I laughed. The white tourists did too. Nick, an Oglala Lakota Sioux from the Pine Ridge Nation in South Dakota, did not, which altered how I might otherwise have reacted to the next joke, and the one after that. Again and again the storyteller mocked his audience, and again and again they chuckled on cue. I didn’t know what to make of this. Were these jokes undermining the significance of the tribe’s calamities or intensifying them? And was laughing a sign of our complicity, or was it a strange way of seeking karmic forgiveness for the atrocities that some of our ancestors had committed against theirs?
No time to contemplate: Live Indian Dancing had begun. The storyteller took over the drum and started chanting while his younger partner stepped into the center of the circle of listeners. He wore regalia—war paint, dozens of beaded necklaces, a headdress and bustle made of turkey feathers—over faded Levi’s and sneakers. For about a minute, he shuffled his feet and bobbed his bustle as the tourists took pictures. When he bowed, the storyteller passed around a basket, which the audience filled with bills and coins.
I had witnessed touristic practices ranging from the questionable to the degrading the world over, but this struck me as something dangerously complex. Self-exploitation? I turned to Nick for guidance, as he was my de facto barometer for what was morally acceptable in Native America. He clenched his jaw in anger.
When the last tourist departed, we marched over to the performers. Though just nineteen years old, Nick had inherited formidable oratorical skills from his grandfather (who provided legal counsel for the American Indian Movement) and mother (who won the 1993 Goldman Environmental Prize), so he did our talking. One by one, he ticked off every instance of cultural misappropriation we had encountered there: how, historically, the Cherokee had never lived in teepees, raised totem poles, or performed the Sun Dance, and how they had certainly never worn that style of headdress. What gave these men the right to profit from traditions not their own?
The storyteller shook his tip basket. He fed his kids with this money, he said. White people, they didn’t know anything about Indians. He was educating them.
“How are you doing that? You are totally misrepresenting your history.”
He looked Nick in the eye. “You say you’re Lakota, eh? Do you speak the language? Do you know the dances and the ceremonies? I do. But I don’t do them here. They’re too sacred.”
And just like that, our righteous indignation fizzled. No, Nick did not speak Lakota—for the same reason that I, a Chicana from South Texas, did not speak Spanish. Our elders had suffered so much discrimination for using their mother tongues that they’d declined to pass them on to us. Although Nick and I had been hired by the Odyssey to represent our communities, we couldn’t actually talk with many of our elders. What, then, gave us the right to question these men? They knew their culture, which was more than we could say about our own.
Sensing that he’d hit a nerve, the storyteller invited Nick to sit with him, then picked up a drum and started singing. After a while, Nick joined in. They sang song after song together, until the next flock of tourists arrived. When the storyteller rose from the bench to open a new show, we slinked away.
In the year that followed, I drove more than 45,000 miles across the United States with Nick and other colleagues. Nothing affected me like that Cherokee trip. From that day forward, whenever I began another essay about Chicanidad, or wore a rebozo to a reading, I thought of those buskers dancing for tourists on the side of the street. Was I also commoditizing my culture when I performed my identity, or was I offering reverence to my ancestors? Could anything profitable be authentic? Did any of this matter if you were simply trying to survive?
About a year ago, I returned to Cherokee to continue the conversation that had troubled me since that first visit. The timing was auspicious: The town was celebrating its 103rd annual fair, a five-day homecoming festival complete with parades, stickball matches, a Ferris wheel, and a late-night “Pretty Legs” contest featuring scantily clad men in drag. Along Tsali Boulevard, all the teepees were gone, swept from the rooftops and plucked off the streets. The Old Squaw Moccasin Shop had been replaced by a string of upscale stores promoting “authentic Cherokee crafts.” Only one or two bonneted mannequins were left.
These changes were yet another instance of the remarkable agility of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This nation was founded by some of the hundreds of Cherokee who escaped Jackson’s death march by fleeing into the mountains, as well as by those who’d been granted the right to stay through treaties. In the 1870s, they bought back their ancestral territory from the U.S. government, via a land trust called the Qualla Boundary. White outsiders arrived a few decades later, looking to invest in baskets and blowguns. Sensing an opportunity, the white-run Bureau of Indian Affairs organized the tribe’s first fair in 1912, which drew even more visitors. Once the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway opened in the 1930s, cabals of federal, state, and county officials, local businessmen, and a handful of Eastern Cherokee decided to capitalize on the tribe’s heritage.
First came an outdoor theatrical production called Unto These Hills that, according to an early promo, dramatized “the epic clash of the red man and the white man,” from colonization to the Trail of Tears. The show reeled in more than 100,000 spectators during its 1950 inaugural season, and has run every summer since. Next came the Oconaluftee Indian Village, where historical reenactors portrayed daily life circa 1759 for clusters of camera-wielding tourists.
Competition started brewing on the other side of the Smokies when Tennessee towns like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge began to hype up their own heritage. White, middle-class families came in droves for the moonshine stills, wax museums, and attractions like Rebel Railroad (now Dollywood), which at the time offered train rides culminating in “wild Indian attacks.” Refusing to be outdone, the Eastern Band sanctioned Frontier Land, a Wild West theme park that also featured Indian raids. By the early 1960s, the town of Cherokee was awash with tomahawk shops, campgrounds lined with teepees, petting zoos where kids could play tic-tac-toe with roosters, and round-the-clock Live Indian Dancing. Whereas earlier ventures like the Oconaluftee Village aimed for historical accuracy, these newer businesses touted the Hollywood version of the American Indian. Totem poles abounded. Not only did this satisfy tourists, it enabled the Eastern Band to keep their real traditions private and therefore sacred. Once the Red Power civil rights movement elevated Native consciousness in the late 1960s, however, more and more Eastern Cherokee questioned the persona the tribe had put forward, worried about the psychic harm it could cause. Tourism also changed, with heritage seekers wanting to learn more, say, about their great-great-grandma rumored to have been a Cherokee princess.
Then, in the eighties, air travel became more affordable, triggering a nationwide decline in family road trips that parched the tribe’s economy. The time had come for reinvention. In 1997, the Eastern Band launched their most ambitious transformation yet: On the grounds where Frontier Land once stood, they erected Harrah’s Cherokee, North Carolina’s first casino. Suddenly, the Eastern Band had the cash flow not only to fortify their infrastructure—education, health care, housing, public safety—but to revamp their image as well. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian underwent a $3.5 million renovation the following year. In 2006, the tribe hired a Kiowa playwright, Hanay Geiogamah, to revise Unto These Hills according to Native storytelling traditions and to write better roles for community members. (The original script was composed by a white graduate student at the University of North Carolina.) A few years later, the tribal government began offering incentives to local businesses to more accurately represent Cherokee culture. This explained the dearth of teepees along Tsali Boulevard, replaced by new facades hewn of wood and stone.
Vintage Cherokee lives on, though, in the buskers who pose for tourist photographs. Known locally as “chiefing,” this profession dates back to 1930, when a souvenir shop called Lloyd’s asked its employees to stan
d outside in their regalia to draw in customers. After Polaroid popularized instant cameras in the late 1940s, some Eastern Cherokee (as well as members of other tribes) began dressing up and standing along the thoroughfare, beckoning motorists to stop for photos. The first buskers saw a direct correlation between the ostentation of their outfits and how much tourists tipped them, so they abandoned the modest, traditional dress of the Cherokee in favor of the splendid warbonnets of the Plains Indians. Although chiefing soon became one of the town’s biggest attractions—one busker, Henry “Chief Henry” Lambert, claimed to be “The World’s Most Photographed Indian” after posing by his roadside teepee for almost six decades—it was also one of the most controversial, with some members challenging the profession’s dignity. Over the years, the tribal government has tried curtailing the practice through increasingly stringent regulations, allowing only enrolled members to chief inside the Qualla Boundary, requiring annual permits, and, most recently, restricting busking to a handful of three-sided huts equipped with a raised stage, a ceiling fan, and benches. Anyone caught busking outside these huts can be slapped with fines, even arrested.
At 9:00 a.m. all the huts around town were still empty. Over by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, two members of Cherokee Friends—the museum’s ambassadorial wing—stood in a shady alcove, knapping flint and whittling wood. Both men had shaved their heads smooth except for short ponytails at their napes. The younger of the two was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt; the other, who introduced himself as Sonny Ledford Usquetsiwo, wore a belted white trade shirt over red leggings. They both wore metal bands around their wrists and coin-sized gauges in their earlobes. “The reason we are here is to answer questions,” Usquetsiwo said grandly, drawing out each vowel in Appalachian fashion. “Here, we are in our culture 24/7.”
I complimented his regalia, and he nodded, rubbing the red-and-black engravings that covered his arms. “My markings, it is earned. It is not a fad. I’m not just going to the tattoo parlor and getting it done. It is between me and the elders. They are called warrior marks. Real warriors give us that status because we are fighting for our culture. Lots of what is written about us is wrong, like the way we look. You see us on the Internet, but that’s Plains Indians, not us.”
I asked Usquetsiwo whether chiefing had contributed to the public’s misperception of his tribe. He stared at me for a moment before resuming his flint work. “Gradually, they are easing them out. In a way I agree with [chiefing] because I know the people who do it. Yet another way I don’t because they are using warbonnets of another tribe. Our elders will not let us stand on the side of the street trying to get people to take a picture for a tip. We have been told, ‘We don’t want to see you out there.’”
At that, the younger man, Mike Crowe, looked up. “My dad chiefed on the side of the road, didn’t he?” he asked.
Usquetsiwo nodded.
“They do what they had to do,” Crowe said. “It was a smaller job market then. They just tried to make cash to feed themselves. This day and age, I’d rather see them take the time to research our people and give an authentic view. If they are trying to make an honest living, I can’t be mad at that.”
Usquetsiwo’s diplomacy was one of many examples of how the Eastern Cherokee practice what’s called a “harmony ethic,” which values consensus and not causing offense. I’d learned about it in the time between my visits here, and noticed how it manifested not just in the people but in the attractions too. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, for instance, is said to be one of the first in the United States to require visitors to contemplate human suffering. And certainly its mural of the Trail of Tears—of families trudging through snow in mournfully blue strokes—was proof that there is no painless way to tell the story of Native American displacement. But I sensed, too, how the harmony ethic tempered other displays, like one about Cherokee firepower, where a placard listed various excuses as to why the colonists had traded weapons to the Cherokee that were “cheaply made, required special shot, and broke easily” before landing on what made the most sense—namely that “the colonists did not want the Indians to have equal firepower.” A timeline of the Cherokee school system, meanwhile, spared you from the horrors of a century and a half of “Indian residential schools”—during which 100,000 indigenous children were forced to attend Christian boarding schools, where they were beaten for speaking their mother tongues and berated for professing their traditional beliefs—by solely noting how, in the 1930s, American public opinion shifted to support the idea that “removing five and six year olds from their families was inhumane.” This was, in essence, a museum about an attempted genocide, but you couldn’t tell from its rhetorical restraint.
I found a more wrenching experience at the Cherokee Bear Zoo. For decades, animals played a large role in Cherokee tourism in the form of trained-chicken acts and pose-with-a-bear-cub stands, most of which have been phased out. One of the zoos in Cherokee, Chief Saunooke’s Bear Park, was shuttered in 2013 after the USDA fined it $20,000 for deplorable conditions. Tribal elders have sued the Cherokee Bear Zoo as well, contending it violates the Endangered Species Act. (A court ruled otherwise in March 2016, but a PETA campaign against the zoo continues.)
At the entrance were the sounds of more prerecorded flutes and a vendor selling paper trays arranged with apple slices, a piece of white bread, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce. I sidestepped a trash can with a sign that read DON’T SPIT IN THE BUCKET, then peered over the railing. Twenty feet below, bears paced inside tiny concrete pits. Black bears, brown bears—nine in all. The closest one, a grizzly, was standing on his hind legs and staring up at a couple of kids with cell phones. “Lookit!” one shouted, laughing and snapping a photo before dropping an apple slice into the bear’s open mouth. The animal’s teeth were jagged and yellow. His mate stretched out beside a stack of tires that held aloft a log topped by an overturned garbage can. A few feet away, a dripping pipe replenished a tub of water. That was it, in terms of amenities: no plants or grass or even dirt. The kids tossed down a lettuce leaf that alighted by the paw of the prostrate bear, which batted at it listlessly while they laughed and took her photo.
By noon, the streets had filled with fairgoers, but the huts were still empty. On Paint Town Road, I noticed a tattoo parlor flanked by a two-story fiberglass Indian wearing half a headdress and white streaks on his cheeks. I walked inside. A bald man with a goatee looked up from behind the counter. I confessed that I’d driven 300 miles to meet some roadside chiefs but hadn’t found one yet.
“I did it when I was ten,” he offered, adjusting his glasses. “I tanned a lot better then.”
His name was Robin Lambert, and he hailed from three generations of chiefs: his grandfather, his uncle, and he and his brother all busked at one point or another—his uncle, in fact, was none other than Chief Henry. Was it true that the famed showman had put five kids through college by chiefing? Indeed it was, Lambert said, and not only that, but one of those sons—Patrick Lambert—had just been elected “real chief,” or the Principal Chief of the Eastern Band, by a landslide last month.
“So, I guess that makes you an advocate?”
“When you go to Disney, you want to see Mickey Mouse. When you come here, you want to see Indians,” he said with a shrug.
Lambert stepped out from behind the counter. His arms, legs, and neck were so intricately tattooed that I couldn’t help asking which mark had come first. An eagle, he said, but it got covered a while back. His clients, Native and white alike, tended to request animals, feathers, or portraits of Indians. But not every request was honored. “[White] people will come in and say their great-grandmother is Cherokee and they want a tribal seal, but I won’t do it,” Lambert said. “Some will get offended, but then I’ll tell them that to do that, I’d need to make markings on their face. And then they’ll say no.” Lambert didn’t do this out of rudeness; for many tribes, refusal is a political stance, a way of asserting sovereignty. Here in Cherokee, it can even trump
harmony.
Down by the Burger King, I met Mark Hollis Stover Jr., another legacy roadside chief, whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and mother had all been in the business. A tall and slender man, Stover wore an orange ribbon shirt topped by a breastplate of beads shaped like elk bones. An otter pelt was slung across his back and his head was crowned with a “porky roach” (a headdress bristling with porcupine and deer hair). He’d just opened his hut for business and was still arranging beaded bracelets for sale, but he took a moment to tell his story. He grew up in Atlanta—“the only Indian I knew,” he said—then “got in a little bit of trouble” before moving to Cherokee and finding his passion: dancing. A champion in the Men’s Southern Strait Dance on the powwow circuit, Stover said he enjoyed chiefing because it allowed him to live by his art. “That’s all I want to do, is dance.”
The hardest part of his profession was, as he put it, the “stupid questions. They gawk at you. They say woh-woh-woh,” he said, padding his palm against his mouth. “They ask, ‘Are you a real Indian?’ They think we still live in teepees.” He tried to view these annoyances as opportunities. “I get to educate ignorant people who watch TV all day. Kids come up all scared of me, and I show them my jewelry and say, ‘If you take a picture with me, you can pick a piece.’ They see we are just like everybody else.”
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