Week 1 – Response #1 … Stickball & Dinner at the Young’s and the Foster’s House

I know this assignment says to write about “a distinct element or experience of the course so far,” but I can’t seem to narrow this post down to one particular activity, so I’m just going to say it was a combined experience and relate it all together.

Let me start off by saying that as a Psychology major just sitting down and learning about the history of a culture holds little interest for me. I’m not saying that looking at history doesn’t have its interesting points and having background knowledge of a culture certainly has its advantages, but in general learning historical facts is not how I like to gain my knowledge of a people. That being said, the stickball game, dinner at the Young’s house, and dinner at the Foster’s house are the activities that really gave me a chance to immerse myself in Native American culture, and most prominently Cherokee culture.

Playing stickball not only gave me the chance to experience a Native tradition first-hand (connecting to that history in a way you can’t just read about), but it also allowed me to bond with the Cherokee people that played with us on a more intimate level through this long held custom. I learned through the classroom that stickball was a game traditionally used by Native Americans to settle disputes that tribes did not want turned into an all out war. The games were typically violent and often times fatal. Now anyone can be told that in a classroom, but it was through actually playing the game that I got a sense of how brutal it can be. Afterwards, I could easily imagine how people could have been killed playing the harsher version of past times.

The two dinners gave me a chance to get a good look at the Cherokee people of today. By just sitting around and talking I got to see how these people interact with each other, I also learned about Cherokee politics and I got a dose of history too (in the oral tradition way). This personal interaction and connection with the people is the kind I crave in order to learn; I think Walker manages to put it much more eloquently than I ever could in saying, “After a certain point, there are things that can’t be understood intellectually.” These activities were my chance to connect with the past through the perspective of the Cherokee people.