Anthropologists and Indians in the New South

Anthropologists and Indians in the New South

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES

J. Anthony Paredes, Series Editor

Anthropologists and Indians in the New South

Edited by Rachel A. Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2001

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: AGaramond

The maps on pages xi–xii were produced by the UNC–Charlotte Cartography Lab, December 2000.

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anthropologists and Indians in the new South / edited by Rachel A. Bonney and J. Anthony Paredes.

       p.   cm. — (Contemporary American Indian studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

     ISBN 978-0-8173-1070-7 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

     1. Indians of North America—Southern States. 2. Anthropology—Southern States. 3. Indians of North America—Legal status, laws, etc.—Southern States. I. Bonney, Rachel A. II. Paredes, J. Anthony (James Anthony), 1939– III. Title. IV. Series.

     E78.S65 A658 2001

     975′.00497—dc21

                                         2001001284

ISBN 978-0-8173-1323-4 (electronic)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Foreword

Raymond D. Fogelson

Southeastern Tribal Locations Maps

Introduction

J. Anthony Paredes

I. CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND AMERICAN INDIANS

1. Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees

Max E. White

2. Are You Here to Study Us? Anthropological Research in a Progressive Native American Community

Susan E. Stans

3. The Archaeologists’—and Indians’—New World

Janet E. Levy

II. SOUTHEASTERN INDIANS AND THE LAW

4. Federal Tribal Recognition in the South

George Roth

5. Region and Recognition: Southern Indians, Anthropologists, and Presumed Biology

Karen I. Blu

III. ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO NATIVE AMERICAN COMMUNITIES

6. Issues in Alcohol-Related Problems among Southeastern Indians: Anthropological Approaches

Lisa J. Lefler

7. The Newest Indians in the South: The Maya of Florida

Allan Burns

8. A Disaster: Hurricane Andrew and the Miccosukee

Penny Jessel

IV. CULTURE PRESERVATION AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

9. Celebrations and Dress: Sources of Native American Identity

Patricia Lerch

10. From Mob to Snob: Changing Research Orientations from Activism to Aesthetics among American Indians

Rachel A. Bonney

V. CULTURE CONTACT AND EXCHANGE

11. Mobilian Jargon in Southeastern Indian Anthropology

Emanuel J. Drechsel

12. Hypergamy, Quantum, and Reproductive Success: The Lost Indian Ancestor Reconsidered

Michael H. Logan and Stephen D. Ousley

13. American Indian Life and the 21st-Century University: The Playful Worldview and Its Lessons for Leadership in Higher Education

Kendall Blanchard

Conclusions

Rachel A. Bonney

Comments

Clara Sue Kidwell

Billy L. Cypress

Larry D. Haikey

Notes

References

List of Contributors

Index

Figures and Tables

FIGURES

2.1 Map of the Seminole reservation

2.2 James Girtman’s photograph of cats

2.3 Holly Johns’ photograph of her aunt

2.4 Lance Tommie’s photograph of his grandmother

12.1 Mean fecundity and surviving children by quantum

12.2 Number of surviving children by age of mother and quantum

TABLES

2.1 Population of Brighton Reservation, 1995

2.2 Languages spoken by adult sample at Brighton Reservation, 1995

8.1 Estimated damage of Hurricane Andrew to south Florida

8.2 Wish list from Dan Bowers, September 3, 1992

8.3 Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation (BIA)

8.4 Damage of Hurricane Andrew to Miccosukee Reservation (FEMA)

8.5 Meeting at the Miccosukee Reservation

12.1 Mean fecundity and mortality by quantum in the Boas database

Foreword

Raymond D. Fogelson

This welcome volume helps illuminate some dark spaces and times in Native American studies. In most survey courses and textbooks, the Southeast gets short shrift compared to the plenitude of plaintive Plains research, the surplus of salubrious southwestern work, and the fulsome fashions and fashionings of the flamboyant Northwest Coast. Part of the neglect of the Southeast stems from the fact that this area felt the full brunt of the European invasion and was thought either to have been swept up into the dustpan of historical ethnology or radically and rapidly transformed into the liminal, if not oxymoronic, status of Civilized Tribes who were scarcely worth the attention of formative anthropology’s obsession with otherness.

We are slowly coming to realize that the native peoples of the Southeast did not disappear totally through destruction, displacement, or detribalization. Just as we are beginning to link the richly textured lives of prehistoric mound-building peoples with protohistoric and historic groups through the combined efforts of archaeologists, ethnohistorians, comparative ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and linguists, so these same specialists are helping us to trace continuities and discontinuities between contemporary Native Americans and their direct and more distant ancestors.

During the mid-19th-century post-Removal period, Indians remaining in the Southeast were considered by whites to be anomalous and to have dismal prospects. Strong pressure was exerted to encourage them to join their displaced kin in the trans-Mississippi West. Otherwise they seemed destined for disappearance through a combination of physical death as a result of disease and diminished birthrate or cultural death through missionization and assimilation. Despite, or maybe because of, their marginality, the survivors grimly clung to their separate identity by keeping a low profile and staying out of harm’s way by seeking refuge off the beaten track in such places as the Everglades, the Carolina mountains, and other less spectacular but nevertheless out-of-the-way locales.

The 20th century has witnessed the increased visibility and, indeed, vitality of the formerly forsaken Indians of the Southeast. They still suffer from the effects of poverty and various forms of social and physical disorder, yet their present circumstances and future prospects are improving. They are politically adept in redressing long-standing grievances and asserting legal rights as well as achieving and maintaining tribal sovereignty and utilizing its real and sympathetic power. Serious efforts are afoot to preserve native languages through bilingual immersion programs. Along with training for the modern world by mastering technology, their revived pride in tradition is exemplified, for instance, by renewed respect for elders and their wisdom. Modernity and tradition are no longer seen as antithetical.

The New South has discovered not only that it has Indians in its midst, but also that their presence generates cultural and economic synergy by attracting new industries to the area; by promoting tourism anchored by tribal museums and such cultural events as folk fairs and festivals, outdoor dramas, and powwows; and, of course, by bringing lucrative gaming enterprises to Indian Country. The New South clearly needs and celebrates Indians!

As this volume suggests, Native American communities are no longer the happy hunting grounds of patronizing, irresponsible, and sometime summertime anthropologists. Not only do anthropological projects now need to be vetted by human subjects regulations ultimately emanating from Washington, but field research also requires approval of tribal governments. In the spirit of self-determination, Indians today specify the type, direction, and duration of the research they want done, even to the point of hiring their own anthropologists, if need be. In response, anthropologists have taken the pragmatic turn of least resistance to become more responsible and responsive to the people they study and serve. This is not so much applied anthropology as an anthropology of mutual engagement. If such changes are not implemented, anthropologists rather than Indians will become the endangered species.

This volume, opportunely appearing as we enter a new millennium, offers both a diagnosis of past relations between southeastern Indians and anthropologists and also a prognosis for the future. May the delicate dialectic continue to evolve.

Introduction

J. Anthony Paredes

This collection began as an invited session at the 30th-anniversary meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 17–20, 1996. The overall theme of the meeting was a retrospective and futuristic view of studies in, of, and for the South, according to organizers Patricia Beaver and Carole E. Hill. Such a theme lent itself very well to anthropological studies of American Indians in the southeastern United States. Hence the symposium’s title, Anthropologists and Indians in the New South: A Retrospective for the New Millennium.

What is the New South? There are layers of meaning. What it is not is the Old South. According to my historian colleague William Warren Rogers (personal communication, January 28, 1996), the Old South is not simply the pre–Civil War South: The Old South was really only the four (maximum five) generations before the Civil War, that is, approximately the first half of the nineteenth century when the South was an agricultural engine dependent on cotton as its fuel and slavery as its work crew. Though slavery had existed much earlier, of course, to the historian that time frame is colonial America. From an ethnohistorical perspective, that colonial period and the early American period that immediately followed were the era of natural historians and proto-anthropologists such as William Bartram (1791), John Adair (1775), and Benjamin Hawkins (1848), whose observations on the native peoples remain so valuable in defining the contact-traditional cultures of American Indians of the South. Thanks largely to the work of preeminent southern anthropologist Charles Hudson (e.g., 1997), scholars have now come to realize that those later contact-traditional cultures were very different from those of the peoples of the populous, complex chiefdoms first encountered by Spanish explorers. But that is another story.

In its narrower meaning, the Old South was for American Indians a time of what we would call today ethnic cleansing. After centuries of warfare with competing European powers, debilitating economic entanglements in the deerskin trade, and land cession after land cession, the native peoples were at the mercy of postcolonial Americans. In the 1820s the United States began the relentless task of removing the Indians to make room in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee for the expanding system of slave agriculture. With the Indians out of the way (or so conventional wisdom held), real southern history could begin. From the beginning, however, such a view was greatly oversimplified. It ignores the slaveholding traditions of the Indians themselves and their own early economic involvement in slave catching. And the simplified view ignores the continuing presence of enclaves of unremoved Indians in the South, even though as late as the early 1900s the United States was cajoling Indians into leaving Louisiana and Mississippi for Indian Territory just before Oklahoma statehood.

With the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the New South begins as a time period, but, as Rogers admonishes, one should be aware of ‘the New South’ as a phrase combining economic and social meaning and laced with irony. Following the forced political changes supported by federal troops during Reconstruction (1865–1877), enthusiastic New South boosters set out to balance agriculture with industry (even if financed from the North) and create a new era of prosperity. Henry Grady of Atlanta was one of the great promoters of the New South. The dream of an ascendant New South, however, ultimately was to flounder on Jim Crowism, the miseries of rural poverty for whites as well as blacks, northern opportunism, and the disproportionate aggrandizement of the few at the expense of the many. In time there came to be a certain ring of truth to the old saw that Grady’s Atlanta was a diamond in a horse turd.

The New South of the 1880s also saw the beginnings of anthropology in the region. In this older New South, while the institutionalization of the discipline was still in the distant future, the South as a fieldwork location attracted some anthropologists (including archaeologists) from the very beginnings of the fledgling discipline—James Mooney (e.g., 1890), Frank Cushing (e.g., 2000[1896]), Frank Speck (e.g., 1907), Frances Densmore (e.g., 1956). It was during this period also that John Swanton (e.g., 1946) prepared his magisterial volumes on the societies, cultures, and histories of southern Indians, combining seemingly every scrap of information available—from the Spanish chroniclers onward to the beginnings of modern ethnography in Oklahoma and in the South itself.

This developmental era of southern anthropology remained for the most part focused on Indians, but a few visiting anthropologists (e.g., Hortense Powdermaker [1939]) were beginning to look at other populations. Nonetheless, archaeological and ethnographic salvage work on American Indian cultures was the mainstay of anthropology in the South through World War II. In some ways, the works of such as Raymond Fogelson (1962) and William Sturtevant (1954) in the 1950s and early 1960s mark the end of the first era of New South anthropology.

For some historians, World War II ushered in the New, New South. And so it was with anthropology. Only in the period following World War II did full-blown, multi-field academic programs in anthropology become established at southern universities. Despite such notable early undertakings as John Gillin’s cultures of the South project at the University of North Carolina (e.g., Lewis 1955) and works such as Kimball and Pearsall’s study (1954) of Talladega, Alabama, the postwar South had a difficult time recruiting anthropologists for its universities. As late as the 1960s, the South was a seller’s market for anthropologists. Any place but the South was said to be a common geographic preference in the questionnaires applicants submitted to the American Anthropological Association job placement service in those days.

With the civil rights movement, with a growing number of home-grown southern anthropologists, and with regionally expanding economic and intellectual horizons, anthropology in the South was growing rapidly by the late 1960s, especially in the non-archaeological subfields. The era of the New, New South had truly begun for anthropology. Moreover, with the sudden downturn in the demand for anthropologists everywhere in the late 1960s—but perhaps a little later in the South—anthropology in and on the South flourished. The Southern Anthropological Society was born on the cusp of that transition.

It is perhaps no accident that a new surge of interest in the Indians of the South coincides with the civil rights movement. American Indians never fit well into the all-pervasive, bifurcated white/colored social classification of the postbellum South. In the traditional view, Indians ceased to be part of the historical landscape of the South after the Removal. The very existence of those who remained challenged easy racial classifications. Where they remained in any numbers, whether supported by the federal government or not, those who would be neither black nor white developed their own institutional life through school and church. For those without governmental support, the racism of the surrounding society was perhaps as much a buttress of Indian solidarity as it was barrier to full participation in white society.

With the coming of the civil rights movement, new fault lines became evident in the racial system of the South. Many Indians sought even more to distance themselves from any identification with blacks. Meanwhile, social programs aimed at alleviating the conditions of African Americans were a mixed blessing for Indians. Some Indians—especially those of fair complexion—were to become early beneficiaries of federally mandated integrated employment policies, since Indians were often regarded as preferable to blacks in the workplace.

Social programs like Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty brought new resources to some Indian communities as well as to blacks, but school integration sometimes served to undercut centers of community life for unrecognized Indians. Indeed, such negative consequences of the civil rights movement may well have been an impetus for southern Indians to seek federal recognition in the 1970s. For some Indians, however, the civil rights movement may have been just another historical storm to be weathered. Perhaps it is epigrammatic of the whole of southern Indian survival in the 100 years following the Civil War that, according to some accounts, the first people to encounter the burned-out automobile of slain civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in the summer of 1964 were some Mississippi Choctaws, who salvaged what they could from the wreck and moved on without becoming involved in the incident.

With the coming of the new anthropology to the New, New South, the anthropological gaze on southern Indians changed too. Perhaps it was Harriet Kupferer’s (1966) pioneering community study of the modern Eastern Cherokee in 1960—not published until 1966, the year the Southern Anthropological Society was founded—that marks the true beginning of fin de siècle Indian studies in the South. Ironically, Kupferer’s study appeared in one of the last publications of the old Bureau of American Ethnology, a series wherein Mooney had inaugurated the anthropology of the first New South era with publication of some of his Indian researches in the 1890s (e.g., Mooney 1894). (The Southern Anthropological Society awards a prize for anthropological studies of the South named in honor of Mooney.)

Much has changed in the South for Indians since Mooney’s time, since Sturtevant’s and Fogelson’s time, since even the founding of the Southern Anthropological Society. In rapid succession since World War II, southern Indians have passed through the litigational testing field of land claims cases begun in the 1950s. They successfully negotiated through an era of very ambiguous Indian policy in the 1950s and 1960s. As noted, they played upon or retreated from the black civil rights movement of the 1960s and used to their advantage Great Society programs of the 1960s and afterward.

In the 1970s, the tribes saw the proliferation of one of the country’s most fantastic arrays of Indian wanna-be groups. The adherents of these groups draw upon remote links to Indian ancestors—even if only genealogical fantasies—and adopt fanciful names to convince the public that they are genuine Indians. Many of these groups sprouted up following the establishment of administrative procedures for federal recognition of Indian tribes in 1978. Whatever might be the outcome for Indian people, all this newfound Indianness among southerners surely contains deeper historical meaning for the South as an idealized cultural type. Perhaps, as others have noted all along, the South was not so solid after all (Moreland 1971).

Beginning in the late 1960s, the established tribes expanded their political clout through an intertribal organization, the United Southeastern Tribes—USET (subsequently expanded to include northeastern tribes as well and becoming the United South and Eastern Tribes). Later, the number of legitimate tribes expanded considerably through federal recognition under the 1978 procedures, even as bogus groups were being turned away. Southern Indians led tribes across the nation in creating innovative tribal enterprises—including high-stakes bingo and casinos—in the 1980s and 1990s. In those activities, such tribes as the Cherokee and the Seminole built upon and took control of their long experience in the seemingly endlessly expanding tourist industry of the South.

Now, many southern tribes move toward a very modern cultural renewal through tribal museums, language preservation, and cultural heritage programs. The true significance of the role of the much ballyhooed success of casinos and the less noticed success of other tribal enterprises in underwriting cultural preservation and shaping contemporary southern Indian life is yet to be fully assessed. There is also rapidly growing rapprochement between southeastern Indians and their western kinsmen removed in Old South days. That coming together of East and West may have begun in some cases through joint land claims cases in the 1950s, but it is now further stimulated in part by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. Along with these pragmatic interactions have come important cultural exchanges and an ever more visible presence of the descendants of the removed peoples within the New South. Such trends promise even more dramatic changes in the 21st century.

Anthropology in the South has changed, too. Archaeology is no longer the dominant subfield in the South that it once was (at least in numbers of university faculty). Anthropology and anthropologists of the South have an ever more cosmopolitan flavor, in part a measure of the region’s own burgeoning immigrant populations since the 1960s. Increasingly, sociocultural and physical anthropology in the South have taken an applied turn. Nonetheless, southern anthropology also has moved forward along the cutting edge of academic theory. A few universities in the South have attracted from colder climes some of the leading figures of the discipline and now move forward toward creating what will likely become some of the premier anthropology departments of the 21st century.

Through all of this, the links between at least some anthropologists and Indians in the South have endured. But, they have changed. This collection is meant to reflect both that which has endured and that which has changed in the anthropological embrace of Indians from the Old, New South to the New, New South.

In this collection, we have tried to sample many kinds of anthropology in its various subfields. Regardless of subfield or theoretical persuasion, however, and whether dealing with a totally contemporary problem or applying new perspectives to old data, the authors were guided by such questions as how their work with American Indians in the South shaped their own intellectual development, how the changing nature of anthropology influenced their work with Indians, how southern Indians and Indian studies have affected anthropology, how anthropology has affected southern Indians, and how national and international developments have affected both Indians and anthropologists in the South. One of the article contributors is both an Indian and an anthropologist. The collection closes with the reflections of a distinguished Florida Seminole and two prominent Oklahoma Indians unflinchingly gazing on what anthropologists have done in their ancestral homeland that is now the New, New South.

Unlike the previous volume on modern southern Indians edited by Paredes (1992), this collection is not so much a collection of ethnographic snapshots as it is a series of studies in the stances from which such images of southern Indians have been taken. Perhaps sometimes these studies can seem professionally self-serving. Sometimes they might be embarrassingly intransigently politically incorrect by the standards of elitist humanists who have only of late discovered Indians and who may be oblivious to the close associations that anthropologists have had with southern Indians for decades.

The essays in this volume assay the varied intertwinings in the peculiar symbiosis between Indians and anthropologists so characteristic of American anthropology. The relationship is well known (and caricatured) for the West but barely recognized for the South, despite some classic early anthropological works from the region.

The first section of articles provides a glimpse of the evolving nature of some of the most long-standing links between anthropologists and Indians in the South. Studies of the Cherokee and Seminole, in different eras, laid the groundwork for later ethnographic work in the South. Beneath it all is the work of archaeologists that now becomes the framework for a new set of relations between tribes and anthropologists. The papers by White, Stans, and Levy, then, do much to put the work of southern anthropologists with Indians in broadest historical context.

The papers by Roth and Blu, which follow, are an important reminder of the broader structure of United States law and policy that has provided the framework within which Indians and anthropologists have interacted, from the Dawes Act of 1887 to the federal acknowledgment procedures of 1978.

Despite the suspicions and disdain of some academic anthropologists, in the post–World War II era applied anthropology has sometimes brought direct benefits to the peoples anthropologists study (e.g., Peterson 1973; Paredes 1976). The increasingly applied bent of southern anthropology in the New South has sometimes provided surprising examples of the possibilities of an engaged anthropology for southern Indians. Lefler, Burns, and Jessel give us lively case studies of the relevance of anthropology to practical problems faced by a broad spectrum of Indian groups in the South, from one of the oldest and most widely recognized to one of the newest and barely recognized as Indian because of their Latin American origins.

Continuing that theme in a more general way are the articles by Lerch and Bonney, which highlight the mutual relevance of Indians and anthropologists to each other for both cultural preservation and anthropological theorizing about identity and culture.

Finally, Drechsel, Logan and Ousley, and Blanchard show us how the linguistic, genetic, and sociocultural exchange in the South that commenced almost from the beginning of European discovery of the Americas can continue its trajectory into the 21st century. It will no more be a one-way exchange in the future than it has been in the past. The currents of exchange may, however, be more difficult to trace and follow as we all become engulfed in the connected world system that is the legacy of the first links in the global economy forged in the 15th century.

The non-anthropologist reader may be perplexed by some of the far-reaching themes and comparisons that some of the authors pursue, but this is, after all, a work in anthropology. It is not a treatise on the empowerment of the oppressed. It is not an exercise in atonement. It is not a search for transcendental philosophical meaning in the continually unfolding story of the interaction of native (of whatever kind) and outsider. It is not an effort to reach some soothingly definitive answers about identity—Indian or anything else—in the modern world.

Whatever personal feelings these writers might have about Indians, no matter what positive rewards may or may not have come to the Indians from the probings of one generation or another of fieldworkers, and regardless of whether the work described was pure or applied, these essays are part of the scientific enterprise that is anthropology. If nothing else, anthropology is quintessentially comparative. It is grounded in the firm belief that to know ourselves, to know humankind, we must not fall into the trap of overgeneralizing from too few cases. We must know ourselves in all the many forms and guises we humans take—constantly changing yet staying the same in still-to-be-understood ways that are the essence of our species regardless of our cultural raiment. This collection is in the spirit of the noblest old-fashioned quest for a true science of humanity. It is guided neither by smug antiquarian epistemological self-delusion nor by postmodernist nihilistic self-righteousness at being in the (temporary) condition of either the observer or the observed.

We hope that readers will gain from this very eclectic mix of essays an appreciation for the complexity of anthropological studies of, and relationships with, Indians in the South at the end of the 20th century. We hope, too, that these reflections will foster mutual human respect between southern anthropologists and southern Indians and will strengthen them both in the 21st century.

I

CHANGING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND AMERICAN INDIANS

One of the major themes of this volume is how relationships between anthropologists and American Indians have changed over the past century as many anthropologists have altered their focus from pure scientific research to applied research. The chapters in this first section examine or are examples of some of those changes.

Anthropologists at the beginning of the 20th century were concerned with gathering as much data about vanishing tribes and their cultures as they could before those cultures had disappeared completely. They sought to write complete ethnographies or descriptions of the entire culture as it existed before the coming of the Europeans, or at least as complete as was possible in those days of rapid culture change and cultural loss. Many of these early anthropologists were students of Franz Boas, who stressed holistic data collection and letting the facts speak for themselves; little or no effort was made to address specific research interests or to deal with issues of concern to the people under investigation. Research problems were identified by the researchers themselves, and the results and any possible benefits of their studies rarely found their way back to the communities or subjects of investigation, a fact that became a source of resentment for many natives.

This early approach and subsequent shifts in the research paradigm to proactive anthropology are discussed in Max White’s chapter, Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees. White discusses the early Cherokee studies of such scholars as Mooney and Olbrechts done in the Boasian tradition, shifting to studies focusing on narrow research problems and examining the present conditions rather than the past. His discussion of the more recent past illustrates the mutually beneficial relationship that can exist between anthropologists and Indians, as does Susan Stans’s chapter, ’Are You Here to Study Us?’ Anthropological Research in a Progressive Native American Community, which demonstrates a research strategy oriented to benefiting the Seminole as well as herself. Although her research was centered on alcohol abuse and treatment, she offered to assist the Seminole community she was studying in a variety of ways. The reciprocity reflected in her article reflects a growing trend in current anthropology being done in American Indian communities, as well as an increased degree of sophistication and awareness of the people she intended to study.

Janet Levy’s chapter, The Archaeologists’—and Indians’—New World, continues in this vein, as she discusses the changes in the relationships between archaeologists and the Indian communities that may be affected by their work. She points out that archaeologists now have to be anthropologists as well as archaeologists, that they have to deal with the living communities and sometimes sensitive political issues as well as with the remains of their ancestral cultures.

1

Anthropologists and the Eastern Cherokees

Max E. White

As the field of anthropology has evolved, so has the relationship between anthropologists and the peoples being studied. Various paradigms and theoretical schools of thought have dominated the discipline of anthropology throughout its history. These paradigms and theories can be seen shaping the research carried out by anthropologists, and the history of anthropological research among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reflects this. In this chapter I shall examine the changing aspects of anthropological research among the Eastern Cherokees and the impact this research has had on the Cherokees themselves. It is not my purpose to enumerate each and every individual who has conducted research on this group, for inevitably some names would be inadvertently omitted and feelings would be hurt. Rather, I shall mention the works of some selected anthropologists and examine some of the results of the research vis-à-vis the Eastern Cherokees.

The Eastern Cherokees today number approximately 11,000 and represent descendants of those families and bands who were not caught up in the Removal of 1838–1839. The history of this Eastern Band is well documented from the time immediately following the Removal to the present.

Although poverty is present, the Eastern Band of Cherokees has fared better economically than most other Native Americans because of their proximity to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With the establishment of the park in the 1930s, tourism began and the Cherokee lands bordering the southern entrance to the park quickly became a major tourist attraction. More recently, casino gambling was established, bringing another major influx of capital to the area. For many years, few of the Eastern Cherokees attended college, but this too has changed with the establishment of an extension campus of Western Carolina University at Cherokee.

The person generally acknowledged as the father of American anthropology is Franz Boas. It is he who set the pattern for anthropology in this country for most of the 20th century, and his legacy is still apparent. His insistence on fieldwork, on learning the language of the group being studied, on taking detailed