Final Post

I got back to North Carolina late last night, and I've spent the past couple days thinking about what I would write for my final blog post. I decided that I should keep it as academic as possible--if I wander too far into the personal, this could get awfully sentimental, and nobody wants that.

While turning over the past three weeks in my head, I tried my hardest to find some strand of unity in all the diversity of the Cherokee experience. What, I wondered, makes Cherokee culture unique? It is not, as some outsiders assume, some kind of living, breathing cultural relic. Nor is it, as some policymakers past and present would like to believe, obsolete and fully assimilated. Rather, it seems to me that the Cherokee have not been assimilated, but are the products of an assimilative system. In short, the Cherokee are able to incorporate elements of European-American culture without being incorporated in it. They have been able to twist around elements of other cultures and make it distinctly Cherokee.

At the Philbrook museum, I saw an early piece of evidence for this idea in Indian material culture. In one of the collections, our group was shown a pair of Delaware moccasins that used trade beads as part of its design. Though the moccasins were not Cherokee, it demonstrates the principle that Indian cultures are able to incorporate the "non-traditional" into the "traditional."

In spiritual life, the same idea holds true. While at the stomp dance at the Echota grounds, I saw this assimilative system at work yet again. For example, I stomped behind a young woman wearing a set of tin-can shackles, a long skirt, and an Army T-shirt. I'm not sure I could have found a better representation of the modern Cherokee experience. This spiritual blending is also present in the Cherokee Christian tradition, as we observed at the Sunday School session at the Indian Baptist Church. Although these particular Cherokees were firmly devoted to a Western religion, they gave it a Cherokee twist, using the bible as a vehicle to teach Cherokee language and literacy.

This trend is present in media as well, as Will Rogers pretty clearly demonstrates. Rogers, an enrolled Cherokee who received allotment land, crafted a public persona that made him one of the earliest and most successful figures of modern American mass culture. Though he used the mainstream media, his jokes and commentary drew on distinctly Indian humor, and he made more references to his Cherokee membership than most Rogers experts acknowledge.

I have come to believe that the Cherokee system is an extremely elastic one. From the development of a centralized tribal government, to the invention of a Cherokee system of writing, to the founding of the modern-day Cherokee immersion school, the Cherokee people and government have found ways to make their culture adaptive, without losing the kernel of Cherokeeness. As Chief Smith likes to emphasize, the Cherokee are not a backward-looking people. They venerate their ancestors and their heritage, but they generally do not view their culture as a relic to be preserved and coddled. Cherokee culture and modernity grew up together and influenced one another: American modernity is in many ways as Cherokee as Cherokee culture is modern. Cherokee culture is living, breathing, and changing, but it is rooted.