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.

Cherokee ceremonial dances and costumes are described, explained, and illustrated in full color in this beautiful how-to-do book. With a practical and usable approach using many illustrations and easy-to-follow sketches.

This study considers the Cherokee Booger Dance as a purely religious phenomenon by reinterpreting anthropologist Frank G. Speck's observations of a performance held by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians through the lens of Mircea Eliade's theory of religion.

Unto These Hills: A Drama of the Cherokee

This first collection of plays by an Indian playwright presents a spectrum of Indian life that ranges in time from the past to the present and on into the future. Body Indian, the earliest, most widely performed, and most highly acclaimed of Geiogamah's plays, deals with a problem of the present -Indian alcoholism. But the play is not so much about alcoholism as it is about the social and moral obligations that Indian people owe to one another. Foghorn, through the use of humor rather than bitterness, tries to exorcise the harmful stereotyping that often stands in the way of non-Indians' understanding of Indians, and even on occasion of Indians' own appreciation of themselves. In the play 49 the author links the past with the present and points a road to the future. Here the approach is synchronic rather than diachronic. The value of Indian traditions is emphasized -but only where those traditions are used imaginatively and not treated as ossified relics to be blindly venerated. 49 celebrates the continuity of Indian life in the vigor of new forms and with an abiding optimism. This collection of plays-all widely performed and seriously and extensively reviewed-adds a new and important voice to the small body of Indian authors who write about their own people.

"In these essays a distinguished historian analyzes how the Indian nations of the Southeast grappled with nationalism, slavery, and missionaries. Against the background of this "combined onslaught on their cultural identity," McLoughlin describes what the Indians did "to preserve what they considered most important." The fate of Native Americans was inextricably bound up with the most vital questions of national life"--Publisher's description.

Retelling 30 myths and legends of the Eastern Cherokee, this book presents the stories with important details providing a culturally authentic and historically accurate context. Background information is given within each story so the reader may avoid reliance on glossaries, endnotes, or other explanatory aids. The reader may thus experience the stories more as their original audiences would have. This approach to adapting traditional literature derives from ideas found in reader-response and translation theory and from research in cognitive psychology and sociolinguistics.