reservations (Kiowa) and those who refused deportation (Eastern Cherokee). During his productive career Mooney pioneered many methodologies that are considered essential for ethical ethno-graphic and ethnohistorical research today (see Moses 1984). In addition, a desire for justice in colonial situations undergirded his political activism (fights for religious freedom and federal recognition). A proponent of an engaged anthropology that helped communities and individuals, Mooney tried to explain Indian worldviews and behaviors to Congress, Indian Service personnel, and the American people. His most famous works were the Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), Myths of the Cherokee (1900), and Calendar History of the Kiowa (1898), “an autobiographic history of an...

The Cherokee syllabary: Writing the people’s perseverance by Ellen Cushman (review)

Reviewed by: The Cherokee syllabary: Writing the people’s perseverance by Ellen Cushman Brad Montgomery-Anderson The Cherokee syllabary: Writing the people’s perseverance. By Ellen Cushman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011. Pp. 256. ISBN 9780806142203. $34.95 (Hb). In the 1820s Sequoyah devised a syllabic writing system for his native Cherokee language. The creation of this script, commonly referred to as the Cherokee syllabary, is one of the most famous episodes in Native American history. The syllabary has become iconic of the Cherokee people, the largest Native American community in the United States. In recent years this writing system has undergone both a popular and scholarly revival. Language revitalization initiatives among the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes have promoted syllabary usage in immersion and college classrooms, and they have increased its presence in the linguistic landscape of northeastern Oklahoma and western North Carolina. New scholarly interest has also heightened awareness of this two-hundred-year-old writing system. Bender (2002a,b, 2007) has written extensively on its use among the Eastern Cherokees in North Carolina, while Peter and Hirata-Edds (2009) have studied its use in the Cherokee Nation immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Ellen Cushman has previously explored issues related to the origin and use of the syllabary (2011a, b, 2012), and I discuss and use it throughout my own grammar of the language (Montgomery-Anderson 2014). Unlike Bender, C focuses in this work on Oklahoma Cherokee. C is a professor of writing, rhetoric, and American cultures at Michigan State University, and she is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, a federally recognized tribe that is headquartered in Tahlequah. In the first chapter (‘Sequoyah and the politics of language’), C provides the historical context of the creation of the syllabary. She opens with a claim that is at odds with the traditional portrait of Sequoyah, who has historically been described as illiterate in English. C presents an English letter signed by Sequoyah that she found at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. C’s assertion that Sequoyah was already fluent and literate in English is an important part of her claim that Sequoyah’s design of the syllabary—or Sequoyan, as she terms it—was part of a conscious and deliberate effort to maintain a distinctive Cherokee identity in the face of an encroaching white society that threatened to overwhelm and assimilate it. The term ‘perseverance’ in the subtitle of this work is an important theme throughout. With the adoption of Sequoyan, the Cherokee acquired a powerful technology for recording traditional knowledge and communicating among themselves; at the same time, this unique writing system helped them to resist the assimilative pressures of which alphabetic literacy was a part. The story of Sequoyah’s process of invention is absorbing reading, and C makes good use of contemporary sources in her narrative. She underlines that this period was characterized by ‘self-imposed isolation from the influence of the Roman alphabet’ (38). In Ch. 2 C discusses the syllabary as a writing system, focusing specifically on the organization of the complete set of characters. She contrasts the initial arrangement with the second, print-oriented arrangement; this latter set, as C points out, is organized to make sense to those already literate in English. For example, the vowel characters on the horizontal axis of the chart are ordered as /a/, /e/, /i /, /o/, /u/, and /v/ (this last character represents a nasalized mid-central vowel), while the consonants on the vertical axis also follow the same sequence as that of the English alphabet. C comments that this arrangement has often been seen as an added obstacle to learning the syllabary as it ‘inserts alphabetic sound systems and orthographies as intermediary steps that learners must go through to locate the correct character’ (45). This observation is part of another important theme in the book: that is, that the syllabary has been misunderstood and underappreciated by those who insist on seeing it through an alphabetic bias rather than on its own terms. In this chapter C claims that Sequoyan not only matches characters to sounds but also ‘at times can also match meaningful units (morphemes) to glyphs’ (49). This is a novel claim that...

Secular trends in Cherokee cranial morphology: Eastern vs Western bands

Background: The research objective was to examine if secular trends can be identified for cranial data commissioned by Boas in 1892, specifically for cranial breadth and cranial length of the Eastern and Western band Cherokee who experienced environmental hardships.Materials and methods: Multiple regression analysis was used to test the degree of relationship between each of the cranial measures: cranial length, cranial breadth and cephalic index, along with predictor variables (year-of-birth, location, sex, admixture); the model revealed a significant difference for all craniometric variables. Additional regression analysis was performed with smoothing Loess plots to observe cranial length and cranial breadth change over time (year-of-birth) separately for Eastern and Western Cherokee band females and males born between 1783–1874.Results: This revealed the Western and Eastern bands show a decrease in cranial length over time. Eastern band individuals maintain a relatively constant head breadth, while Western Band individuals show a sharp decline beginning around 1860.Conclusions: These findings support negative secular trend occurring for both Cherokee bands where the environment made a detrimental impact; this is especially marked with the Western Cherokee band.

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Troubling tricksters: revisioning critical conversations

Eastern Cherokee Fishing by Heidi M. Altman

Eastern Cherokee Fishing by Heidi M. Altman

Eastern Cherokee Fishing. Heidi M. Altman

<i>Eastern Cherokee Fishing</i>. Heidi M. Altman

Eastern Cherokee fishing

In Eastern Cherokee Fishing, life histories, folktales, and reminiscences about fish gathered from interviews with Cherokee and non-Cherokee people provide a clear and personal picture of the changes in the Qualla Boundary (Eastern Band of the) Cherokee in the last 75 years. Coupled with documentary research, these ethnographic histories illuminate changes in the language, culture, and environment (particularly, aquatic resources) since contact with Europeans and examine the role these changes have played in the traditions and lives of the contemporary Cherokees. Interviewees include a great range of informants, from native speakers of Cherokee with extensive knowledge of traditional fishing methods to Euro-American English speakers whose families have lived in North Carolina for many generations and know about contemporary fishing practices in the area. The topic of fishing thus offers perspective on the Cherokee language, the vigor of the Cherokee system of native knowledge, and the history of the relationship between Cherokee people and the local environment. Heidi Altman also examines the role of fishing as a tourist enterprise and how fishing practices affect tribal waters.

Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, and: Off-Season City Pipe (review)

Reviewed by: Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival, and: Off-Season City Pipe Ellen Arnold Allison Adelle Hedge Coke . Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer: A Story of Survival. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 198 pp. Cloth, $24.95. ———Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. Off-Season City Pipe. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2005. 84 pp. Paper, $14.00. Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, of Eastern Tsa la gi (Cherokee), Huron, French Canadian, and Portuguese descent, grew up in Texas, North Carolina, Canada, and the Great Plains. The blonde, light-skinned daughter of a Cherokee/Huron father and a white mother, Hedge Coke's marginalization as a mixed-blood was compounded by her status as an outsider in her own family. The middle child between an older sister and a younger brother, Allison was scapegoated as the "extra girl" and the "bad child" by her severely schizophrenic mother. She left home at thirteen, married at fifteen. By her midtwenties, she had divorced and remarried, borne two children, and labored as a sharecropper, a horse trainer, [End Page 344] a packer in a cracker factory, a fisherman, and as one of North Carolina's first female construction workers. Forced to flee with her sons for their lives from her second husband's violent abuse, she entered what she terms an "exile" from her North Carolina homeland that lasted for over two decades. Eventually earning her MFA in writing from Vermont College, Hedge Coke went on to work as a community activist, songwriter, playwright, director, poet, photographer, and teacher in California, New Mexico, Minnesota, the Dakotas, and New York; most recently she has joined the Writing and Native Studies faculty at Northern Michigan University. But Hedge Coke's writing and identity have remained centered in the South—in the North Carolina piedmont farmlands and coastal waters where she came of age, in the mountains of Qualla Boundary, the ancestral Eastern Cherokee homeland that provided sanctuary and sustenance in the midst of turmoil, and in the Southern working-class experience. Hedge Coke's first book of poems and winner of the American Book Award, Dog Road Woman (1997), is a furiously paced autobiographical collection that chronicles the struggle to survive emotional and physical abuse, rape, and drug and alcohol addiction. At the same time, it celebrates the fierce spirit of resistance, the physical strength and imagination, and the relationships and heritage that enable her personal re-creation. For example, in the title poem, the poet learns to quilt from a ninety-two-year-old Cherokee woman, who also . . . taught me to butcher without waste and who spun stories on your card whenever I would listen, we fashioned stars. (13) The publication of Hedge Coke's 2004 memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer, and her second poetry collection, Off-Season City Pipe, in 2005, coincide with her first return visits to North Carolina in more than twenty years and carry her deeper into both personal and ancestral memories. Hedge Coke's memoir extends Dog Road Woman's commitment to witness to unnamed traumas and to empower those who suffer. Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer is a head-on, often brutal, but riveting account of a childhood "forged schizophrenically" (23) and a harrowing coming-of-age. The security and continuity her father tried to provide his three children through his storytelling, homemaking skills, and steadfast loyalty to his ill wife were constantly buffeted by the "cyclone" winds of her mother's insanity—her ongoing war with the "buggers" who continuously threatened her, raped her with radio waves, and steered her [End Page 345] car off the road and into the paths of oncoming vehicles with her children in the back seat. What Hedge Coke's father constructed, her mother took apart (2). In unflinching detail Hedge Coke describes the violence and indignities of her mother's numerous hospitalizations and electroshock treatments; the periodic removal of the children by social service agencies, despite their father's presence; the horror of her teenage brother's attempted self-immolation and his physical abuse of both Hedge Coke and their mother; and numerous near-death experiences from beatings and accidents that ushered her into young adulthood. Yet, Hedge Coke never lapses into self...

The Cherokee Nation: A History

The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest and most important of all the American Indian tribes. The first history of the Cherokees to appear in over four decades, this is also the first to be endorsed by the tribe and the first to be written by a Cherokee. Robert Conley begins his survey with Cherokee origin myths and legends. He then explores their relations with neighboring Indian groups and European missionaries and settlers. He traces their forced migrations west, relates their participations on both sides of the Civil War and the wars of the twentieth century, and concludes with an examination of Cherokee life today. Conley provides analyses for general readers of all ages to learn the significance of tribal lore and Cherokee tribal law. Following the history is a listing of the Principal Chiefs of the Cherokees with a brief biography of each and separate listings of the chiefs of the Eastern Cherokees and the Western Cherokees. For those who want to know more about Cherokee heritage and history, Conley offers additional reading lists at the end of each chapter.

New Appalachian Books: Write-Ups

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS Write-Ups George Brosi Randy Allan. Lemuel Chenoweth, 1811-1887: Bridging the Gaps. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 2006. 166 pages with photographs. Trade paperback. $21.00. Allen considers his subject to be America's most accomplished builder of covered bridges during the years between 1846 and 1861. This biography places emphasis on the Civil War years, but starts with Chenoweth's genealogy and covers his entire life, which centered around Beverly, West Virginia, located in Randolph County. The book concludes with a chapter on various restoration efforts aimed at preserving his craftsmanship. Heidi M. Altaian. Eastern Cherokee Fishing. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. 152 pages with photographs, charts, endnotes, index and bibliography. Trade paperback. $22.95. This is not a hands-on kind of book—don't look here for hints on how to avoid the game warden. Dynamite isn't even in the index. Instead, it presents a more scholarly overview of the role of fishing in Cherokee life, right up to its present-day status as a tourist attraction. Nancy Grisham Anderson, editor. Wrestling with God: The Meditations of Richard Marius. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2006. 140 pages. Hardback in dust jacket. $30.00. Richard Marius (1933-1999) grew up the son of a Methodist minister at Dixie Lee Junction in Loudon County, Tennessee. He went on to first become a history professor and then the Director of Expository Writing at Harvard. Marius wrote several books including four novels set in rural East Tennessee and two very successful historical biographies, Thomas More and Martin Luther. This book is a collection of 23 sermons or meditations he delivered, which span the entire second half of the twentieth century. B. J. Appelgren. The Transparent Feather. Charles Town, WV: Zillah, Inc., 2006. 272 pages. Trade paperback. $14.95. 98 This book is cataloged under "1. Personal growth, spirituality. 2. Death, dying. 3. Writing. 4. Morgan, Berry," and it actually does belong in all four categories. The author, an aspiring writer, made a deal with Berry Morgan, a distinguished novelist living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia, that she would write down Morgan's memoirs in exchange for writing lessons. This book covers not only their meetings but also Morgan's memorial sévices. Darnell Arnoult. Sufficient Grace. New York: Free Press, 2006. 302 pages. Trade paperback. $23.00. DarnellArnoultburst onto the regional literary stage this year when her firstbook, a poetry collection, What Travels With Us, became the first book of poetry to garner a Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association. Recently, it was named the book of the year in poetry by the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association. Her first novel is equally compelling, featuring an enjoyable cast ofworking class mountaineers. Among the pleasant innovations that Arnoult has incorporated is her attention to what her characters cook. Arnoult grew up near the Virginia/North Carolina line on the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge, which provides the primary setting for this novel as well. Bob Henry Baber. The SwamperFile. Huntington, WV: Mid-Atlantic Highlands, 2006. 287 pages. Trade paperback. $14.95. Bob Henry Baber, the mayor of Richwood, West Virginia, took a quite circuitous route to that exalted office. Bear in mind, of course, that this novel is fiction, notautobiography, butthe story, setin 1971, follows the protagonist from a Los Angeles love-in back to West Virginia. Ann Good Cooper. The Angel ofHappy Hollow: The Story ofMary Elizabeth "Toddy" Collins. Boone, NC: Parkway Publishers, 2006. 476 pages with photographs and tributes. Hardback. $29.95. I cannot imagine a higher station inlife than to achieve the sobriquet of "Angel of Happy Hollow," for what higher calling is there than "angel" and what more delightful home than "Happy Hollow?" This book is the story of a missionary to a little Wise County, Virginia, coal camp, Roda. Fred First. Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days. Check, VA: Goose Creek Press, 2006. 216 Pages with photographs. Trade paperback. $15.95. 99 Bisected by the Blue Ridge Parkway and blessed with many family businesses and a few chains, Floyd County, Virginia, south of Roanoke, charms with a pleasant mix of old-timers and...

The Cherokee Nation: A History

The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest and most important of all the American Indian tribes. The first history of the Cherokees to appear in over four decades, this is also the first to be endorsed by the tribe and the first to be written by a Cherokee. Robert Conley begins his survey with Cherokee origin myths and legends. He then explores their relations with neighboring Indian groups and European missionaries and settlers. He traces their forced migrations west, relates their participations on both sides of the Civil War and the wars of the twentieth century, and concludes with an examination of Cherokee life today. Conley provides analyses for general readers of all ages to learn the significance of tribal lore and Cherokee tribal law. Following the history is a listing of the Principal Chiefs of the Cherokees with a brief biography of each and separate listings of the chiefs of the Eastern Cherokees and the Western Cherokees. For those who want to know more about Cherokee heritage and history, Conley offers additional reading lists at the end of each chapter.

Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life

Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life