Cherokee Studies

A history of the wars between the new states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia and the Cherokee and their allies that lasted from 1775 through 1795 in the core region of the Old Southwest and until 1795 in the Old Northwest.  Originally written for Wikipedia.

Gives a sketch of the pre-history of East Tennessee, North Georgia, the western Carolinas, and Southwest Virginia, and traces the the proto-Cherokee from their origins in the North to the home where they coalesced, the later "Cherokee Country".

This paper describes European trade goods from the Cherokee settlement at the Coweeta Creek site, located in the Appalachian Summit province of southwestern North Carolina, and compares this assemblage with those from the nearby Alarka and Tuckasegee sites. Most of the European trade goods from Coweeta Creek are associated with late stages of the public structure at the site, from nearby pit features, and from the plaza, and there are comparatively few trade goods from domestic areas around the plaza. Most of the domestic houses at Coweeta Creek were abandoned at the point at which European trade goods began to reach the settlement, or soon afterwards. The presence of European goods at Coweeta Creek, Alarka, and Tuckasegee demonstrates an early interest in and access to trade goods by Cherokee groups before the development of formal trade relations between Cherokee towns and the Carolina colony in the early eighteenth century.

Traces the history of the confederacy of Indian nations known as the Erie, identifying the five sub-tribes, the destruction of the confederacy during the Beaver Wars, and demonstrates the survival of groups of Erie in the North decades beyond what is commonly thought, as well as tracing the main refugee group in their migration south.

Calumet ceremonialism was widely practiced by Native American and European colonial groups in the Great Plains and Southeast during the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Cultural practices associated with smoking calumet pipes have rootsin the prehistoric past, but the spread of calumet ceremonialism acrossthe Southeast was associated with the spread of European colonists and colonialism. Calumet ceremonialism served the needs for groups to have a means of creating balance, and of setting the stage for peaceful interaction and exchange, during a period marked by considerable instability and dramatic cultural change. The presence of a redstone elbow pipe bowl fragment from the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina demonstrates the participation of Cherokee towns in calumet ceremonialism, despite the remote location of this site in the southern Appalachians, far from major European colonial settlements, and far from areas such as the Mississippi River Valley and the upper Midwest where such pipes are much more common.

Dozens of Cherokee towns dotted the river valleys of the Appalachian Summit province in southwestern North Carolina during the eighteenth century (Dickens 1967, 1978, 1979; Perdue 1998; Persico 1979; Shumate et al. 2005; Smith 1979). What developments led to the formation of these Cherokee towns? Of course, native people had been living in the Appalachian Summit for thousands of years, through the Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippi periods (Dickens 1976; Keel 1976; Purrington 1983; Ward and Davis 1999). What are the archaeological correlates of Cherokee culture, when are they visible archaeologically, and what can archaeology contribute to knowledge of the origins and development of Cherokee culture in southwestern North Carolina? Archaeologists, myself included, have often focused on the characteristics of pottery and other artifacts as clues about the development of Cherokee culture, which is a valid approach, but not the only approach (Dickens 1978, 1979, 1986; Hally 1986; Riggs and Rodning 2002; Rodning 2008; Schroedl 1986a; Wilson and Rodning 2002). In this paper (see also Rodning 2009a, 2010a, 2011b), I focus on the development of Cherokee towns and townhouses. Given the significance of towns and town affiliations to Cherokee identity and landscape during the 1700s (Boulware 2011; Chambers 2010; Smith 1979), I suggest that tracing the development of towns and townhouses helps us understand Cherokee ethnogenesis, more generally.

Several years before English settlements at Roanoke and Jamestown, Spanish colonists traversed the western edge of the North Carolina Piedmont, and they attempted to establish permanent settlements in the upper Catawba and Yadkin river valleys. Archaeologists attribute sites and artifacts dating from A.D. 1400 to 1600 in the Western Piedmont to the Burke phase, which is best known from sites in the upper Catawba Valley. This paper summarizes current knowledge about the Burke phase, and about encounters and interactions between Native Americans and Spanish conquistadores and colonists in the North Carolina Piedmont during the sixteenth century. From 1540 to 1568, the Western Piedmont formed the northern edge of the Spanish colonial province of La Florida, and before 1540, the Western Piedmont formed a frontier between South Appalachian Mississippian societies to the south and west, and Piedmont Village Tradition societies to the north and east.

The material remains of daily subsistence within Cherokee communities reflect strategies that households enacted while adapting to disruptions associated with European colonialism. Plant subsistence remains dating from the late Pre-Contact period through the end of the Revolutionary War (A. D. 1300–1783) reveal how Cherokee food producers/collectors fed their families as they navigated an increasingly uncertain landscape. Framing our analysis in terms of risk mitigation and future-discounting concepts from human behavioraial ecology, we argue that Cherokee households responded to increasing risk and uncertainty by shifting towards subsistence strategies that had more immediate rewards. Although Cherokee plant subsistence remains exhibit    continuity in how people farmed and foraged, our study shows that households made strategic decisions to alter their food production and collection with respect to looming uncertainty. Archaeobotanical analysis from multiple sites spanning the Colonial period (ca. A. D. 1670-–1783) reveal a stepwise process of declining maize production, increased foraging, and overall diversification of the plant diet. This case underscores the relevance of concepts from human behavioral ecology to complex colonial situations by demonstrating that strategies of risk prevention and mitigation have applicability beyond ecological factors.

This paper relates the craft of contemporary Cherokee pottery to the history and prehistory of Cherokee pottery in southwestern North Carolina as it is known to archaeologists. Archaeologists attribute Cherokee pottery in North Carolina to the Qualla series, and this paper outlines provisional distinctions between Early Qualla, Middle Qualla, and Late Qualla ceramics.

This article describes the development and initial results of the Western North Carolina Mounds and Towns Project, a collaborative endeavor initiated by the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research Program at the University of Georgia. The goal of this project is to generate new information about the distribution of late prehistoric mounds and historic period townhouses in western North Carolina. This ongoing research has produced updated location and chronological data for 15 Mississippian period mounds and historic Cherokee townhouses, and led to the discovery of a possible location for the Jasper Allen mound. Using these new data, I suggest that David Hally's model for the territorial size of Mississippian polities provides a useful framework for generating new research questions about social and political change in western North Carolina. I also posit that the cultural practice of rebuilding townhouses in place and on top of Mississippian period platform mounds, a process that Christopher Rodning describes as “emplacement,” was common across western North Carolina. In terms of broader impacts, this project contributes positively to the development of indigenous archaeology in the Cherokee heartland.

Public structures known as townhouses were hubs of public life in Cherokee towns in the southern Appalachians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries A.D., and in towns predating European contact. Townhouses were sources of cultural stability and conservatism during periods of dramatic change, and they were an architectural medium through which Cherokee towns adapted to life in the postcontact Southeast. This article summarizes the characteristics of townhouses in the southern Appalachians dating from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries A.D., focusing on size and shape, the surfaces on which they were built, sequences of building and rebuilding, and the presence or absence of burials inside townhouses. The architectural form of townhouses rooted people to particular places, but Cherokee townhouses also enabled towns to move from one place to another, because a town could build a townhouse at any particular place, old or new.

This article examines the online management of culturally sensitive knowledge through a discussion of a collaboration between the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and the Smithsonian Institution. It discusses the roles of the two institutions in a digital repatriation project involving an extensive body of 19th and 20th century manuscripts as well as the assumptions that informed their respective decisions regarding the online presentation of traditional cultural expressions. The case study explores some challenges involved in providing online access to culturally sensitive materials: first, by probing disparate senses of the term community, and then through a close examination of a particular class of heritage materials about which many Cherokee feel deeply ambivalent and for which notions of collective ownership are especially problematic. The Cherokee knowledge repatriation project offers a novel model for the circulation of digital heritage materials that may have wider applicability. The success of the project suggests that collaboration between tribal and non-tribal institutions may lead to more creative solutions for managing traditional cultural expressions than either alone can provide.

When representatives of the Cherokee nation went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1831 to sue the state of Georgia, they initiated a paradoxical endeavor. They argued that they were a " foreign state, " but subjected themselves at the same time to the jurisdiction of the court of another state. In the course of this campaign they transformed themselves from a political to a legal subject and took the position of what today would be called an " indigenous " community. The Court translated the paradoxical formation of indigeneity―being legally incorporated and excluded at the same time―into the legal text of the judgment by inventing the contradictory phrase " domestic dependent nation. " Analyzing as an autoethnographic text the bill that the Cherokee Nation presented to the Supreme Court, this essay investigates how the Cherokee's indigeneity was produced in their interaction with the legal field of the (post) colonial state and how the paradoxical roots of indigeneity can serve as a starting point from which to rethink the native–settler relationship and the indigenous condition.

The archaeological manifestation of protohistoric and historic Cherokee material culture and settlements in southwestern North Carolina is known as the Qualla phase. This phase, and the Qualla ceramic series, has generally been dated from A.D. 1450 to 1838. This paper reconstructs temporal trends in Qualla pottery based on quantitative analyses of sherd assemblages from several independently dated contexts at the Coweeta Creek site. Results of these analyses enable us to differentiate Middle Qualla (A.D. 1500–1700) and Late Qualla (A.D. 1700–1838) pottery, and they also enable us to propose at least an outline of the major characteristics of Early Qualla pottery, which is provisionally dated from A.D. 1300 to 1500. This proposed Qualla ceramic chronology—which should be tested with data from other sites and revised as necessary—enables us to assign dates to sherd assemblages, and the sites and proveniences from which they are derived, with greater precision than has been possible in the past. The characteristics of and the dates of Early Qualla pottery from Coweeta Creek also encourage us to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between the Pisgah and Qualla phases in southwestern North Carolina.

Indigenous youth today are in a precarious position. The elders who guided their grandparents and parents often suffered from direct racism and dislocation from cultural practices, land, medicine, language, knowledge and traditional lifeways. Family and community kinship networks that provided emotional, spiritual and physical support have been brutally and systematically dismantled. When perpetuation is
discussed within an Indigenous context, it often refers to the transmission of Indigenous knowledge to future generations and how they act on and regenerate it. This perpetuation of Indigenous knowledge and nationhood occurs every day, often in the shape of unnoticed or unacknowledged actions carried out within intimate settings, such as homes, ceremonies and communities. Focusing on everyday acts of resurgence shifts the analysis of the situation away from the state-centred, colonial manifestations of power to the relational, experiential and dynamic nature of Indigenous cultural heritage, which offers important implications for re-thinking gendered relationships, community health and sustainable practices. The authors of this article examine ways in which land-based pedagogies can challenge colonial systems of power at multiple levels, while being critical sites of education and transformative change. Drawing on a multi-component study of community practices in the Cherokee Nation conducted by the second author, this article examines strategies for fostering what have been termed “land-centred literacies” as pathways to community resurgence and sustainability. The findings from this research have important implications for Indigenous notions of sustainability, health and well-being and ways in which Indigenous knowledge can be perpetuated by future generations.

A renewed interest in the Qualla phase occupation of southwestern North Carolina has generated a better understanding of Cherokee lifeways in the late prehistoric and protohistoric periods. A lack of archaeological research on pottery, however, represents a gap in our basic knowledge of Qualla phase foodways. Here we offer a functional analysis of pottery assemblages from the Coweeta Creek site in the Appalachian Summit region of southwestern North Carolina. We intend this as a baseline for future studies of Qualla phase pottery at Coweeta Creek and throughout southwestern North Carolina.

This paper explores the role of public architecture in anchoring Cherokee communities to particular points within the southern Appalachian landscape in the wake of European contact in North America. Documentary evidence about Cherokee public structures known as townhouses demonstrates that they were settings for a variety of events related to public life in Cherokee towns, and that there were a variety of symbolic meanings associated with them. Archaeological evidence of Cherokee townhouses—especially the sequence of six townhouses at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina—demonstrates an emphasis on continuity in the placement and alignment of public architecture through time. Building and rebuilding these public structures in place, and the placement of burials within these architectural spaces, created enduring attachments between Cherokee towns and the places in which they lived, in the midst of the geopolitical instability created by European contact in eastern North America.

A renewed interest in the Qualla phase occupation of south- western North Carolina has generated a better understanding of Cherokee lifeways in the late prehistoric and protohistoric periods. A lack of archaeological research on pottery, however, represents a gap in our basic knowledge of Qualla phase food- ways. Here we offer a functional analysis of pottery assemblages from the Coweeta Creek site in the Appalachian Summit region of southwestern North Carolina. We intend this as a baseline for future studies of Qualla phase pottery at Coweeta Creek and throughout southwestern North Carolina.

The Pisgah culture of Western North Carolina (AD 1000-1500) has historically been characterized as a Mississippian phenomenon in part due to the addition of new decorative rim treatments on the ceramics, along with coeval changes in the built environment and subsistence practices.  While certain aspects of ceramic production reflect continuity with earlier Woodland groups, the shift in decorative treatments points to extra-local interaction and influence.  By considering intersite differences between assemblages recovered from the Cane River site (31Yc91), the Garden Creek site (31Hw1), and the Warren Wilson site (31Bn39), regional variation in participation with Mississippian social political relationships is better defined.

A B S T R A C T In the American South white-tailed deer remains are recovered in abundance from late prehistoric archaeological sites and have been used to identify numerous social and cultural phenomena including status based differences in food consumption, feasting, inter-site transport of foodstuffs, and regional variation in subsistence strategies. Meat, marrow, bone, antler, and hide were important physical contributions of deer to the daily lives of southeastern native peoples. However, deer also play(ed) an important role in self-identity and social structure (Deer clan). In this paper we bring together multiple lines of evidence to offer a nuanced interpretation of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) antler objects recovered from Native American archaeological sites in the pre-European Southeastern United States in the traditional homelands of the Cherokees of the American South. We review the importance of the culturally appropriate interactions with deer as taught in deer hunting lore and taboos recorded in ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources. With this understanding, we then identify the material manifestations of deer hunting amulets from several archaeological sites in our study area. Ultimately our study of antler objects shows that combining indigenous knowledge with material studies gives us new insights into how humans perceived and interacted with the animals that lived in their shared environment, and fosters new interpretations of material culture.

Public structures known as townhouses were hubs of public life within Cherokee communities in the southern Appalachians before and after European contact. Townhouses themselves were architectural manifestations of Cherokee towns. The architectural symbolism of townhouses was related to the symbolism of late precontact Mississippian platform mounds, mythical connections between earthen mounds and Cherokee townhouses, and color symbolism that was widespread in the Southeast during the eighteenth century. These points are evident from documentary sources, oral tradition, and the sequence of protohistoric Cherokee townhouses at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina.

Mississippian societies of southwestern North Carolina are generally thought to have been less centralized and less hierarchical than their counterparts elsewhere in the Southeast. This paper compares and contrasts mortuary patterns at Warren Wilson, Garden Creek, and Coweeta Creek to reconstruct patterns of social and spatial differentiation within late prehistoric and protohistoric communities in southwestern North Carolina. These sites include, respectively, a late prehistoric stockaded village, a platform mound and village, and a protohistoric Cherokee town with a public structure and several domestic dwellings. Distributions of burial goods and the placement of burials indicate that some social distinctions were reflected in the treatment of the dead by Mississippian and protohistoric groups in southwestern North Carolina, and that those distinctions were embedded in the architecture and built environment of these sites.

Summary

Ever since publication of The Book of the Hopi in the 1960s the legends of the Hopi Indians of Arizona have been central to any discussion of diffusionism and the origins of North American Indians. In this, the first chapter of a new book about Greek, Egyptian and other Mediterranean cultural traits in the Cherokee Indians, it is suggested that the nucleus of the tribe we now know as the Hopi can be traced to Egypt, that the Hopi worldview contains elements of Hellenistic science and philosophy and that many of the religious terms used in their ceremonies are based on the ancient Egyptian language. The Hopis and the Cherokee, in other words, are related and share roots in the Old World of classical antiquity.

This chapter considers the applicability of the house society model to the study of native towns in the southeastern United States and, specifically, of Cherokee towns in southwestern North Carolina. I focus on the history of building and rebuilding dwellings and public architecture by the Cherokee town located at the Coweeta Creek site from the fifteenth through early eighteenth centuries A.D. I identify two different patterns of structure rebuilding at this site, associated with differing spatial layouts of this settlement during two different episodes in its settlement history. The structures themselves were made of wood and other perishable materials, but practices of rebuilding in place created permanence in the arrangement and alignment of architectural space.

This review of the history of fieldwork at the Coweeta Creek site (31MA34) in southwestern North Carolina sets the stage for the case studies that follow. The Coweeta Creek site, a mound and associated village in the upper Little Tennessee Valley, was excavated from 1965 to 1971 by the Research Laboratories of Anthropology (RLA) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the Cherokee Archaeological Project. The primary goal of this broader regional project by the RLA was to reconstruct the origins and development of Cherokee culture in the Appalachian Summit province of western North Carolina. Case studies included in this collection concentrate on select aspects of the archaeological record from Coweeta Creek to explore native lifeways at this ancient Cherokee town.

This paper outlines major historical developments connecting prehistoric Cherokee settlements and societies with those present when Spanish expeditions traversed the southern Appalachians during the 1500s, and with the groups of Cherokee towns present during interactions with English and French colonists during the 1700s. Public structures known as townhouses, and public plazas adjacent to them, were critical architectural spaces to these developments, because they were settings for the events during which Cherokee households created and renewed shared identities as Cherokee towns and communities.

This paper compares and contrasts the rebuilding sequences of late prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee structures at the Coweeta Creek site in the upper Little Tennessee Valley of southwestern North Carolina. Several domestic structures dating to the 1600s were built and rebuilt in place, as was the public structure (or townhouse), whose six successive stages span the period from the mid-to-late 1600s to the very early 1700s. By contrast, domestic structures dating to the fifteenth century demonstrate a less compact and less formalized settlement plan. The formally planned town at Coweeta Creek—comprising the townhouse, town plaza, and domestic houses—postdates early European contact in the southern Appalachians, and this paper argues that the formal settlement plan at Coweeta Creek created a sense of place that emphasized permanence in the midst of the destabilizing effects of European contact on native peoples of the Southeast.

Of all the actors in the American Civil War, marginalized groups have been vastly underrepresented on the commemorative landscape. Cherokee soldiers were among the minorities who contributed to both the Union and the Confederacy, and up to the present time, there has not been a completed study which surveys the extent of that participation and how it is interpreted to the public. It is important to present history as a complete narrative, and a detailed list of these significant sites can only benefit that endeavor. Spatial technologies also provide new tools to employ within public history, allowing increased access of the story to a wider audience. This thesis will therefore act as a preliminary survey and will attempt to fill a gap in nineteenth century historiography by incorporating memorials, historical markers, and other interpretive materials on the commemorative landscape into an interactive geographic information system.

https://jewlscholar.mtsu.edu/handle/mtsu/6146

Indigenous ancestral teachings commonly present individual and community health as dependent upon relationships between human and nonhuman worlds. But how do persons conversant with ancestral teachings effectively convey such perspectives in contemporary contexts, and to what extent does the general tribal citizenry share them? Can media technology provide knowledge-keepers with opportunities to communicate their perspectives to larger audiences? What are the implications for tribal citizens’ knowledge and views about tribal land use policies? Using a PhotoVoice approach, we collaborated with a formally-constituted body of Cherokee elders who supply cultural guidance to the Cherokee Nation government in Oklahoma. We compiled photographs taken by the elders and conducted interviews with them centered on the project themes of land and health. We then developed a still-image documentary highlighting these themes and surveyed 84 Cherokee citizens before and after they viewed it. Results from the pre-survey revealed areas where citizens’ perspectives on tribal policy did not converge with the elders’ perspectives; however, the post-survey showed statistically significant changes. We conclude that PhotoVoice is an effective method to communicate elders’ perspectives, and that tribal citizens’ values about tribal land use may change as they encounter these perspectives in such novel formats.

Amid the ever-present concerns throughout Indigenous communities over the health and vitality of our people, lands, and ways of life, our elders represent sources of knowledge and wisdom that we rely on for guidance and direction. Yet, increasingly, traditional ways of passing down knowledge through person-to-person relationships and kinship bonds have to compete with dispersed tribal populations and the dazzling array of technology preferred by today’s youth. In this context, how can our elders effectively communicate their knowledge and perspectives on pressing issues to tribal officials, youth, and the general tribal population? How can media technology be harnessed in the service of this goal?

This article describes a PhotoVoice project I facilitated with the Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers in summer 2015 that sought to answer these questions. The article is accompanied by selected photos and statements from the elders.

This article describes patterns of continuity and change in the architectural design and placement of a public structure in a native town, the Coweeta Creek site (31MA34), located in the upper Little Tennessee Valley of North Carolina. Remnants of at least six stages of a townhouse have been identified in the Coweeta Creek mound. European trade goods from the last stage of this townhouse indicate that it stood until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The townhouse construction sequence at this spot within the Coweeta Creek settlement offers valuable clues about the nature of public architecture in southwestern North Carolina during the seventeenth century, and perhaps even earlier.

This paper compares mortuary evidence from late prehistoric and protohistoric Native American settlements from southeastern Tennessee and southwestern North Carolina, from the perspective of ethnohistoric evidence about gender roles and gender ideology within historic Cherokee towns. Structures and practices of power within Mississippian and historic native groups in the southern Appalachians were shaped by negotiations and tensions between male leadership of towns and leadership by women in clans and households.

Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos "[N]ot only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him(Wakan Tanka-the Great Spirit) continually in differing ways."-Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) A S CONTEMPORARY LIFE BECOMES MORE AND MORE FRAGMENTED AND UNSUSTAINABLE, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. It is the spiritual crisis brought about by a desacralized worldview that began in the modern West with the emergence of the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment that has created an existential and ontological void and uprooted the centrality of the sacred in the lives of the human collectivity. Very few would question or challenge the reality of climate change and the perilous situation of the present day, yet it is often overlooked that indigenous communities have in many cases been impacted the hardest by the environmental crisis and have been on the frontline of the struggle to protect the earth, as witnessed most recently by the events at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The First Peoples of the world provide an integral vision as to how human beings can live in balance and harmony within themselves and simultaneously with the world around them. It needs to be remembered that it was not until relatively recently that the religion and shamanic traditions of the First Peoples-with all their diversity-were viewed to be one of the world's religions itself. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, passed and put into law in 1978, allowed indigenous peoples to freely practice their traditional religion without fear of persecution. The timeless wisdom of the diverse cultures of the world speaks in a singular voice on the nature of the Absolute or Spirit, which is often referred to as the perennial philosophy (philosophia perennis). Joseph Epes Brown, renowned scholar of the Native American Traditions and World Religions, writes: 112 | PARABOLA FALL 2017 | 113 Book Reviews A sacred service, an open esoteric secretthe Act of Consecration of Man.

This paper reconstructs gender ideology and duality in protohistoric Cherokee towns through consideration of mortuary evidence from the Coweeta Creek site, in North Carolina, and ethnohistoric evidence about Cherokee culture and community during the eighteenth century. These forms of evidence demonstrate close relationships between male leadership and public structures in Cherokee settlements known as townhouses, and between women and the matrilineal clans and matrilocal households in Cherokee towns.