Western Cherokee Research Articles

Obituary for Raymond D. Fogelson

Ray Fogelson passed away peacefully on January 20, 2020, near his Southern home in Blairsville, Georgia. A lifetime member of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE), he served as its president in 1987–88. He also served as president of the Central States Anthropological Association in 1982–83 and was the longtime book review editor for American Anthropologist. He was one of the foremost ethnohistorians of his time, and a leading expert in Southeast ethnology. He mentored several generations of graduate students, including many who have been active in the ASE.Ray received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962. While at Penn he held a fellowship at the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, reflecting his own lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, and that of his mentors, A. Irving Hallowell and Anthony F. C. Wallace. He went on to teach at the University of Washington and University of California, San Diego, before moving to the University of Chicago, where he spent the bulk of his career. He held visiting positions at Princeton and the University of Texas.He conducted fieldwork initially with the Eastern Band of Cherokee under the tutelage of John Gulick at the University of North Carolina. He would later conduct research with the Shushwap, the Western Cherokee, and the Muskogee, where he was an adopted member. In addition to conducting research among these tribes, he practiced “action anthropology,” as an advocate. One example is his congressional testimony in favor of federal recognition of the Lumbee.Ray was dedicated to his students at all levels, including those who would not go on in anthropology. He was a raconteur, a bon vivant, someone possessed of a “wild sense of humor,” to quote his dean. He loved the city of Chicago and was a devoted fan of the Bears. He will be missed by all who knew him. He is survived by his wife, Karen Luckritz.

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.

Shaping New Homelands: Environmental Production, Natural Resource Management, and the Dynamics of Indigenous State Practice in the Cherokee Nation

Natural resource management in Indian country today must continually address colonial histories. In the Cherokee Nation, tribal resource managers are acutely familiar with this history because they deal with its current manifestations daily. This situation reflects both structural issues that stem from the imposed land management programs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and practical issues in which the results of federal policies like allotment inhibit tribal access to and control over resources within Cherokee Nation boundaries. In this article, I trace the origins of contemporary obstacles to tribal natural resource management in the Cherokee Nation, emphasizing the process of environmental production to explain how myriad actors and forces shaped the western Cherokee landscape. Additionally, I frame tribal resource control and management as an identifiable modern state practice. As such, I explore the dynamics of the Cherokee Nation as a uniquely indigenous state—one that is struggling to balance its ability to assert indigenous approaches toward environmental management with its power to regulate its own citizens' access to sparse lands and resources.

Cherokee stories of the Turtle Island Liars' Club: Dakasi elohi anigagoga junilawisdii (turtle, earth, the liars, meeting place)

Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' paints a vivid, fascinating portrait of a community deeply grounded in tradition and dynamically engaged in the present. A collection of forty interwoven stories, conversations, and teachings about Western Cherokee life, beliefs, and the art of storytelling, the book orchestrates a multilayered conversation between a group of honored Cherokee elders, storytellers, and knowledge-keepers and the communities their stories touch. Collaborating with Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess, and Woody Hansen, Cherokee scholar Christopher B. Teuton has assembled the first collection of traditional and contemporary Western Cherokee stories published in over forty years. Not simply a compilation, Stories of the Turtle Island Liars' explores the art of Cherokee storytelling, or as it is known in the Cherokee language, gagoga (gah-goh-ga), literally translated as he or she is lying. The book reveals how the members of the Liars' Club understand the power and purposes of oral traditional stories and how these stories articulate Cherokee tradition, or teachings, which the storytellers claim are fundamental to a construction of Cherokee selfhood and cultural belonging. Four of the stories are presented in both English and Cherokee.

A Frankston Phase Settlement and Cemetery at the H. C. Slider Site on the Neches River in Cherokee County, Texas

The H. C. Slider site is a previously undocumented Late Caddo habitation site and cemetery in the Neches River valley in western Cherokee County, in the East Texas Pineywoods. The site was found and investigated by Buddy Calvin Jones in November and December 1967. His notes and collections from the site are curated at the Gregg County Historical Museum in Longview, Texas. According to Jones' notes, the site is on three sandy knolls along a Neches River terrace, approximately 11 miles southwest of the city of Jacksonville. These knolls (A-C) have midden deposits with ceramic sherds and lithic artifacts. Knoll A has a cemetery, and Jones excavated four burials (Burials 1-4) at the northern end of the knoll.

African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (review)

Reviewed by: African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens Kevin T. Barksdale African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens. By Celia E. Naylor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pp. ix, 360.) Celia E. Naylor’s African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens traces the tangled relationship between African Americans and the western Cherokee from removal (1838) through the formation of Oklahoma (1907). Relying heavily on the Works Progress Administration’s slave narratives, Naylor captures the lives of slaves and freed people residing in the Cherokee Nation and their efforts to resist their enslavement, forge multiracial identities, and obtain Indian citizenship. Naylor dedicates the first two chapters of her work to African Indian slave resistance in an effort to challenge historical misconceptions regarding Native American slavery. By recounting brazen acts of slave resistance (escapes and violence directed at slaveholders) and covert “day-to-day” defiance, Naylor refutes the historical contention that the Amerindian version of slavery was more benevolent than its counterpart in the southeast. She argues that the Cherokee Nation rejected the opportunity created by removal to abandon slavery, and chose instead to further enmesh the institution within their western communities. Removal and the accompanying political power struggle provided slaves an unprecedented opportunity to resist enslavement. Despite their efforts to exploit the turmoil surrounding removal, most slaves embraced their Indianness (89). Naylor examines the complicated interplay between blood quanta, cultural bonds, and African Cherokee identity. Through racial intermixing (biracial African Cherokee) and selective acculturation (i.e., foodways, clothing, and language), slaves embraced their Native American identity and deep cultural connections to their Indian communities. The Civil War disrupted these multiethnic communities by intensifying the slavery debate and injecting sectional tensions into Indian Territory. Naylor’s account of the war within the Cherokee Nation proves that [End Page 109] geographical distance did not “insulate” western residents from the political debates and violence (126). Cherokee antislavery, pro-Union organizations such as the Keetoowah Society clashed with proslavery, Confederate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. The threats posed by these clashes led many slaveholders to reluctantly seek refuge in Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas, and the dislocation proved equally traumatic for their slaves. The Civil War did provide slaves another opportunity to escape, but most longed to return to their adopted Indian homelands. The final two chapters examine the postbellum struggle by freed people to secure Cherokee citizenship in the face of escalating racism. Following the Civil War, African Indians’ cultural ties and desires for social integration found expression in the “articulated nationalism” they demonstrated toward the Cherokee Nation (155). For the next four decades, African Indians pressed for full Cherokee citizenship rights and access to governmental annuity payments and land grants. Despite being spared much of the racially motivated political violence occurring across America, African Cherokees faced determined opposition from inside and outside of the Cherokee Nation to their demands. Efforts within the Cherokee leadership to exclude freed people from the numerous Indian roles using complex blood quanta formulas and governmental policies designed to strip property rights from all of the Cherokee, heightened tensions within the Cherokee Nation. Intertribal disputes combined with the fear that Oklahoma would become a “black state” as a result of the postwar “Great Negro Exodus” to the West, fueled support for segregation (188–89). Racial segregation was a harsh reality in Oklahoma by the time it emerged as America’s forty-sixth state, and the African Indian dream of full citizenship remained elusive. Celia E. Naylor’s refutation of benevolent Indian slavery and description of African Amerindian acculturation are not revelatory. Historians Theda Perdue and William G. McLoughlin have offered similar studies of slavery within the Cherokee Nation. Naylor also fails to connect the post-removal socioeconomic dynamics occurring among the western Cherokee to the plight of the slaveholding eastern band. Despite these criticisms, African Cherokees in Indian Territory offers readers a rich and textured glimpse of life, work, love, and loss in Indian Territory. [End Page 110] Kevin T. Barksdale Marshall University Copyright © 2009 West Virginia University Press

Entretien avec Joanna Bigfeather, Cherokee, directrice, Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (IAIA), Santa Fe, NM, États-Unis

Foreword Joanna Bigfeather was appointed director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in April 1999. A Western Cherokee brought up in New Mexico, Joanna Osburn Bigfeather graduated from IAIA in 1987 and moved to the University of California at Santa Cruz to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Then she attended the State University of New York in Albany, where she obtained a Master in Fine Arts. While exhibiting extensively prints, ceramics and installatio...

Improving American Indian health care: the Western Cherokee experience

Indicators point to continuing lower health status among Native Americans as compared to the general population. Just a decade ago, the mortality rate of Native Americans was 37 percent greater than the rate for the general population, and Native Americans are still more likely to suffer from diabetes, tuberculosis, alcoholism, depression, and suicide.To address the basic health concerns of all Native Americans, this book examines the response of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to critical medical issues. After 1976, the Cherokee Nation aggressively addressed inadequate levels of health services for tribal members and better coordinated efforts to deal with the health problems of their population. Improving American Indian Health Care shares the Western Cherokee experience so that other tribal governments may adopt or adapt the approaches particularly suitable to their own circumstances.

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery Among the Western Cherokee

Ethnobotany and Ethnicity in the Ozarks: A Reply to Jones

HUMAN ORGANIZATION southern Missouri, researchers will need to be cautious in identifying the ethnicity and cultural affiliation of informants since a large population segment in this region are Western Cherokee who have not identified themselves to outsiders in almost 150 years. This situation can possibly be alleviated by contacting local Native American groups prior to going into the field to gain permission for tribal members to identify themselves. As the Western Cherokee and other Native American groups “come out of the closet” and develop forms of resistance other than hiding, the history and cultural ethnography of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri will continue to change.

Commentary: Commentary on "Cultural Conservation of Medicinal Plant Use in the Ozarks"

Cultural Conservation of Medicinal Plant Use in the Ozarks, by Justin Nolan and Michael Robbins (Human Organization 58:67-72, 1999), is a useful and interesting article, particularly its examination of demographic and socioeconomic factors in relation to the survival of traditional medicinal systems. The ethnicity of the 14 plant experts interviewed and their sources of information were not discussed, however, Nolan and Robbins apparently assumed their informants were people of Scottish-Irish and German derivation by way of the Southern Appalachians (pp., 67-68). I wonder if the source of medicinal plant knowledge as well as the ethnic and cultural roots of the informants were Native American, since Cherokee migrated to the region prior to the Scottish-Irish and Germans. Many academics believe that most of the Cherokee left northeastern Arkansas and southern Missouri after the Treaty of 1809, moving into Cherokee lands between the White and Arkansas Rivers, and then most left Arkansas after the Treaty of 1828 (Agnew 1975:357; Littlefield and Underhill 1972:167-169). They assume the Cherokee who remained in Arkansas and Missouri simply disappeared as a distinct people, adopting American culture and blending with American and European immigrants. This is far from the truth. There are literally thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Cherokee in the area who have never lost their identity as Cherokee and have maintained their government, community associations, religion, and other cultural features. These Cherokee rarely identify themselves as Native American, except to other Cherokee or known “Indian sympathizers.” The reason is a long history of prejudice and repression in Arkansas and Missouri, which has developed into a fear of anything that might be identified as “the government.” The history of the Western Cherokee is still not written. You cannot go to the library and pull an academic version of “The History of the Cherokee in Arkansas and Missouri” off the shelf. Their history does not even appear in the stock histories of Missouri and Arkansas (Ashmore 1984; Berry and Novak 1987; Ferguson and Atkinson 1966; March 1967; Meyer 1970; Nagel 1988). Bits and pieces of their history Commentary

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee by Alan Kilpatrick

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee by Alan Kilpatrick

The Night has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee.

Journal Article The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee. By Alan Kilpatrick. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997. xviii, 160 pp. $28.95, ISBN 0-8156-0471-8.) Get access Joel W. Martin Joel W. Martin Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 85, Issue 4, March 1999, Pages 1606–1607, https://doi.org/10.2307/2568331 Published: 01 March 1999

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee

The Night Has a Naked Soul: Witchcraft and Sorcery among the Western Cherokee

The night has a naked soul: witchcraft and sorcery among the western Cherokee

This exploration of the occult world of the Western Cherokee translates 40 shamanistic texts which deal with such esoteric matters as: divining the future; protecting oneself from enemies; destroying the power of witches; and purifying one's soul from all forms of supernatural harm.

Booklist and Notes

Booklist and Notes George Brosi Burton, Thomas. Serpent-Handling Believers. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. 208 pages, illustrated, with an index and bibliography. Oversized trade paperback. $24.95. As Burton says in his introduction, "It is easy . . . either to romanticize or brutalize the people and the practice" of handling snakes in religious services. The author does an exemplary job of avoiding either temptation. The photographs and the text—often a transcription of statements by the believers themselves—combine to give a real feel for the lives of these fervent Christians and those who love them. This is no quick study. Burton has been attending the services of those who handle snakes for twenty years and his bibliography runs twenty-three pages! Carson, Jo. The Last of "The Waltz Across Texas" and Other Stories. Frankfort, Kentucky: Gnomon Press, 1993. 142 pages. Trade paperback. $10.50. Jo Carson has lived most of her life in Johnson City, Tennessee, and has been performing and publishing her "people pieces" for over a decade. Both in person and in print, she is a born entertainer. Although Carson's characters seldom seem very complex, they are portrayed with a sense of humor which often makes them thoroughly engaging. Conley, Robert J. The Dark Way. New York: Doubleday, 1993. 179 pages, illustrated by Murv Jacob. Hardback in dust jacket. $15.00. This is Book Two of a series of historical novels about the Cherokee, whose tribal name loosely translates into English as "the real people." It tells the story of how society's powerful priests were overthrown. Like the first novel in the series, this book attempts to explain how the Cherokee society George Brosi sells both new and out-of-print books through the mail and brings a display of boohfor sale to regional events. His address is Appalachian Mountain Books, Route 2, Box 238, Whittier, North Carolins 28789. His phone number is 704-586-5319. 72 had become so large and elaborate in the absence of a single charismatic leader. Conley, who lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capítol of the Western Cherokee , is one of the most respected Indian authors working in America today. ________________. The Way of the Priests. New York: Doubleday, 1992. 177 pages with a glossary, illustrated by Murv Jacob. Hardback with dust jacket. $15.00. This is the first book in Conley's new series of historical fiction about his own people, the Cherokee. Set in the Southern mountains immediately prior to European intrusion into North America, it traces the rise in power of the Cherokee priests and gives a glimpse of traditional life based on extensive research into the earliest records of Cherokee ways. Conley presents interesting characters involved in an exciting plot. Ellis, Jerry. Walking the Trail: One Man'sJourney Along the Cherokee Trail of Tears. New York: Delta/Dell/Doubleday, 1993. Reprint of a 1991 release. 257 pages. Trade paperback. $9.95. The author, at the age of 41, walked from Oklahoma to his hometown of Fort Payne, Alabama, traveling backwards along the route of the infamous "Trail of Tears" in which his Cherokee ancestors were "removed" from the Southern Appalachians. "Every fragment of Jerry Ellis's story is compelling— the land, the people, the walk itself, those nights out under the stars. What Jerry Ellis does best is to magically touch the wanderer down deep inside all of us with his eloquent prose." —Terry C. Johnson. Garlock, Dorothy. Tenderness. New York: Warner Books, 1993. 377 pages. Mass-market paperback. $5.99. The author's publicists claim she has sold over six million romances and been translated into fourteen languages. This novel is set in 1902 in a small East Tennessee town. The heroine is a respected nurse who is in love with a man suspected of being the sexual pervert who is terrorizing the community . Hess, Norah. Kentucky Bride. New York: Leisure Books/Dorchester, 1992. 442 pages. Mass-market paperback. $4.99. This is a romance novel set in Kentucky in the 1780s. It is the story of the courtship and marriage of a trapper and a pioneer woman who has been raised on the frontier by an abusive uncle. In the beginning there is...

The Cherokee Struggle for Lovely's Purchase

As a young man William Lovely was a participant in the two most important battles of the American Revolution: Saratoga and Yorktown. The passage of years carried Lovely far from his country's mainstream and deposited him in 1813 on the raw Arkansas frontier as a subagent to a Western branch of the Cherokees. Nearing the end of his life, virtually destitute, and perhaps dulled by the excessive use of alcohol, Lovely was confronted with the almost impossible task of ending the bloody conflict between the Cherokees and Osages.1 In the summer of 1816, the subagent arranged a meeting between the two tribes at the mouth of the Verdigris River, near present-day Muskogee, Oklahoma. There he suggested that tension between the tribes might be eased if the Osages allowed the Cherokees unchallenged access to the Western hunting grounds. Promising that the government would reimburse the Cherokees and whites who had claims against the Osages, on July 9 Lovely persuaded the Osages to cede a seven millionacre tract to the Cherokees as a hunting outlet. This cession, lying north of the Arkansas River, extended from the Western Cherokee settlements to the Verdigris River.2 While the sale was neither authorized nor ratified by the government in Washington, the tract became known as Lovely's Purchase. Lovely's effort to bring peace to the frontier failed, and death soon relieved the old man of further obligation to resolve the conflict. If the subagent had not given the Arkansas frontier peace, he did leave it a legacy that would insure that his name would be remembered long after he was forgotten. The land Lovely purchased from the Osages became the center of a controversy that would not be resolved for another decade. In the course of the struggle the land-seeking pioneers would accuse the government of ruining them and their territory, and the Cherokees would accuse it of betrayal. Here is a classic example of the confrontation of the Native American striving to preserve his identity and the White man seeking to acquire his land. The outcome