Category Archives: Cherokee Nation

Happy Birthday, Funk Heritage Center

Posted on by

From the FHC:

Osiyo.

Waleska was the name of a man who lived in Cherokee County in the early 19th century and was quite a noted person in his settlement. He was distinguished for always wearing feathers from eagles that he shot himself. He had six children, including “quite a handsome daughter.” Lewis Reinhardt moved to this area in 1834, one of the early settlers in this area, and he lived very near this man, Waleska, and his family. It was said that Mr. Reinhardt was very kind in his dealings with Waleska, the Four Killers, and other local Cherokees, and that they respected him in turn. Reinhardt was a Christian and often spoke of Jesus Christ’s teachings to the Cherokees. He spoke to them of what was “displeasing in the sight of the Lord,” which included working on holy days, and most especially the Sabbath.

One day, however, Mr. Reinhardt went down to his farm tend a burning log heap. In one heap he found that the chunks needed to be pushed closer together, and so he climbed over the fence to do so. As he was in the act of climbing, a group of his Cherokee neighbors came along and caught him tending to the fire. Instantly they began to upbraid him for his hypocrisy, shaking their heads dubiously. Waleska and Four Killer said they did not care much for the religion of a man who would work on Sunday clearing land, but did not want the Cherokees to do so. 

To his dying day, Lewis Reinhardt said he never forgot the rebuke.

Today is a special day for the Funk Heritage Center, as we mark the 20th anniversary of this place. In doing so, we welcome the descendants of the Four Killer family that was forcibly removed on the Trail of Tears. Today is a kind of holiday, at least for us. So take a lesson from our local history, and stop working, at least for a short while, and come help us welcome these friends back to their ancestral homeland this afternoon.

According to the 19th century newspaper report of Belle Kendrick Abbott in the Atlanta Constitution, as well as Nathaniel Reinhardt’s diary entries from the time, it was Mr. Reinhardt who stood up for the Four Killer family when Old Four Killer was “cruelly abused” by the soldiers.

The Four Killers and other area Cherokees, “headed by Mr. Reinhardt, struck out for the fort,” it was reported. As they neared Fort Buffington “suddenly they all halted and refused to go further. By persuasion they soon made known to Mr. Reinhardt that they had heard the drum beating in the fort, and they were afraid. Mr. Reinhardt reassured them, but before moving a step, they began to unpack a bundle of stuff they had with them, from which they took about two pounds of gunpowder and gave it to Mr. Reinhardt to keep. Four Killer asked for four days of grace, in which to dispose of his belongings as he chose, and he obtained it from the soldiers through the act of Mr. Reinhardt standing as his security for his appearance.

He did return, and with his family, along with the Waleska family and thousands of others, journeyed on the long Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.

Today at 2 p.m. they come home again, at the Reinhardt University campus. Please join us as we at last tell their story, with our newest exhibit, “Resistance & Resilience: The Cherokee Trail of Tears.”

Please also enjoy a slide show with us, looking back on our two decades as a museum family. Meet staff members past and present, as well as our volunteers. Help us recognize some of our family with some special presentations. Have some cake with us. We will see you soon.

(Please forgive us if you have to stand … we’re already out of chairs! But that doesn’t mean we don’t want to see you.)

Wado.

Exhibit and Speaker at the Funk Heritage Center

Posted on by

From Reinhardt’s Office of Communications:

The Funk Heritage Center will mark its 20th anniversary tomorrow, Nov. 21, with a special speaker and the opening of its newest exhibit, “Resistance & Resilience: The Cherokee Trail of Tears.”

Speakers will include Troy Wayne Poteete, national president of the Trail of Tears Association and former Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Justice, as well as Cherokee elder and Georgia chapter TOTA President Tony Harris. Special guests include Melanie Fourkiller and Paisley Fourkiller, descendants of the Fourkiller family who once lived near what is now the Reinhardt University campus, on Shoal Creek, next door to the Reinhardt family. The Fourkillers were forcibly removed from the area on the Trail of Tears in 1838, and this will mark their first return to their ancestral homestead.

The event begins at 2 p.m. It is free but seating is limited.

The New Year + Indian Flaggery

Posted on by

Thanks to Jeff Bishop, director of the Funk Heritage Center, for lending us the space yesterday for our history program pop-up party to start off the new academic year. A good time was had by all!

In keeping with one of the themes of this blog, here are images of the flags hanging in the main hall, representing the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of the American southeast. 

The flag of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, one of three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes in the United States. 

Flag of the Chickasaw Nation, also headquartered in Oklahoma. 

There is a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, but this flag is of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. A third Choctaw band claims Jena, Louisiana as its home.

The flag of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, or as it says on the flag, “Indian Territory.”

The flag of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma does not appear, but that of the Seminole Tribe of Florida does. 

Finally, what does this sixth flag mean? It’s a great design, but apparently it is the flag flown by the Creek… as allies of the Confederate States of America!

(Personally, I wouldn’t hang this one.)

The Cherokee Nation

Posted on by

I like a lot of what Massachusetts senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has to say, but the fact remains that she repeatedly and deliberately claimed Cherokee ancestry over the course of her academic career, for the sake of whatever boost that particular valence of identity would give to it. Frankly, I don’t understand how people can get away with this grift. Unlike the categories of “Hispanic” and “African-American,” “Native American” is buttressed by a specific legal status. The “Cherokee grandmother” (or worse, “Cherokee princess”) that you’re supposedly descended from might be interesting to you, but it is of no more moral significance than having Italian or Irish ancestors. Unless you are a member of a federally-recognized tribe, then you don’t get to say that you’re a Native American! Alas, a seller’s market exists for these claims: liberal academic institutions are so desperate for American minorities, both as students and faculty, that they (apparently) won’t investigate them too deeply. But it is still fundamentally dishonest, not much different from plagiarism, that is, stealing someone else’s stuff and passing it off as your own, which is the unforgivable academic sin.

I was glad, therefore, to read this piece by Rebecca Nagle on Huffpost Personal (hat tip: Funk Heritage Center):

The center of this controversy is not Warren’s political career, it is Cherokee sovereignty and self-determination. The monster I am trying to wrestle to the ground is not one white woman who claimed to be Cherokee. It is the hundreds of thousands of white people claiming to be Cherokee and the broad social acceptance that emboldens them. It threatens the future of my tribe. Warren is just the most public example.

When white people took over our land, they outnumbered us. Today, Cherokees are once again outnumbered by outsiders, claiming not our land, but our identity. In the last U.S. census, there were more white people claiming to be Cherokee than there are Cherokee citizens enrolled in our tribes. These fakes are writing our history, selling our art, representing us to the United Nations, fighting for the same legal status as our tribe, and stealing millions of dollars from federal programs set aside for people of color. And they all have stories that sound just like Warren’s. 

Read the whole thing. 

Appalachian English

Posted on by

From Appalachian Magazine (hat tip: Funk Heritage Center):

Appalachian English: Why We Say “Warsh Rag” & “Low Tar”

The world that I knew as a kid was far different than that of most other children; however, at the time, I had no idea.  I thought that every child had grandfathers who were coalminers, a father who bucket fed orphaned calves, a grandmother who spoke about Jesus as though she knew him personally and a mother who wasn’t above forcing her disobedient son to snap a green branch from the willow tree out in the front yard.

I grew up Appalachia and Appalachia was all I knew.

It was not until I reached the golden age of 18 and moved away to college in a distant city that I slowly began to realize just how unique and wonderful my life’s experiences had been compared to so many others.

My first day of living in a freshman dormitory, I evoked the laughter of the entire floor when I used the word “warsh rag” to describe the newly purchased wash cloths my mother had included in my bag of necessities.

In the world that I came to age in, that’s what they were called and that was the only thing they were called.

In the days, weeks and years that followed, I would one by one learn that the way we spoke as a child was far different than how most others talked.

To my astonishment, I discovered that a “mountain holler” was actually spelled an pronounced as “hollow”, I also faced criticism for pronouncing wire as “war”, fire as “far”, and tired as “tarred”.

Through the years, my classmates, teachers and employers have all attempted to either correct my pronunciations or berate me for speaking this way; however, I have since learned to be proud of my Appalachian-English and that there are many linguistic experts who have come to our defense in recent years.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of the Funk, I’m looking forward to a presentation there this week:

“Archaeology of the Cherokee Heartland”

Join us this Thursday, Feb. 7, at 2 p.m. when we host Dr. Benjamin Steere of Western Carolina University. Dr. Steere, author of “The Archaeology of Houses and Households in the Native Southeast,” will introduce participants to the world of the prehistoric Cherokee who lived in the Southern Appalachians. Reserve your seat by calling (770) 720-5967. The cost is $10 (or $5 for members).

New Echota

Posted on by

On Saturday we had the pleasure of visiting New Echota State Historical Site near Calhoun. New Echota was the capital of the Cherokee Nation from 1825 until 1838, when U.S. government forces, under the command of Winfield Scott, rounded them up and forced their removal to Oklahoma. This is the infamous Trail of Tears, and a monument commemorates this as you arrive at the visitors’ center.

The flag on the left is that of the United Keetoowah Band, and the flags on the right are those of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Cherokee Nation, the three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes. (The United Keetoowah Band and the Cherokee Nation are headquartered in Tahlequah, Okla., while the Eastern Band is headquartered in Cherokee, N.C.)

A plan of the site. Alas, the Worcester House (8) is the only original building here. This was the home of Samuel Worcester, a missionary to the Cherokee and publisher of the Cherokee Phoenix (see below). Convicted by the state of Georgia for living in Cherokee territory without a license, Worcester appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the Georgia law unconstitutional, as it was the federal government that had the exclusive right to treat with Native Americans. President Andrew Jackson is reputed to have said in response that “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Worcester went west with the Cherokee and died there in 1861.

Other buildings are reconstructions, like the Council House (3), where the Cherokee legislature convened…

…or the Supreme Courthouse (4), which doubled as a school.

What made this visit especially pleasurable was to see Reinhardt history graduate Cole Gregory, now employed with the state parks service. Here he is in the Vann Tavern (9), explaining how it worked (an interesting detail: a window on the back served as a drive-thru for people that the manager did not want coming in). James Vann was a Cherokee leader who owned several taverns; this one does date from the early nineteenth century but was originally located in Forsyth County and moved here in the 1950s.

The reconstructed Print Shop (11) represents the locale of the famous Cherokee Phoenix. A friendly and knowledgeable volunteer explained things to us. The newspaper was largely written by Elias Boudinot, who believed that relocation to the west was in the best interests of the Cherokee and who thus signed the Treaty of New Echota with the federal government. This “Treaty Party” represented a minority of the Cherokee Nation, and the signatories, including Boudinot, were assassinated not long after they arrived in Oklahoma.

You can buy a copy of Vol. 1, No. 4 in the gift shop. This one contains notice of Cherokee laws passed, news of ongoing negotiations with Washington, poetry, and news of the escape of some missionaries from Maori cannibals. As you can see, it is printed both in English and in Cherokee, using Sequoyah’s syllabary. (We learned that they type foundry had changed some of his characters for easier casting – and that archaeologists at New Echota had recovered a cache of individual letters [“sorts”] at the bottom of a well, into which they had been thrown by U.S. troops in 1838.)

We were pleased to find this book in the gift shop. John Ross was a Cherokee leader who opposed forced resettlement in the west; his house is in Rossville, Georgia, less than 1000 feet from the Tennessee state line. Jeff Bishop is Reinhardt’s new director of the Funk Heritage Center and, as you can see, an expert in Cherokee history.

***

On our way home we stopped at the Rock Garden, situated behind Calhoun’s Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The Rock Garden is the creation of one DeWitt “Old Dog” Boyd, and features sculptures made up pebbles glued together to form miniature buildings. My favorite was this interpretation of Notre Dame cathedral, complete with flying buttresses, but I loved the whole thing – I respect anyone with the vision and the patience to realize art like this, like Howard Finster and his Paradise Garden.

Panel at the Funk

Posted on by

I was pleased to attend an interdisciplinary panel last night in the Funk Heritage Center entitled “The Etowah River: History, Ecology, Literature.” Organized by Donna Little, professor of English at Reinhardt, it also served as a kick-off event for Reinhardt’s new low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, currently organized around the theme of “Story and Place in the New South.”

The Etowah River begins near Dahlonega, Georgia, flows southwards and then eastwards, passes through Canton (the seat of Cherokee County and seven miles south of Reinhardt), and then joins the Oostanaula at Rome. The resulting river is named the Coosa; this becomes the Alabama River near Montgomery, and empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Mobile.

donna

Donna Little speaks at the Funk Heritage Center, 4/20/16.

Dr. Little opened the night’s proceedings by showing a map of the area. Nowadays we are used to thinking in terms of I-75 and I-575, the north-south freeways leading to Atlanta, but the Etowah and the Oostanaula run east-west, and that’s the direction that Indians would have been familiar with: thus the Mississippian Etowah Mounds in Cartersville, and New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, which was not in the middle of nowhere in north Georgia, but on the Oostanaula, which was a major thoroughfare.

Speaking of the Cherokee (who, it must be said, were only resident in north Georgia from the 1780s or thereabouts), Dr. Little publicly unveiled a discovery of hers: that during the expulsion of the Cherokee Indians during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a group of Cherokee actually encamped on what was to become Reinhardt’s campus. Lloyd Marlin’s History of Cherokee County (1932) quotes the now-lost journal of Nathaniel Reinhardt (the father brother of Augustus Reinhardt, who was the co-founder of RU on his family’s land). It reads:

In 1835, Father [i.e. Nathaniel’s father Lewis Reinhardt] bought a tract of land on the old Pinelog Road [i.e. today’s GA-140] some two miles from his mill-place, improved it and in the latter part of 1835 he moved on it.

1838… In the spring many U.S. soldiers were passing through the country for the purpose of collecting and removing the Cherokee Indians to the West. They frequently lodged at night at Father’s Saw old Foekiller, a neighbor Indian, just after he had been arrested by the soldiers, who were carrying him to Fort Buffington. They treated him rather cruelly, which excited my sympathies very much in his favor. The old Indian desired to see father, who solicited better treatment in his behalf. He left all his keys with Father. After the Indians had been collected by the soldiers and started on their final march off, they came near our house the first night and camped, I caught the measles from a soldier who lodged with us that night, and had them severely. One of the neighbors came and stayed the night at Father’s from fear of injury by the Indians.

[Emphasis added. Fort Buffington was thirteen miles from Waleska and the distance is certainly walkable in a day.]

The need for a Trail of Tears monument on Reinhardt’s campus (not just an exhibit at the Funk) is very great.

wheeler

Ken Wheeler speaks at the Funk, 4/20/16.

Reinhardt History Professor Kenneth Wheeler followed with a talk on the human relationships along the Etowah River, particularly the gold rush of the 1820s and the antebellum iron industry, both of which were ecologically disastrous. He also mentioned how Reinhardt co-founder John Sharp had promoted a steamboat service between Canton and Rome, and how William Nickerson attempted to dredge the Etowah for gold – although the attempt proved uneconomical, and Nickerson later opened a sawmill. Presumably all these characters will appear in Dr. Wheeler’s upcoming book.

RayMinik

Keith Ray and Diane Minick at the Funk, 4/20/16.

Keith Ray, adjunct professor of biology at Reinhardt (a Reinhardt graduate and Ph.D. candidate at Auburn), mentioned how the Etowah valley is one of about five or six places in the world which, for the past 100 million years or so, has neither been under water, nor under glaciers. This remarkable stability has produced a vast abundance of plant and animal species. (I had no idea this area was so ecologically diverse.) Environmentalists Joe Cook of the Coosa River Basin Initiative and Diane Minick of the Upper Etowah River Alliance spoke of the importance of maintaining this diversity.

stacey

Laurence Stacey at the Funk, 4/20/16.

Laurence Stacey, adjunct professor of English at Reinhardt, ended the evening by reading some haiku.

The GAH

Posted on by

Congratulations to Prof. Ken Wheeler on his paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Georgia Association of Historians this past weekend at Georgia Highlands College in Rome, entitled: “Racial Expulsion and a Myth of Whiteness: Why Reinhardt Normal College Abandoned the New South and Became a Mountain School.” This is based on an article forthcoming in the Appalachian Journal, which I have had the privilege to read, and which begins:

Founded in 1883 at the edge of southern Appalachia in northern Georgia, Reinhardt Normal College initially reflected a New South ideology of its German-American founders, who saw the school as part of a larger vision that included mining, business development, and transportation improvements. By 1900, however, a second generation articulated a different story of the college, in which they presented Reinhardt as a missionary outpost among an isolated and ignorant, though promising, population that required moral uplift. For the founding generation, the hilly, even mountainous, topography surrounding their school signified the waterpower that could be harnessed to power mills and factories, but for the second generation the landscape signified a geographically and culturally remote locale in which the school operated. What stayed constant was a racial outlook in which the first generation advocated ridding the area of people of African descent, and the second generation either echoed that aspiration or presented the school as though racial purification had already happened and Reinhardt existed in an all-white setting.

(Cf. VPAA Mark Roberts’s talk last fall, wherein he argued that the Appalachian “hillbilly” was the valued repository of an unsullied original “Anglo-Saxon” culture.)

Given this history, one can see why the admission of James T. Jordan was such a significant event, and worth remembering.

Congratulations are also due to Prof. Wheeler on being awarded a sabbatical leave next spring to work on his book, Creation and Destruction in the Cherokee Country: Georgia’s Etowah Valley 1829-1865.

The Seven Clans

Posted on by

Happened to see this decal on a car window in a parking lot this afternoon:

These are the seven Cherokee clans that evolved in the nineteenth century (note the Cherokee script). Justice Poteete spoke disparagingly of people who claimed Cherokee ancestry but who couldn’t trace their lineage back to one of these clans. The number seven appears frequently in Cherokee iconography, thus the flag of the Cherokee Nation (which hangs in the Funk Heritage Center), featuring seven gold stars in a circle, each of which has seven rays:

One can also see seven pointed stars on this poster, which a colleague of mine has up in her office:

 

From the Vault

Posted on by

The previous entry on the Cherokee Nation made me think of our visit to the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum in Vonore, Tennessee, which my wife and I saw once. Seqoyah (c. 1770-1840) was a Cherokee silversmith who, impressed by the ability of white people to communicate with each other by means of “talking leaves,” invented from scratch a syllabary of eighty characters for representing the Cherokee language, which continues to be used.

Via Wikipedia, this is the most common portrait of Sequoyah, an engraving after an oil painting he sat for in Washington DC on a visit there once.

Unfortunately, the museum didn’t do justice to its namesake. The exhibits were not about him so much as they were about the Cherokee themselves, with the film they show you (an hour long, as it turns out) focusing heavily on Cherokee removal and mentioning only briefly such things as the tradition of “inter-clan violence.” The rest of the museum consisted of a meager collection of artifacts, rather poorly displayed. We both thought that if it’s being billed as a Sequoyah museum they should focus on him and then branch out into other issues that he represents: the historic identity of the Cherokee, their contact with Europeans, the whole question of what literacy does to people (including the history of the Cherokee Phoenix), and the question of acculturation: how do we deal with Europeans, by resisting them, or imitating them? Of course you then could still talk about how even the latter didn’t save the Cherokee, due to the stunning bad faith of Andrew Jackson, et al., but you could then follow Sequoyah out to Oklahoma and tell about how the band survives out there to this day.