Traditionally, the Cherokees dance to ensure individual health and social welfare. According to legend, the dance songs bequeathed to them by the Stone Coat monster will assuage all the ills of life that the monster brought. Winter dance (including the Booger Dance, which expresses the Cherokees’ anxiety at the white invasion) are to be given only during times of frost, lest they affect the growth of vegetation by attracting cold and death. The summer dance (the Green Corn Ceremony and the Ballplayer’s Dance) are associated with crops and vegetation. Other dances are purely for social intercourse and entertainment or are prompted by specific events in the community. When it was first published in 1951, this description of the dances of a conservative Eastern Cherokee band was hailed as a scholarly contribution that could not be duplicated, Frank G. Speak and Leonard Broom had achieved the close and sustained interaction that very best ethnological fieldwork requires. Their principal informant, will West Long, upheld the unbroken ceremonial tradition of the Big Cove band, near Cherokee, North Carolina.

Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it possibly be both? Why has it lasted so long, surviving through centuries of upheaval and change? Based on his work in the field and in the archives, Michael J. Zogry argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, itself the hub of an extended ceremonial complex, or cycle. A precursor to lacrosse, anetso appears in all manner of Cherokee cultural narratives and has figured prominently in the written accounts of non-Cherokee observers for almost three hundred years. The anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities which, taken together, complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as game versus ritual, public display versus private performance, and tradition versus innovation. Zogry's examination provides a striking opportunity for rethinking the understanding of ritual and performance as well as their relationship to cultural identity. It also offers a sharp reappraisal of scholarly discourse on the Cherokee religious system, with particular focus on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation.

Illuminating the historical development of race relations from African American, Cherokee, and Muskeg (Creek) points of views, this book weaves a rich tapestry from oral history accounts, manuscript census schedules, and ethnohistorical literature. The Cherokee and Creek tribes were two of the largest in the Southeast and their forcible removal to Indian Territory affected tens of thousands of Africans and Native Americans This innovative study describes Creek and Cherokee social organization and culture change in the early 19th century, uses oral accounts to examine the impact of Removal on black-Indian relations, and analyzes Creek-black Indian political alliances during the Green Peach War and the anti-allotment Crazy Snake Uprising. Two chapters contain analyses of samples from federal manuscript census schedules of 1900 and 1910, describing demographics, intermarriage patterns, and education The study also links African American and European American immigration to race relations in Creek and Cherokee history between 1880 and 1920, consulting many sources that have not been used before. The comparison between the neighboring Cherokees and Creeks in the Indian Territory shows different approaches to similar problems, documenting culture change that affected the two societies. The census figures at the beginning of the century are analyzed in terms of four population segments: black Indians, including freedmen, and post-1880 black immigrants, so-called fullbloods, and (white-Indian) mixed-bloods. The study shows how these categories became metaphors for political and social outlooks and attitudes about race and native Americans. The book ends with a detailed, comprehensive bibliography containing primary and secondary sources with guides to their locations. (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley 1994; revised with new preface and index)

Finger is a descendant of the tribal remnant that avoided removal in the 1830s and instead remained in North Carolina. Most now live on a reservation adjacent to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians the Cherokees were early recognized as the greatest and the most civilized. Indeed, between 1540 and 1906 they reached a higher peak of civilization than any other North American Indian tribe. They invented a syllabary and developed an intricate government, including a system of courts of law. They published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English and became noted as orators and statesmen. At the beginning the Cherokees’ conquest of civilization was agonizingly slow and uncertain. Warlords of the southern Appalachian Highlands, they were loath to expend their energies elsewhere. In the words of a British officer, "They are like the Devil’s pigg, they will neither lead nor drive." But, led or driven, the warlike and willful Cherokees, lingering in the Stone Age by choice at the turn of the eighteenth century, were forced by circumstances to transfer their concentration on war to problems posed by the white man. To cope with these unwelcome problems, they had to turn from the conquests of war to the conquest of civilization.