Brett Riggs

Partial Transcript: Well, I’m Brett Riggs, Sequoyah professor of Cherokee Studies here at Western Carolina University. I have sort of what has now turned into a lifelong interest in Cherokee heritage, history, and culture, and also a lifelong interest in string band music. And so, you know, sometimes we see the intersection of those interests.

Partial Transcript: Well, I think as a child, I was marked or influenced by an early family vacation to Cherokee, North Carolina. And in terms of music, when I was a teenager, a banjo player was stranded at our house in a blizzard. And so I picked up the banjo.

Partial Transcript: I think it’s important to understand that there were—for many, many thousands of years—vibrant societies here in the Southern Mountains—residents here. Before any British settlers came into the region to settle permanently, they were preceded by people from Great Britain, people from Spain, and other nationalities who’d made contact with that native people of this region who had regular interactions with the people in this region and who sometimes resided among the native people in this region. So that by the time the first English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish settlers entered this area, there was already a string music tradition that was fixed and vibrant in the native societies particularly in this area, in this region here among Cherokee Indians.
We know, for instance, that fiddle music was actually fairly common in the Cherokee nation at least as early as the 1790s, probably as early as the 1760s, 1770s, introduced into this area by English Scotch traders, many of whom were resident for at least part of the year in these Cherokee communities. And they brought with them some of the music from their homelands, and the setting was such that it allowed for syncretism to develop so that by the time a traveler who left his journal which is almost a travel log, John Norton visited the Cherokee nation in 1809, I believe it was. He found fiddle music all over the place. He found people who are building fiddles. He observed dances where there might be a dance done to fiddle and it can be regular round dance—British round dance. And then the fiddle was put away. The rattle was brought out. The song set up in Cherokee and the traditional Cherokee dance that follow it with exactly the same personnel.
So we have traditions that run parallel to each other, but then also some syncretism between those that we see in place in this region before you have colonists or American settlers actually putting down roots here. So what they encountered—what the settlers of British background and German background folks encountered was a music tradition that was already in place and yet one that was somewhat familiar to them. And that then set the stage again for very interesting interplay across these societies because music is a bridge. And we see that as a thread of communication that goes forth through time from the 18th Century up to present.

Partial Transcript: People have lived in these mountains here for at least 13,000 years. Archeological evidence would indicate that. Cherokee tradition states that they have always been here. They have always originated—or they originated in this place. And, you know, that’s a forever statement. And I think if we talk about a time span on the order of 10,000 years or more, that’s forever. So you have a society of people, a community that very deep roots in the area with incredibly detailed adaptations and understandings of this region. Two, for whom other cultural layers are added, and that’s where we see that the entry of people into various music traditions and the interplay between music traditions which you have this group of people who have lived in this area for thousands of years.
Linguistic evidence would indicate, for instance, that the Cherokee language emerges as a distinct separate language from the other Iroquoian languages such as Mohawk and Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca. It emerges from the larger group about 3500 years ago. So it’s a separate language—has been a separate language for 3500 years that’s what? A millennium and a half or two millennia more than English has. So when we think of it in those terms, we can understand the sort of the depth of connectedness in this region with this people.

Partial Transcript: When the first Europeans contact the Cherokee peoples here in the Southern Mountains. They found folks living in fairly large communal villages. These were farming villages that would be surrounded by fields of corn, with squash and beans, and other crops growing in them. Within those villages, life was relatively how it’s structured. The center of civic life in those villages would be the council house or townhouse. In the 18th Century, this was a large octagonal building with a plaza immediately adjacent to it. Throughout much of the year, that building in addition to being the venue for a ceremony and for civic events and for political discourse was also the venue for social events. And so, there were very often dances that were held every week in some cases; sometimes even more frequently within that council house. Those will be all-night dances. There were social dances, and there were ceremonial dances. And there whole cycles of dances that went on in these places.
So there was very much a tradition of dance and music in these communities that was understood by all of the members of the community, and everyone participated in these observances both social and ceremonial observances. So that creates a foundation where music, in this case, primarily a song with rhythmic accompaniment. And dance is central in Cherokee social and ritual life.

Partial Transcript: The dances are largely—there are certain prescriptions on the way that the movement in these dances occurs. It’s primarily counterclockwise which is recognized as being sort of the motion of this earth and this plane. And that motion is a balancing motion. They’re circular in nature. They’re actually spiral in nature. They occur only on the central point which is a sacred fire in the council house or in later years as the central fire that’s outside. They are led by; the dance leader sings a song that is very often call in response in nature. The rhythm is added by women who wear dance rattles that are made of box turtle shells and their cuffs that are worn around the legs so that the movement of the dance itself produces a rhythm that’s often a polyrhythm that is central to the dance. But it’s also central—the sound and the rhythm of the dance is very central to its ritual use as well.
There are few elements of this dance pattern that we see in Anglo-American dance in the Southern Mountains where you have dance figure in a big spiral that then reverses on itself. You see the same thing in Cherokee social dance and in ritual dance as well. And it’s obviously a very ancient figure in this area. Did Anglo-Americans borrow that figure? I don’t know. It may have been duplicated in other context as well but that’s a close similarity, close parallel between those dance traditions as well.
I think having this very rich context for song and dance, for dance with both rhythmic and vocal accompaniment predisposes Cherokee folks and a lot of native folks throughout the Americas, in fact, to adopting new musical forms and to take these musical forms, and not simply adopt them but adopt them and transform them. So we see in the tribes of the American South or native nations of the American South very strong music traditions that are parallel and often convergent with the music traditions of southern whites and southern blacks. So there’s this interplay that happens as long as these societies are in contact and interdigitate with each other. And we see this very fertile ground or for new forms of music or modified influenced forms of music to emerge.

Partial Transcript: I think we see parallel settings in Cherokee cases. Music was used very differently in traditional Cherokee life. The string tradition was recognized as an invasion and quite often was kept very separate. It was a new thing that was not necessarily imposed upon in older tradition that has certain associations that need to be kept apart. So, for instance, the constitution of the Kituwa Society—a traditional religious society with a constitution that was first written down in the 1850s—there's a prescription or proscription in there against fiddle music on the traditional dance grounds. So understanding that it might have a corrupting influence on song and dance that was used for particular purposes, they created—these folks created a barrier there not that people couldn’t use that music in other contexts, and they freely acknowledged that people would and were using that music in other contexts. But they needed to separate this particularly context from that music.
And so, we see some compartmentalization as well as cross-fertilization; the context in which string music and string band music were applied or contexts that were really sort of much more similar to that of the European neighbors. And there’s a separate context for the traditional sacred music, for instance.

Partial Transcript: And yet at the same time knowing that the two were not specifically intermingled, the one informs the other. So people’s sensibilities were informed by, you know, this other form so that we see elements of music from church enter into the string band tradition. And certain sensibilities perhaps about tonality move the other way as well. There were a number of old time fiddle tunes were if you break them down, you realize that these were old hymns that it just sort of move across that barrier and are integrated into southern instrumental tradition.

Partial Transcript: You know, what is today called stomp dance is very, very ancient tradition. We see elements of the central songs that are employed—recorded back in the early 18th Century. So it’s a very, very persistent form that has a very particular application. But you can imagine that for people who are stuck(sic)(??) in that tradition that elements of that within—leaked over into social dance and beyond traditional Cherokee social dance into syncretic form so that, you know, the movement in stomp dance is really very—is quite different from what you see in Southern Mountain dance.
There’s been some attempt to connect the footwork, for instance, and it is really very different. But I think that some of the figures in Southern Mountain dance might—will be informed by certain figures that are used in ritual dance. That said, there’s some very strong step dance tradition among Cherokee folks. And that is a step dance tradition that even if it does not derive from deeply traditional native forms of dance if we consider that step dancing tradition might have been brought in at early contact by British traders, that contact goes back to the 17th Century. And so that’s very deep roots for step dancing to be taken, modified, and really transformed into some patently Cherokee modes.

Partial Transcript: You know, I think there was not really the effort to quash outside influence although there was—people were cognizant of the native preserves certain traditional forms. And so there was compartmentalization and segmentation to effect some separation to preserve those things that needed to be preserved in toto in their much more original forms. But you’ll see—for instance even today—we have the performance of the song in traditional ritual settings, and tonality might—will be informed and affected by, for instance, blues phrasing. You can hear certain singers, certain leaders who will use blues guitar phrasing. And so that’s—but people recognized that that’s the way they sing, and someone else might sing it very differently.
So there's some difference in performance there, but they're sort of bookends on that. There are limits to how much flexibility there is there and how much flexibility is acceptable for one kind of performance versus another kind of performance. There—I don’t think there was very much resistance against having multiple types of performance, multiple types of music that were used for different things, for different purposes. And, you know, through time, I think it’s also very important to recognize Cherokee people, as Southern Mountain people in much of the sense that we recognize white Southern Mountain people, black Southern Mountain people, Cherokee Southern Mountain people. So there’s a thread of similarity as well that ties these communities together, and it’s a culture that has developed over time by the interactions of these various communities. That’s an overlay over the top of it.

Partial Transcript: You know, there’s been this opportunity for musical interchange actually for hundreds of years. None of these communities lived in isolation. Only prior to the arrival of Europeans and Africans was it completely native in terms of the spheres of interaction that these folks worked with. And even then, people shared songs across languages, across language families. They shared songs. They shared dances. They picked up innovation from other places, introduced it. You’ll see today when there’s some social dance going on, they might say, Oh, and there’s a Yuchi dance. And they will dance a Yuchi dance, or they’ll dance sort of a Shawnee dance and then go back to the sort of the collection of traditional Cherokee dance but recognizing that all of these together might form a vibrant tradition or a living tradition.
After the arrival of Europeans and Africans, there’s just more people in the mix, more people who have new musical material, new forms. And for people who are already very musical with the native communities here—very musical in nature—they’re really interested in this. They’re really interested in this other music coming in because music is truly the universal language. And so we see a lot of interchange going on all through time. We know—and then, of course, musicians themselves form their own communities of interests and communities’ practice. And so, you know, even in places where there might have been relatively rigid separations of different communities, the musicians are the people who transgressed that.
So there are many, many stories about black musicians being in integrated bands back in the old—the bad old days and white musicians slipping off and playing at black dances with black musicians. And so that interchange tended to transgress what people thought of this fairly rigid lines. That’s clear in the Cherokee case as well—Cherokee musicians who played repertoires that reached across state lines to different places and to different communities of musical practice. So, for instance, Manco Sneed who’s one of the best-known eastern band fiddlers, his repertoire was very much influenced by people from Upper East Tennessee, from Southeastern Tennessee, from Northern Georgia. So it’s kind of a regional style that he is part of, and he’s part of this dynamism that’s going on throughout this area of the extreme Southern Mountains here.
And we have to imagine that that’s the case through time that musicians are reaching out to learn new things from new people and that there’s always this interchange that goes on. So musicians quite often end up as brokers for at the very least musical exchange. And we might think probably lots of other constant exchange as well.

Partial Transcript: Well, there—um, many of the individuals involved in trade particularly from Charlestown, South Carolina with southern Indian nations were Scots there. There were various even sort of fraternities of traders that there would be the Hibernian society and the Caledonian society of traders. And there were people with very clear not only affinity but derivation—some second, third sons who’ve come over and entered into this commerce with native nations. Um, that commerce is not just commerce—these folks—because many of the native nations are so far distant from the center—commercial center at Charlestown and, of course, from Great Britain that these traders take up residents in these towns. They run stores in these communities. They interact, and they become parts of those communities. They marry people from those communities.
Quite often, they’ve had parallel Cherokee and Anglo families in different places. And then those families would be in contact with each other. So they again become this bridge between the societies. I think for Scots, particularly rural Scots, they recognize something about the social structures in the Cherokee nation. They were familiar to them in the way that they were families group together in parts as clans. And there were some things about the organizational structure of Southern Indians that really resonated with these folks. So they tended to understand what was going on in the society much more than, say, urban English would.
And so, we see mid to late 18th Century a lot of intermarriage and intermingled families—Cherokee and Scottish ancestry together. So, for instance, John Ross who was the principal chief of the Cherokee nation from the late 1820s up until 1866, his father was Sottish. His grandfather was Scottish. They had all these connections when John Norton came into the Cherokee nation in the early 19th Century. And he was constantly referring to this person is an old Scotsman whose—they’re living in a Cherokee nation as a citizen by virtue of intermarriage and having children and grandchildren et cetera there. So there was a lot of, you know, not just musical interchange going on there. And these folks then become bridges between these societies, communities, societies and cultures.

Partial Transcript: That phenomenon of kind of desertion from the European settlements to take up life in native communities was a constant thread in early history here in the Americas. We see it all the way back to Puritan days in New England, in early Jamestown in Virginia. This is a constant issue that people would come here and abandon or desert their colony to go live in native communities. And I think the attraction was certainly something that is recognized as an ethos that builds in America that we like to think at least contributes to the American Revolution. And that’s to try to break the shackles of hierarchical control to break out of the—away from the system of monarchs and nobles and landed gentry who control everything and keep your station in life low whereas in most of these native societies, possession in very often way did not give you any authority to compel anybody to do anything.
And so people recognized that even though they might technically be free, they were enslaved to the system. And the people who were actually free were the people in these native communities. So if they could find any connection at all, any lifeline, they would desert and go to these communities.
Interviewer
0:40:39 Those communities were more representative of the philosophy of the founders more than the actual practices.
Brett Riggs
Than the actual practice, that’s exactly right.
Interviewer
Very interesting.
Brett Riggs
And in fact, many people have contended that much of the philosophy that informs the founders, although not fully in practice, is the natural philosophy that Rousseau and other people have talked about. Benjamin Franklin very actively talks about it. There is communication to try to understand how the Six Nations of the Iroquois organized and how that system works there to inform the formation of our government. Apparently, they didn’t get enough information. But there was this recognition that whatever it was about this folks, they were in a state of individual freedom that Europeans craved.

Partial Transcript: You know, by and large, the uh, Cherokee string tradition in the east has not been well-documented and has been well understood or roughly studied or well recorded. Sort of the tail-end of this tradition in full form was captured by some folklorists who came into the area in the 1970s, and they sought out this fiddler—a man named Manco Sneed—who was a representative of a very musical family. We know that his brothers play. His father, John Harrison Sneed, was a very well-known fiddler player. And we can see in some documentary records that fiddle music in that family goes back at least to the time of the Cherokee removal of 1838. Through that very narrow window, we get some idea of what the fiddle tradition, string tradition as practiced by Cherokee folks would have been like, was like.
At the same time, we see—and that was a very old archaic fiddle styles, very intricate fiddle stylings that we use. But at the same time, we see that there was a string band tradition that moves forward into the commercial age. In the 1930s, 20s, 30s, 40s into the 50s Cherokee, North Carolina is a music venue, is a music destination. People came. It was a tourist destination. And hence, it was a place for musicians to go and make money play music. And so, there was—in the early days Cherokee, North Carolina, they—every weekend the street would close up for a street dance. And there were different musicians who were coming in joining local musicians. There were a number of musical families around Cherokee—the Suwannees(??) are particularly well known. Of course, the Sneeds are very well known in the local area. And we—while some of the early writings about this tended to pick these folks as being somewhat obscured, if we look back, these guys were actually—they were out there.
Manco and some of his associates were—made regular appearances at Bascom Lamar Lunsford Festival. That was sort of the window where everyone from distant places would see these musicians and learn about this music. There was also a form of dance that arises in these areas. It's kind of precision square dancing clogging that comes up with, for instance, the Soco Gap dance. And there’s also dance team around Cherokee at the same time.
So in the 30s, you’ve got this sort of new form that it blends a couple of existing forms to create this new form that is a show, is a form of dancing for performance. And we see it hit the world stage when the Soco Gap team goes up to Washington DC and dances for Franklin and Eleanor and the Queen of England. So it hits the national, international stage. Who are the musicians that are with them? People like Manco Sneed, these musicians from this area were traveling with these groups and presenting this music. So it really hits a stage much larger than a local stage here in that period of time.
And we see early on probably because there are big lumber companies and lumber camps just outside Cherokee, North Carolina. So at Ravensford and Smokemont, you had these big communities, these mill villages there with all these folks in them. There’s entertainment constantly coming into those places because that’s where the money is. Probably because of having that market right there, we see lots of people coming into Cherokee. There were fiddler’s conventions in Cherokee. There will be fiddle contests in conjunction with the Fall Fair which is the big annual event.
I’ve spoken one time with Bob Douglas who was a champion fiddler in the mid-south and lived to be, I think, 101. And he was playing in Cherokee in the 30s. He was coming for performances and playing for dances in Cherokee in the 30s coming from Southeastern Tennessee. And he was big time. There were big time acts coming in. There was all this interchange and interplay, they'd pick up musicians from Cherokee and go off to other places and play. So it was very much—it was the scene. It was a happening scene for string music and dance, and then a song. And that continues. It continues through time so that recognizing that this is a venue, we see Hank Williams, Sr. come and play in Cherokee which is just sort of a continuation because it’s very much—he’s the front man and singer but it's a very much a string band rocking there. And that’s kind of the bridge toward more modern country music.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. And that’s—I think Lunsford is kind of symptomatic—his attitude toward black musicians, and the appearance of black musicians in his festival in other places is symptomatic of kind of the rise and one of the many rebirths of old-time string band in the south that comes along from the 10s, 20s, and into 30s where it’s very much segregative tool. So the phenomenon that you mentioned in this presentation of this music as being very purely European Scots-Irish is a function of a movement—social and political movement—to right this interaction out. It very much goes with the Zeitgeist to the post-First World War American South so that we see, you know, very much the representation of this being an all-white music, a pure original all-white music. Whereas you’ve got recording sessions going on where there are no photographs. There’s—this song has no video because there are black musicians in that room playing with these white musicians.
And—but there is very much a segregationist attitude that carries through as a thread in a number of instances. And I think Lansford very much presented and projected that.

Partial Transcript: You know, in much of the Southern Mountains, you see that music has kind of moved on past what we would think of as old-time string band music. And so, music being very dynamic and somewhat fluid, Manco’s generation—maybe the generation right after that—really the last people who played these particular genres because everything was swept over by bluegrass, you know, by commercial string music and song that comes along. Everything’s swept over by that. And we see people all over this region—white people, Cherokee people—who play bluegrass or they play bluegrass gospel. So there are still plenty of string music there still being played. And there are people who have connections with the eastern band and other groups who are actually well-known musicians, and they’re just not playing the same music because that’s not the nature of music in its organic state to remain static.
And so you won't today travel around this local area and find musicians playing George Bells(??) or “Polly Put the Kettle On” or any of these that older canon of tunes anymore. That's just the nature of the evolution of music in communities. I’m not very well-versed—I know folks who play, but I’m not very well-versed in the modern kind, sort of string scene in Cherokee. So I’m not the person to touch onto about that. I know Eddie Bushyhead plays guitar and banjo along with Cherokee flute. One of my students, Matt Tooni who’s a great flute player, he’s learning fiddle because he wants to play some of this stuff that is not a situation where he’s necessarily earned. He’s not learning that from a Cherokee order because he just—he doesn’t have that opportunity. And that’s kind of the nature of the world.
Interviewer
0:56:01 Plus the recording industry and records had a lot to do with the fact that old-time music went—by the way, right?
Brett Riggs
Yeah. That's right. Very much so—and particularly radio because whatever’s new is coming out on radio, and people want to—they’re like, That's great stuff. Let’s do that. So at one point in time, you would people who might know everything Hank Williams was doing. But they also knew the “Lady Hamilton” too. And then, gradually, sort of things fall off at the end of the table as new things, newer things were added. So people are going to be able to, you know, play the incredibly long break from Free Bird(??), but they’re not going to play Wylie Laulston(??). And that’s the way things sort of move along in communities of music.

Partial Transcript: Well, strangely enough, I think, that was Indian identity as long as it was kind of well-controlled in the view of some of the promoters. It was a positive thing. So you have like Chief Henry's Indian String Band recording. You have Osey and Ernest Helton trying to emphasize their Indian identity in performance settings or what their connection to Indian identity would be. It was an odd phenomenon—an interesting phenomenon I should say—not odd—but interesting phenomenon where that identity is accepted as in a way a viable identity for string music, whereas African-American identity is not for most of these commercial outlets. So you have Anglo or Euro-American string bands. You have native string bands. You have African-American string bands. And you have some that are all of the above.
And particularly, I think in keeping with the trends of the day, they want to keep this very separate. And they want to make sure that African string band tradition is out of the picture. It’s okay we can record blues, but that music against white music. And so we’re not going to put you, guys, in there except for people like the Baxter Brothers where you got fiddle and guitar showing up in the most—and people don’t necessarily know that they’re African-American when you hear their stuff.
But you see promo photos of the Helton Brothers dressed in buckskin outfits with headdresses on—all of which are commercially available. They can buy this medicine show outfit. So they do that. They’re also linked into medicine shows where native remedies are seen as being particularly effective. And so they promote that component there. The—and I think there is a continuing thread that goes through early country music where the Native American—some association with Native American identity is not only okay but it might even be emphasized in some cases. So that's a really interesting relationship, I think.
Interviewer
1:00:46 It was a marketing ploy.
Brett Riggs
It was a marketing ploy very much as Native American identity in professionals wrestling. And that sort of brings to minds sort of how the parallels between marketing these people in these different contexts would be.

Partial Transcript: I think the commonly understood—if we look just at the surface, the music experience of the Southern Mountains has really been whitewashed that those other parts of the story had been left out, sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose, to effect this idea of what is pure and what is native to southern whites. Part of it is in creating an identity for southern whites that is unmodified that—which is pure, which is native and fine when the reality I think is much more interesting. This has always been the melting pot. And we see that in musical genetics. When we start looking into this music, we see, Oh yeah. There’s stuff coming in from everywhere to make this music. And then people are performing it in different venues, through different media, and then is presented in a number of different ways. And stories are crafted to fit in some cases to fit particular agendas.

Partial Transcript: There is now a fairly large community of musicians who are interested in this traditional music—traditional music encompassing any number of sounds there that traditional music is a very broadly-based phenomenon. The digital revolution has allowed much greater access to kind of the larger library of music that’s out there of both early commercial recordings and of older traditional musicians who had learned that their music from traditional sources. And so that material—source material becomes much more available to people who are interested in learning and performing this music now.
So the digital revolution has allowed people to hold libraries of thousands, of tens of thousands of performances of this music and to try to absorb and incorporate all that. So we see you might—if you’ve gone on a plane in Atlanta and flew out to LA, and you might end up in a jam, and somebody says, “Well, here’s a Manco Sneed to—" and play “Polly Put the Kettle On” or “Lady Hamilton,” whereas that would have been impossible 50 years ago.
So that kind of sharing and building is much larger but at the same time much more homogenized community because everybody is sort of like—it's all just music. I think that’s lent itself to that. What was the second part of your question?
Interviewer
1:05:39 What do we lose when music is removed from its cultural context?
Brett Riggs
I think it’s important to understand that music is not simply an oral performance, that music is contextualized, that music is very much shaped by the people who make it and the things that the inform the lives. I think we have a much—there was a much richer and, in some cases, much weirder assortment of music that developed within a cultural context. And when they’re divorced from those contexts, we lose understanding for why particular things are the way they are and the way that they work, what they do, what they do beyond you simply hearing the notes. They evoke certain feelings and, in some cases, certain actions within your contexts when we remove them from those—when we remove music those contexts, and we don’t get the same effect.

Partial Transcript: Music was very interactive in most traditional contexts, I would say. The most rural context in which music was performed; it was a highly interactive thing. There were—well, there might occasionally be music shows of some sort and other. Probably even those from were very interactive. And so now, we’re very accustomed to music as being passive or semi-passive consumer item that we consume this music, but we don’t necessarily interact with it. And in many cases, we don’t interact with it again in its cultural context. And so it loses something in that translation, I think.

Partial Transcript: I think Appalachian music both is shaped by a full motion of local identities in the mountains and shapes those identities. It becomes integral to those identities. And we live in a time when regional and local identities are just melting away. And I think we need to understand that these were valuable things. These were things that—at least some elements of these—need to be maintained, preserved because they are—there are things that allow people to ground themselves and to be able to fix yourself in a time and a place with an identity. Then, it allows you to work with confidence in the world going forward, whereas if you don’t know who you are, then you don’t know where you're going, and you don’t know what you're doing. This was part of the way people understand who they are.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. And I think again that, you know, understanding the broader story is—may lend itself to having a better informed identity; one that is more pluralistic in nature, one that maybe doesn’t necessarily serve that agenda of exclusivity that created that myth of purity there that, in fact, this music was very inclusive. And if that informs our identity, then we develop a world view that’s more inclusive that understands our story as a polythetic and pluralistic in nature.

Partial Transcript: I think there’s been a real push, a strong effort in many native nations—and I would say locally within the eastern band of Cherokee Indians in particular—to try to push back against the complete homogenization of American culture and the popularization and commercialization of American pop culture. Part of that is that the Cherokees recognize, they understand whether some people are more fully informed than others. But they do have a unique experience, and they can’t sacrifice that because they’re locked into that experience with their identity as Cherokee people whether or not they know and speak and use the Cherokee language. In many cases, you’ll find people that say, I don’t, but I need to. I need to. And that need is about establishing and reestablishing who you are, and I think that that is a lesson that we could all work not that it is something to make as insular, it's something to make our lives richer—is to try to reconnect to these identities and understand where we come from, why we're the way we are. It gives us a platform to celebrate what’s good. It gives us a basis to understand and work on what’s not good, to drive it from that.
Everything has a history. In our current society, we move so fast that we often ignore that history. And yet, it comes back to haunt us. It comes back to bite us over and over and over again. If we understand that, if we fully comprehend it, we understand what that’s made of, then we can deal with it. We can work with it. We can celebrate the good. We can work on what’s bad. And we become better as a people and as a society, and as communities, and as individuals by doing that.