Being Cherokee: Identity and the Homeland

WEEK ONE: June 29–July 4, 2014

Guiding Questions:

1. What does it mean to be Cherokee and how are Cherokee history and ideology grounded in the landscape they view as the homeland?
2. How did federal policy towards American Indians in the Southeast change in the early nineteenth century?

Required Readings for Week One:

Duncan, Barbara R. and Brett H. Riggs. Welcome and Introduction to Cherokee History and Culture (pp. 3–40), in Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Finger, John R. Origins (pp. 3-19) in The Eastern Band of the Cherokee 1819–1900. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Perdue, Theda and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (pp. 1-41), London: Penguin Books, 2007.

Satz, Ronald, Rhetoric versus Reality: The Indian Policy of Andrew Jackson (pp. 29-54) in Cherokee Removal: Before and After, William Anderson, ed., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.

Suggested Readings for Week One:

Mooney, James. Cosmogonic Myths (pp. 239–261) in History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee. Fairview: Bright Mountain Books, (1891, 1900), 1992.

Walker, Willard. The Twentieth-Century Conservators of the Cherokee Sacred Formulas (107-114), in Southern Indians and Anthropologists. University of Georgia Press, 2002.