Dear Colleague,
Thank you for your interest in “Beyond the Trail of Tears: A View from the Cherokee Homeland,” a Summer Institute for School Teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and hosted by the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). This three-week Institute will be located in Cullowhee, North Carolina and surrounding locations from Sunday June 29 to Saturday July 19, 2014. The NEH’s Summer Institutes for School Teachers provide an un-equaled opportunity for deep engagement with humanities content presented by noted scholars, as well as rich professional growth afforded through a learning community comprised of colleagues from throughout the country.
This is the first time that “Beyond the Trail of Tears: A view from the Cherokee Homeland” has been offered as a NEH Institute for School Teachers and I am particularly pleased to be the director, as the mountains of western North Carolina are also my homeland. I mention this because “place” will be an important concept in this institute. Tom Belt, a member of the institute faculty, states, “Among Native Americans, you don’t come from a place, you are of a place. Our name for ourselves is Gituhwa-gi, the people of Kituwah. A connection to the place designates who you are.” Given this understanding, one can begin to imagine the deep significance that relocation had for Indian peoples and specifically for the Cherokees.
This letter should give you a sense of the goals and activities that are designed to guide our study over the course of the Institute. It should answer your questions regarding the specific content to be addressed, weekly readings, field trips, housing, Institute faculty, and the application process. I also encourage you to consult the project’s website at www.nccat.org/neh for more detailed information. You may also feel free to contact me at [email protected].
A Brief Overview of Institute Content
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the US government shifted its policy regarding American Indians from one of assimilation to that of relocation. This forced removal of thousands of American Indians from their homes in the East to land west of the Mississippi River, often referred to as the Trail of Tears, is a complex and difficult story on numerous levels. Indian removal was not one event but a decades-long struggle between tribes, the US government, and the various state governments surrounding Indian-held lands. Changes in political leadership, diplomatic strategies, lobbying efforts, communication, and negotiation were, in the end, largely ineffective in the battle to maintain traditional homelands. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the stage for the ultimate outcome for most of the Indian peoples in the southeastern states. By 1837, 46,000 had been removed, opening up twenty-five million acres for predominantly white settlement.
In this Institute, we will examine the removal, its causes and its consequences, through the history of the Cherokee experience. The story of the Cherokee removal cannot substitute as the story for all tribes, but it can exemplify this American saga and provide a window into underlying cultural and economic tensions that form a recurring theme in conflicts between people across time.
Collectively, Cherokees comprise the second largest group of American Indians in the present-day United States. The Eastern Band is a federally recognized tribe with more than 13,000 members; the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma includes more than 200,000 tribal members; and another 15,000 are members of the United Keetoowah Band. Although they are now geographically dispersed, they all trace their roots to the ancient mountains of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern South Carolina, and northern Georgia. Cherokee place names dominate this landscape and serve as reminders that this is indeed Cherokee homeland.
A set of guiding questions will structure our study throughout the three-week period:
- What does it mean to be Cherokee, and how are Cherokee history and ideology grounded in the landscape that Cherokee people view as their homeland?
- How did federal policy toward American Indians in the Southeast change in the early nineteenth century?
- What key events led up to the relocation of Cherokees and other Southern Indians?
- How did adopting European practices impact the Cherokee world?
- What methods do historians and archaeologists use to learn about past and present cultures?
- How is Cherokee identity defined, maintained, and expressed across the post-removal Cherokee world?
- How have different paradigms regarding unity, governance, and decision-making impacted Cherokee life in the past as well as in the present?
- What lessons can be learned from the history of the Cherokee people over the past 250 years and how are these lessons relevant to bridging cultural divides in the present?
Institute Faculty
The Institute faculty will enrich our study with diverse perspectives as we explore these questions. Dr. Brett Riggs will be joining us as the lead faculty member for the Institute. Brett is a research archaeologist with the Research Laboratories of Archaeology (RLA) at UNC–Chapel Hill. He specializes in Cherokee studies and, for more than twenty years, has worked in southwestern North Carolina to shed light on the lives of Cherokee families during the removal era of the 1830s. In his position with the RLA he is helping to establish the National Historic Trail of Tears Long-Distance Trail in the extreme southwestern corner of North Carolina. Results of these studies will be presented to the National Park Service and, ultimately, to the US Congress for consideration and approval.
Dr. Andrew Denson brings the lens of the historian to our Institute. He is an associate professor of history at Western Carolina University (WCU) and the author of Demanding the Cherokee Nation: Indian Autonomy and American Culture, 1830–1900. He is currently writing a book about the commemoration and public memory of Cherokee removal in the modern South with the working title Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and Southern Memory.
Also joining us as faculty members or visiting lecturers are: Dr. Jane Eastman who is an associate professor of anthropology at WCU and director of the Cherokee Studies Program; Roseanna S. Belt who is director of WCU’s Cherokee Center and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI); and Roseanna’s husband, Tom Belt, who is the WCU Cherokee Language Program Coordinator and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Joyce Dugan who is a former chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and the first woman to hold that position will join us for several sessions. During her tenure as Chief of the EBCI, the tribe recovered the property on which the “mother town” of Kituwah was located. B. Lynn Harlan will serve as a guest lecturer for the Institute; she is a member of the EBCI and serves as the Tribal Historian. Andy Mink, executive director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s LEARN NC, will be our guide into the vast collection of digital resources that document Cherokee history and American Indian removal.
Peter Julius will serve as master teacher for the Institute; he is a member of the NCCAT faculty and supports the professional development of teachers throughout North Carolina. He specializes in social studies and science education, and has prior experience as a high school teacher and an interpreter with the National Parks Service.
Although “Beyond the Trail of Tears" is a new Institute, I have directed four previous NEH Institutes for School Teachers at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado where I was director of education for more than eight years. I am a career educator, having spent 14 years as a classroom teacher before returning to graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill for a doctoral degree in educational foundations with a minor in anthropology. My work over the last eight years has focused exclusively on leading innovative professional development programs for teachers. I am currently the director of the Kenan Fellows Program at NC State University in Raleigh, NC; just prior to this I served as executive director of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT), which is our host institution. In this Institute, as in those conducted at Crow Canyon, I am able to bring together two topics about which I am passionate: American Indian history and providing teachers with opportunities for in-depth study with outstanding scholars.
Institute Activities
During the first week of the Institute, we will be building foundational knowledge of Cherokee history and culture to provide you with the background against which the events of the removal period can best be understood. Activities during weeks two and three focus more specifically on the politics and process of the removal, acts of resistance, the short-term impact that the removal had on Cherokee people at the time it took place, and finally on the long-term outcomes realized by Cherokee communities today.
Learning experiences will include lectures, readings, discussions, research with archival materials and digital resources, archaeological field and lab work, and field trips to significant Cherokee sites. Discussion groups will meet weekly to clarify understandings around Institute topics and reading assignments. A controlled-access section of our Institute website will be created to provide you with a private workspace where ideas, resources, and experiences may be shared. It will also be a space in which you can work with others in the group to co-develop lesson plans and other materials. You will be asked to develop at least one work that is appropriate for wide distribution through multiple venues including postings on the NCCAT Internet website and Facebook pages, as well as through project partners such as the Cherokee Studies Program at WCU and through LEARN NC, an Internet-based program of the School of Education at UNC–Chapel Hill, which provides lesson plans, professional development, and innovative web resources for teachers.
A number of field trips are included throughout the three-week period, many of which are conducted out of doors and may require short hikes. Among these will be a visit to the Kituwah Mound with former Chief Dugan who led the effort to recover the land for the EBCI. The most physically rigorous part of the Institute will be a two-day archaeological field experience at Fort Armistead, which is the focus of Dr. Rigg’s research. This is one of twenty-nine forts that were used by the US government during the removal period for the purpose of gathering and temporarily housing the migrating Cherokees. Just over the North Carolina border in Tennessee, it is the only removal-associated facility that is substantially represented in the archaeological record. While at Fort Armistead, you will participate in archaeological excavation with Institute faculty and learn data recovery methods that address specific archaeological research questions. In order to minimize travel time and maximize the time for fieldwork at Fort Armistead, we will spend two nights in hotel accommodations near Murphy, NC rather than in Cullowhee.
During the final week of the Institute, our focus will turn to the different groups that formed after removal, taking a particularly close look at the history of the Qualla Boundary and the reasons why the Eastern Band was successful in resisting efforts to remove them from their land. Cherokee language survival and the relationship between language and identity will also be emphasized during this last week of the Institute. You will be given an introduction to the Cherokee language and learn about initiatives to ensure its survival through the Cherokee Language Revitalization Project.
An additional focus for the third week will be the completion of research and/or curriculum projects. These products will be shared on the final day of the institute and plans for making these available to a larger audience will be finalized.
Readings selected for the institute will deepen our understanding of the story of Indian removal and the issues identified in the guiding questions. In addition to those authored by our primary faculty members—Riggs and Denson—we will be reading selections from the works of other noted scholars of Cherokee studies including John Finger, Theda Perdue, and Michael Green. Included in these readings are selections from Perdue and Green’s The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, and Finger’s The Eastern Band of the Cherokee. A detailed schedule and reading list can be found on the Institute website at www.nccat.org/neh.
Institute Setting
The North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT), which is located in Cullowhee, NC, is the host organization for the institute. Most class sessions will be conducted on the NCCAT campus, while housing for the Institute will be on the adjacent campus of Western Carolina University (WCU). The community of Cullowhee, where these institutions are located, is near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway, approximately fifty-five miles southwest of Asheville, NC. It is a relatively easy walk from NCCAT to WCU, but you may prefer to take the free shuttles that run throughout the WCU campus and surrounding area. If you are going to be driving in to Cullowhee, you will be provided with a parking pass.
NCCAT’s thirty-six acre campus was designed to reflect the natural beauty of the surrounding mountains and provide a campus dedicated to the intellectual and professional development of teachers. The campus includes a main building with offices, classrooms, conference rooms, an 80-seat indoor amphitheater, full dining services, wireless Internet, a 25-unit computer lab, a small library, and a fitness center.
Housing for the Institute will be in WCU’s Balsam Hall. A relatively new facility (completed in 2010), Balsam is air-conditioned and consists of rooms that are arranged suite-style. All rooms reserved for the NEH Institute are private, including private bathrooms located within the sleeping rooms. Wired and wireless Internet is available as well. Each floor in Balsam provides two common rooms with kitchens, which will also be available to you. The private rooms in Balsam will be provided at the rate of $33.00 per night. A linen fee of $45 for the three-week period will also be charged (provides a clean set of linens for each week). You will also be given access to WCU’s Hunter Library, which contains 702,000 books and bound periodicals, 1,513,000 microfilm units, 23,000 e-books, and 3,330 current serial subscriptions. During the fieldwork component that takes place during the second week of the Institute, we will spend two nights in a hotel located in or near Murphy, NC. These nights will be an additional cost but are expected to be relatively inexpensive.
While I highly encourage you to stay in Balsam Hall on the WCU campus in order to enjoy the benefits of collegiality and intellectual exchange, you may choose an alternative housing arrangement and information regarding other options will be provided.
You will be awarded a stipend of $2,700.00 to offset the costs of this three-week institute, which will be distributed according to the following schedule: When you arrive, you will be given a check for half of the stipend amount; the remaining half will be provided on the last day of the Institute. Housing (if on the WCU campus), along with the cost of the hotel in Murphy, NC, as well as Institute related meals, and other fees will (with your permission) be deducted from the stipend. The experience of many previous NEH Institute directors suggests that this solves many concerns in advance.
Perhaps I am biased, but I truly believe Western North Carolina is one of the most beautiful natural settings in North America. Situated at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, it is rich in both biological diversity and cultural history. During your personal time, you may want to explore the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, try your hand at fly fishing, go whitewater rafting, or delve into the literature of a region that gave birth to the likes of Thomas Wolfe and Charles Frazier. I hope you will consider the many intellectually and personally fulfilling benefits of coming to Cullowhee in the summer of 2014 for the learning experience of a lifetime.
We welcome applications from K–12 schoolteachers interested in the history of American Indian removal and relocation. We are also happy to receive applications from current full-time graduate students who intend to pursue careers in K–12 teaching. If you are interested in applying, please visit the Institute website at www.nccat.org/neh. Please note that the deadline for applications is March 4, 2014. If you have questions, you may contact me directly at [email protected].
Best regards,
Elaine Franklin
Institute Director