Cherokee History

Within the last few years there has been an outpouring of significant new studies on the Cherokees, despite the fact that this group of Indians has had more attention paid to it than almost any other Native American nation. Traditionally, historians emphasized the Cherokees' revolutionary changes in becoming civilized. Yet now scholars are tending to fit these changes into a context of stronger cultural persistence and continuity. Some of the most exciting changing viewpoints have come in an understanding of traditional Cherokee legal ideas and belief systems. Building upon his earlier work A Law of Blood: The Primitive Law of the Cherokee Nation (New York: New York University Press, 1970), John Phillip Reid clarifies the legal code of eighteenth century Cherokees and how these ideas affected relations with non-Indians. In A Better Kind of Hatchet: Law, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Cherokee Nation during the Early Years of European Contact (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), Reid shows that the English officials tried to deal with the Indians as with state-level societies, but that these policies were a failure because Cherokee chiefs had no coercive powers to command individuals. Legal codes were enforced by the clans, and there was no strong national leadership class. While Reid may have overreacted against Fred Gearing's emphasis on the influence of priests and warriors, his books contribute to a better conception of early contact Cherokees. Likewise, Rennard Strickland, Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975) also focuses on legal aspects. Strickland's main point is that the changes in adaptation to white pressures were not a dramatic shift from savagism to civilization, but were a more gradual evolutionary adaptation of traditional forms. The 1827 Cherokee Constitution functioned to preserve many of the

Archaeology · Cherokee · Genealogy · Archaeology and Natural History · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology

• The Oppositional Paradigm of Purity versus Pollution in Charles Hudson's

  Mary C Churchill•The American Indian Quarterly•1996

  Add to list