High Mountains Rising (4 page)

Even though the threat of allotment and tribal dissolution faded during the Roosevelt administration, after World War II there was a resurgence in the federal government's desire to assimilate Native Americans. In 1950, Dillon S. Myer was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs, with the express goal of putting the BIA out of business, terminating all tribal governments, and assimilating all Native Americans.
³⁴
However, most native leaders supported self-determination, defined as freedom of action under their own tribal governments without the withdrawal of federal assistance. Many Eastern Cherokees feared rapid termination because of continued white prejudice against them and because they were unsure they could manage the growing tourist economy without federal assistance. Only during the Kennedy administration in 1962 did this renewed threat of termination and assimilation finally end.

The 1960s were a boom time for the Eastern Cherokees. Tourist visits to the Oconaluftee Indian village (a recreation of traditional Cherokee life) and other attractions brought several million dollars into the economy. Lyndon Johnson's “Great Society” programs provided a variety of services for improving housing, education, and health.

This focus on Native American self-determination continued into the 1970s and culminated in the passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975).
³⁵
A provision of this act was that the federal government was committed to maintaining its political and economic support for federally recognized tribes. It also stated that Native Americans should be allowed to direct federal programs affecting them. The Eastern Cherokees began selecting their own BIA agents. They also limited tribal enrollment and membership to descendants of people who had one-sixteenth Cherokee blood quantum or higher on the 1924 Baker roll (or census). Tribal membership is currently closed to any new applicants except the newborn of current members.
³⁶

As of the 2000 census, the Eastern Band of Cherokees has approximately
12,500 enrolled members and a nearly 57,000-acre reservation with its capital at Cherokee, North Carolina.
³⁷
Federal authorities (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investigation) have control over major crimes such as murder and kidnapping, and the tribal police enforce lesser offenses on the reservation. Tribal government is made up of a principal chief, a vice-chief, and twelve representatives from six districts, all of whom are elected by popular vote.

Today, tourism is by far the most important economic resource for the Eastern Cherokees. Traditional tourist venues such as the Museum of the Cherokee Indian,
Unto These Hills
, and the reservation's many motels and souvenir shops are important, but gambling has far outstripped these activities as a source of revenue. Federal law does not prohibit gambling establishments on reservations of federally recognized tribes. In 1982, the tribe began Cherokee Bingo, which expanded to about 200 employees and offered jackpots of up to $1 million.

In 1997, the $85-million Harrah's Cherokee Smoky Mountain Casino opened. In its first year, it was the top-grossing member of the Harrah's chain for the entire United States, with estimated net earnings of $250 million. Every tribal member is given a share of the profits, and Cherokees are given preferential hiring for the nearly 1,500 casino jobs. There is some disagreement over the amount of casino profits being returned to the Cherokees. However, the rapid influx of funds has led to equally rapid growth in construction and development. In 2000, the casino began a major expansion and absorbed Tribal Bingo as well.
³⁸
The casino proceeds should give the Eastern Band the opportunity to develop true economic self-sufficiency if these funds are invested in diverse economic enterprises.

From the identification of the “Chorakae” in a 1674 document
³⁹
to the present, the Cherokees have proven their adaptability and resilience to severe culture stress. For more than 300 years, they have interacted with European and American society through diplomacy, trade, and warfare. Major historic impacts on the Cherokees, such as the Revolutionary War and the removal period, caused death and hardship. The Trail of Tears even led to a permanent division of the Cherokees into the Cherokee Nation (with its reservation in Oklahoma) and the Eastern Band of Cherokees. The Eastern Band struggled throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to maintain their Appalachian homeland and their tribal identity.

However, by this time many traditional aspects of life had changed forever. Autonomy was exchanged for a centralized tribal government and a principal chief. Increasing factionalism affected the harmony ethic and mirrored the political conflicts in white society. The Eastern Cherokees and other Native Americans were encouraged or forced into a wage-earning economy and an Anglo-American dominated educational system.

Despite these impacts, the current government policy of self-determination has led to a perception of federally recognized tribes such as the Eastern Cherokees as semisovereign states. More tribal control of daily activities and greater economic security have been the result. The Eastern Band of Cherokees has been transformed by the course of history into a tribe very different from their ancestors of 300 years ago. However, unlike before, they are now in a position to choose the direction of future change and their own destiny.

NOTES

1.
Jefferson Chapman,
Tellico Archaeology
, rev. ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 99; Gerald Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory and Archaeology from 1540 to 1838,” in
Indians of the Greater Southeast: Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory
, ed. Bonnie G. McEwan (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 204–5.

2.
Wendell H. Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native Americans
, 7th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill/Mayfield Publishing, 2002), 397.

3.
Leland Ferguson, “Indians of the Southern Appalachians before de Soto,” in
The Conference on Cherokee Prehistory
, comp. David G. Moore (Swannanoa, N.C.: Warren Wilson College, 1986), 2.

4.
Roy S. Dickens Jr., “The Origins and Development of Cherokee Culture,” in
The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History
, ed. Duane H. King (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979), 12.

5.
Judith A. Bense,
Archaeology of the Southeastern United States: Paleo-Indian to World War I
(San Diego: Academic Press, 1994), 183–253.

6.
Ibid., 252.

7.
Dickens, “Origins and Development,” 28.

8.
Gerald F. Schroedl, “Toward an Explanation of Cherokee Origins in East Tennessee,” in
Conference on Cherokee Prehistory
, comp. Moore, 122–38.

9.
Roy S. Dickens Jr., “An Evolutionary-Ecological Interpretation of Cherokee Cultural Development,” in
Conference on Cherokee Prehistory
, comp. Moore, 81–94.

10.
Harriet J. Kupferer,
Ancient Drums, Other Moccasins: Native North American Cultural Adaptation
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 232–34; Brett H. Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households in Southwestern North Carolina: Material Perspectives on Ethnicity and Cultural Differentiation” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1999), 2, 24–25.

11.
Theda Perdue, “Cherokee Planters: The Development of Plantation Slavery before Removal,” in
Cherokee Indian Nation
, ed. King, 115; Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory,” 204–6.

12.
Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs
, 402–3.

13.
Kupferer,
Ancient Drums
, 235.

14.
Ibid., 224–27.

15.
Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 111–12.

16.
Charles Hudson,
The Southeastern Indians
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 411–20.

17.
Schroedl, “Cherokee Ethnohistory,” 217.

18.
John R. Swanton,
The Indians of the Southeastern United States
(reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984), 112; Chapman,
Tellico Archaeology
, 104–5.

19.
Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs
, 409.

20.
Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 113–14.

21.
Brett H. Riggs, “Socioeconomic Variability in Federal Period Overhill Cherokee Archaeological Assemblages” (M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, 1987), 22–31; Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 545–46.

22.
Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 25–27.

23.
Perdue, “Cherokee Planters,” 118.

24.
Riggs, “Removal Period Cherokee Households,” 532–47.

25.
John R. Finger,
The Eastern Band of Cherokees: 1819–1900
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 7–8.

26.
Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs
, 410.

27.
Hudson,
The Southeastern Indians
, 462–64.

28.
Finger,
The Eastern Band of Cherokees
, 82–100.

29.
Hudson,
The Southeastern Indians
, 472.

30.
John R. Finger,
Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 44–46.

31.
Ibid., 78.

32.
Ibid., 79–81.

33.
Ibid., 84–97.

34.
Ibid., 126.

35.
Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs
, 54–56.

36.
Ibid., 418.

37.
Official Homepage of the Cherokee Indian Reservation, <
http://cherokee-nc.com
> (2001).

38.
Oswalt,
This Land Was Theirs
, 416–18.

39.
Swanton,
Indians of the Southeastern United States
, 111.

2

Pioneer Settlement

H. Tyler Blethen

Antebellum Appalachia was a land of immigrants. When they entered the region in the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans and Africans were only the most recent arrivals in a land that had first been settled by Native Americans some 10,000 years previously. The Cherokee dominated southern Appalachia in the sixteenth century, but there were also Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Shawnees. Together the population of these complex agricultural societies, in the late Mississippian stage of their development, was 25,000 to 60,000 people. They combined the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, pumpkins, and tobacco with hunting, gathering, and fishing. It was a way of life well adapted to their mountain environment, and later arrivals borrowed many elements from it.
¹

The earliest European expeditions into Appalachia were led by the Spaniards Hernando de Soto in 1540 and Juan Pardo in 1567; both included African slaves among their numbers. Although these expeditions were transitory and made little immediate impact on the region, they marked the beginning of a steady intrusion of Europeans and Africans, first as traders and hunters and eventually as settlers. Later migrants entered the region from several directions and followed several routes, and established shipping routes from Europe determined the direction of much of the flow. Philadelphia, for a variety of mostly economic reasons, quickly became the main port of entry for immigrants into the Southern mountains. Other Atlantic ports, such as Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, also attracted immigrants, but in nowhere near the numbers as Philadelphia. Consequently, Pennsylvania served as the major doorway to the Appalachian backcountry during the colonial period, and its topography powerfully shaped migration patterns.

As the steady flow of immigrants spilled out of Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, settling the attractive lands of southeastern Pennsylvania,
²
latecomers had to move further out to claim land. Increasing cultural contact between Indians and pioneers along the rapidly expanding frontier
provided numerous occasions for misunderstanding and conflict. When these contacts too often resulted in warfare, colonial governments responded by sending military expeditions into the western mountains and valleys to subdue the Indians. The British government tried to keep the peace by forbidding white settlement west of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the Proclamation of 1763, which sited that boundary along the crest of the mountains, was weakly enforced. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the new federal and state governments rejected the proclamation, using western lands to pay military veterans and to generate revenues. As glowing descriptions of the lands on the Appalachian frontier filtered back east, more and more settlers moved westward. Some pushed into and even through Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains; others turned southwest into the mouth of the fertile Shenandoah Valley. There the Great Wagon Road moved pioneers through the backcountry of Virginia and the Carolinas. Subsidiary routes diverted some of the flow into Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. Significantly smaller streams of settlers also moved into the Southern mountains from the Atlantic seaports of the Carolinas and Georgia.