The 1960s were a boom time for the Eastern Cherokees. Tourist visits to the Oconaluftee Indian village (a recreation of traditional Cherokee life) and other attractions brought several million dollars into the economy. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs provided a variety of services for improving housing, education, and health.
This focus on Native American self-determination continued into the 1970s and culminated in the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975).35 A provision of this act was that the federal government was committed to maintaining its political and economic support for federally recognized tribes. It also stated that Native Americans should be allowed to direct federal programs affecting them. The Eastern Cherokees began selecting their own BIA agents. They also limited tribal enrollment and membership to descendants of people who had one-sixteenth Cherokee blood quantum or higher on the 1924 Baker roll (or census). Tribal membership is currently closed to any new applicants except the newborn of current members.36
As of the 2000 census, the Eastern Band of Cherokees has approximately 12,500 enrolled members and a nearly 57,000-acre reservation with its capital at Cherokee, North Carolina.37 Federal authorities (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investigation) have control over major crimes such as murder and kidnapping, and the tribal police enforce lesser offenses on the reservation. Tribal government is made up of a principal chief, a vice-chief, and twelve representatives from six districts, all of whom are elected by popular vote.
Today, tourism is by far the most important economic resource for the Eastern Cherokees. Traditional tourist venues such as the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Unto These Hills, and the reservation’s many motels and souvenir shops are important, but gambling has far outstripped these activities as a source of revenue. Federal law does not prohibit gambling establishments on reservations of federally recognized tribes. In 1982, the tribe began Cherokee Bingo, which expanded to about 200 employees and offered jackpots of up to $1 million.
In 1997, the $85-million Harrah’s Cherokee Smoky Mountain Casino opened. In its first year, it was the top-grossing member of the Harrah’s chain for the entire United States, with estimated net earnings of $250 million. Every tribal member is given a share of the profits, and Cherokees are given preferential hiring for the nearly 1,500 casino jobs. There is some disagreement over the amount of casino profits being returned to the Cherokees. However, the rapid influx of funds has led to equally rapid growth in construction and development. In 2000, the casino began a major expansion and absorbed Tribal Bingo as well.38 The casino proceeds should give the Eastern Band the opportunity to develop true economic self-sufficiency if these funds are invested in diverse economic enterprises.
From the identification of the “Chorakae” in a 1674 document39 to the present, the Cherokees have proven their adaptability and resilience to severe culture stress. For more than 300 years, they have interacted with European and American society through diplomacy, trade, and warfare. Major historic impacts on the Cherokees, such as the Revolutionary War and the removal period, caused death and hardship. The Trail of Tears even led to a permanent division of the Cherokees into the Cherokee Nation (with its reservation in Oklahoma) and the Eastern Band of Cherokees. The Eastern Band struggled throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to maintain their Appalachian homeland and their tribal identity.
However, by this time many traditional aspects of life had changed forever. Autonomy was exchanged for a centralized tribal government and a principal chief. Increasing factionalism affected the harmony ethic and mirrored the political conflicts in white society. The Eastern Cherokees and other Native Americans were encouraged or forced into a wage-earning economy and an Anglo-American dominated educational system.
Despite these impacts, the current government policy of self-determination has led to a perception of federally recognized tribes such as the Eastern Cherokees as semisovereign states. More tribal control of daily activities and greater economic security have been the result. The Eastern Band of Cherokees has been transformed by the course of history into a tribe very different from their ancestors of 300 years ago. However, unlike before, they are now in a position to choose the direction of future change and their own destiny.
NOTES
1. Jefferson Chapman, Tellico Archaeology, rev. ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 99; Gerald Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory and Archaeology from 1540 to 1838,” in Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory, ed. Bonnie G. McEwan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 204–5.
2. Wendell H. Oswalt, This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native Americans, 7th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill/Mayfield Publishing, 2002), 397.
3. Leland Ferguson, “Indians of the Southern Appalachians before de Soto,” in The Conference on Cherokee Prehistory, comp. David G. Moore (Swannanoa, N.C.: Warren Wilson College, 1986), 2.
4. Roy S. Dickens Jr., “The Origins and Development of Cherokee Culture,” in The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 12.
5. Judith A. Bense, Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: Paleo-Indian to World War I (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994), 183–253.
6. Ibid., 252.
7. Dickens, “Origins and Development,” 28.
8. Gerald F. Schroedl, “Toward an Explanation of Cherokee Origins in East Tennessee,” in Conference on Cherokee Prehistory, comp. Moore, 122–38.
9. Roy S. Dickens Jr., “An Evolutionary-Ecological Interpretation of Cherokee Cultural Development,” in Conference on Cherokee Prehistory, comp. Moore, 81–94.
10. Harriet J. Kupferer, Ancient Drums, Other Moccasins: Native North American Cultural Adaptation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 232–34; Brett H. Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households in Southwestern North Carolina: Material Perspectives on Ethnicity and Cultural Differentiation” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1999), 2, 24–25.
11. Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Planters: The Development of Plantation Slavery before Removal,” in Cherokee Indian Nation, ed. King, 115; Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory,” 204–6.
12. Oswalt, This Land Was Theirs, 402–3.
13. Kupferer, Ancient Drums, 235.
14. Ibid., 224–27.
15. Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 111–12.
16. Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 411–20.
17. Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory,” 217.
18. John R. Swanton, The Indians of the Southeastern United States (reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 112; Chapman, Tellico Archaeology, 104–5.
19. Oswalt, This Land Was Theirs, 409.
20. Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 113–14.
21. Brett H. Riggs, “Socioeconomic Variability in Federal Period Overhill Cherokee Archaeological Assemblages” (M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 1987), 22–31; Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 545–46.
22. Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 25–27.
23. Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 118.
24. Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 532–47.
25. John R. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees: 1819–1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 7–8.
26. Oswalt, This Land Was Theirs, 410.
27. Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 462–64.
28. Finger, The Eastern Band of Cherokees, 82–100.
29. Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, 472.
30. John R. Finger, Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 44–46.
31. Ibid., 78.
32. Ibid., 79–81.
33. Ibid., 84–97.
34. Ibid., 126.
35. O
swalt, This Land Was Theirs, 54–56.
36. Ibid., 418.
37. Official Homepage of the Cherokee Indian Reservation,
38. Oswalt, This Land Was Theirs, 416–18.
39. Swanton, Indians of the Southeastern United States, 111.
2
Pioneer Settlement
H. Tyler Blethen
Antebellum Appalachia was a land of immigrants. When they entered the region in the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans and Africans were only the most recent arrivals in a land that had first been settled by Native Americans some 10,000 years previously. The Cherokee dominated southern Appalachia in the sixteenth century, but there were also Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Shawnees. Together the population of these complex agricultural societies, in the late Mississippian stage of their development, was 25,000 to 60,000 people. They combined the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and tobacco with hunting, gathering, and fishing. It was a way of life well adapted to their mountain environment, and later arrivals borrowed many elements from it.1
The earliest European expeditions into Appalachia were led by the Spaniards Hernando de Soto in 1540 and Juan Pardo in 1567; both included African slaves among their numbers. Although these expeditions were transitory and made little immediate impact on the region, they marked the beginning of a steady intrusion of Europeans and Africans, first as traders and hunters and eventually as settlers. Later migrants entered the region from several directions and followed several routes, and established shipping routes from Europe determined the direction of much of the flow. Philadelphia, for a variety of mostly economic reasons, quickly became the main port of entry for immigrants into the Southern mountains. Other Atlantic ports, such as Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, also attracted immigrants, but in nowhere near the numbers as Philadelphia. Consequently, Pennsylvania served as the major doorway to the Appalachian backcountry during the colonial period, and its topography powerfully shaped migration patterns.
As the steady flow of immigrants spilled out of Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, settling the attractive lands of southeastern Pennsylvania,2 latecomers had to move further out to claim land. Increasing cultural contact between Indians and pioneers along the rapidly expanding frontier provided numerous occasions for misunderstanding and conflict. When these contacts too often resulted in warfare, colonial governments responded by sending military expeditions into the western mountains and valleys to subdue the Indians. The British government tried to keep the peace by forbidding white settlement west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the Proclamation of 1763, which sited that boundary along the crest of the mountains, was weakly enforced. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the new federal and state governments rejected the proclamation, using western lands to pay military veterans and to generate revenues. As glowing descriptions of the lands on the Appalachian frontier filtered back east, more and more settlers moved westward. Some pushed into and even through Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains; others turned southwest into the mouth of the fertile Shenandoah Valley. There the Great Wagon Road moved pioneers through the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas. Subsidiary routes diverted some of the flow into Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. Significantly smaller streams of settlers also moved into the Southern mountains from the Atlantic seaports of the Carolinas and Georgia.
The new settlers, both white and black, brought a diverse ethnic and cultural mix to Appalachia. The English, as elsewhere in America, contributed fundamental elements such as legal and government institutions and language. But the Scotch-Irish, descended from seventeenth-century mostly Presbyterian emigrants from the Scottish Lowlands and northwestern England to Ireland’s northern province of Ulster, also shaped Appalachian frontier society. James I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, had initiated that migration, or “plantation of Ireland,” to subdue his rebellious Irish Catholic subjects. In the eighteenth century more than 100,000 of their descendants left Ulster, driven out by the province’s increasing poverty. Overpopulation had encouraged “rack-renting,” a practice whereby landlords were able to drive up their rents by leasing their lands to the highest (and usually most desperate) bidder. The resulting agricultural distress was worsened by cyclical depressions in the Irish linen industry, which reduced opportunities for farm families to supplement their agricultural income by spinning and weaving. Many Ulster Presbyterians also resented their persecution by the episcopal Church of Ireland. Most of these Scotch-Irish emigrants eventually ended up in southern Appalachia. There they were joined by significant numbers of the 200,000 Germans who migrated to America in the eighteenth century and smaller numbers of French, Welsh, Dutch, and Scots.3
Immigrants of African ancestry also continuously entered the mountains, from the time of the de Soto expedition on. Most were brought as slaves, obtained from various West African kingdoms. The Cherokee sometimes acted as slave-catchers, returning runaways to their white masters, but they eventually practiced African slavery themselves.4 Ironically, although the Cherokee adopted many European prejudices concerning the racial inferiority of Africans, they shared some cultural traits with Africans: the desire to maintain harmony and balance within a spiritualized nature, the importance of kinship in governing individual lives, and subsistence agriculture.5
Slavery in Appalachia never reached the critical mass that it did in Southern piedmont and coastal plantation societies; the environment was unfavorable to plantation crops such as cotton, rice, and tobacco, and mountain farms were too small. Analysis of census records indicates that blacks in Appalachia made up about 10 percent of the total population in 1860.6 The majority of those African Americans were slaves, but some were free. A surprising number of both slaves and free blacks worked out individual accommodations with the white racist and patriarchal society that dominated Appalachia as much as it did the South in general.7
The complex mix of cultural diversity created by these migration patterns, described by some as a triracial society, developed in a physical environment dominated by mountains and forests. The Appalachian Mountains sweep southwest from Newfoundland to Alabama, but they embrace a wide variety of topographic and environmental regions. They vary in height—rising to almost 7,000 feet in North Carolina—and in configuration—from chains and cross-chains to plateaus to ridge-and-valley topographies. Well into the nineteenth century they were covered by an upland forest, part of the great eastern hardwood forest that dominated the continent east of the Mississippi River. It was made up mostly of chestnut, hickory, and oak but contained significant stands of evergreens such as spruce, hemlock, and pine.8
That the environmental characteristics of this mountain frontier must have powerfully influenced its culture seems persuasive,9 but since Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis” in 1893 there has been substantial disagreement as to what shape such influence may have taken. Turner emphasized the role of land as property in arguing that the supply of free land on the frontier had shaped America’s democratic institutions, economic behavior, and social patterns. Recent revisionists have accused him of “ethnocentrism, triumphalism, gender bias, and linearity.” Turning away from his environmental determinism, they examine “the ways in which the interaction of diverse peoples on frontiers created new cultural forms.”10 To them, frontiers are important because they are “regions that lay between two or more culturally distinct societies and beyond the immediate control of any one of them, where individuals or groups from these societies came into direct contact. The uncertain, changeable natural and social conditions of frontier life required that people rely upon and borrow from others who came from alien cultures.”11
This conception of frontier nicely fits the complex process of cultural formation that occurred in Appalachia as the frontier moved through the region between the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Appalachia’s cultural diversity was especially rich because each o
f its three broad racial categories was further differentiated into ethnic subgroups and by status, gender, language, and religious differences. Out of the ensuing cultural exchange emerged a synthesis on which Appalachians of all ethnicities came to rely to sustain themselves on this frontier. This shared core, based on herding, farming, and hunting, was characterized by the historian John Solomon Otto as a “stockman-farmer-hunter economy.”12 It drew heavily on Native American practices for its agricultural patterns. New World crops long cultivated by Indians and quickly adopted by newcomers included several strains of corn, beans, squashes, and tobacco. The Indian method of clearing ground—girdling trees to kill them and then burning them, known as slash-and-burn—fertilized the soil (burned trees provide the nutrient potash). It also took less work, an important advantage on a labor-poor frontier. The Indians supplemented their agriculture with forest products obtained by hunting, fishing, and gathering.13
European and African newcomers often took over the very fields that Indians had farmed and adopted Indian methods of slash-and-burn and of planting beans and squashes among irregular rows of corn. They also contributed new crops along with their practice of stock-raising. The most important European crops were grains such as wheat, rye, barley, oats, and various peas, which pioneers planted along with Indian crops. More significantly, Europeans introduced cattle, sheep, and hogs to the New World, which they allowed to range freely. Native Americans had no tradition of livestock herding, and for a time the domestication of animals marked a cultural divide on the frontier.14 Africa also contributed new crops to the Appalachian agricultural economy: edible plants such as watermelons, okra, groundnuts (peanuts), millet, and yams, as well as dozens of medicinal plants.15
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