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The MA in Critical Craft Studies (MACR) program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, which was the first low-residency, full-time graduate program focused on craft studies, has been terminated. However, a special issue of the Journal of Modern Craft has been published, featuring student work from the MACR program. The essays in the special issue explore various aspects of craft, including the historiography of craft, media studies, economics, cultural geography, Black studies, and Indigenous studies. The essays also examine craft in different contexts, such as the classroom, studio, workshop, and various locations in North Carolina. The special issue aims to showcase the research methodology of ethnography and its application in craft scholarship. [Extracted from the article]

Persons with high temporal discounting tend to value immediate gratification over future gains. Low self-reported lifespan (SRL)―an individual's assessment of a relatively short future lifespan―concentrates in low-income populations and may reflect high temporal discounting. We use casino-based cash dividends among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) as a quasi-experiment to test whether large income gains among EBCI members translate into increased SRL. We used SRL data for EBCI and White youth, aged 19 to 28, participating in two waves of the Life Time Trajectory of Youth (LTI-Y) survey from 2000 to 2010. We controlled for unobserved confounding across individuals, time, and region through a longitudinal design using a difference-in-difference analytic approach (N = 294). We conducted all analyses separately by gender and by quartile of socioeconomic status. Cash dividends correspond with a 15.23 year increase in SRL among EBCI men below the lowest socio-economic quartile at baseline relative to Whites (standard error = 5.39, p <.01). Results using other socio-economic cut-points support improved SRL among EBCI men (but not women). The large magnitude of this result among EBCI men indicates that a non-trivial cash dividend to a low-income population may confer long-term benefits on perceptions of future lifespan and, in turn, reduce temporal discounting. Abbreviations: EBCI: Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians; SES: Socioeconomic Status; LTI-Y: Life Trajectory Interview for Youth; GSMS: Great Smoky Mountains Study; SRL: Self-Reported Lifespan; SSS: Subjective Social Status [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2007, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma amended its constitution to limit membership to only those who can trace lineal descent to an individual listed as Cherokee by Blood on the final Dawes Rolls. This exercise of sovereignty paradoxically ties the Dawes Rolls, the colonial instruments used to divide the lands and peoples of the Cherokee Nation, and self-determination. In the process, it effectively disenrolls Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of Blacks enslaved by the Cherokee Nation. In this article, we explore the implications of this history in the context of self-determination and sovereignty, particularly looking at the influence of colorism on the Dawes Rolls and its ongoing effects. Our goal is to share a piece of history that is often obscured or unknown; to explore how and to what extent the exercise of self-determination and sovereignty in Indigenous nations is impacted by colorism; and finally to consider implications for practice created by the disenfranchisement of peoples from Indigenous nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the passage of the Curtis Act in 1898, a Federal government commission was sent to Indian Territory to compile a descriptive list of citizens of the Five Civilized Tribes. The commissioners personally interviewed every tribal applicant. Key pieces of information, such as name, age, sex, tribal enrollment, and lineage, were recorded on cards. These interviews and cards provide an incredible level of detail about life among the Five Tribes at the turn of the century. The author describes the enrollment process in order to introduce social scientists to this unique resource. To demonstrate how the cards can be a valuable resource, she discusses a census sample that links Cherokee freedmen families across 40 years and three censuses. She then uses this data to analyze the consistency of the Dawes enrollment process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the manner in which spatial knowledge affected colonial encounters. Utilizing Bourdieu's concept of habitus, I argue that space, like language, art, and gender, is a cultural construct and that for each individual nation there existed a spatial habitus. This spatial understanding was one lens through which contact was viewed. Using the concept of contrasting spatial habitus, the article seeks to explain the actions, by both European and Cherokee individuals, during the visit to Cherokee space by Sir Alexander Cuming in 1730 and the subsequent return visit of Cuming and seven Cherokee to London. It unpacks the events during Cuming's Atlantic travels showing that both incidents were interpreted differently by each nation through their own spatial habitus. Thereby showing that travelers whether they be British moving to America or Cherokee moving to England carried with them their spatial understandings as clearly as they carried their baggage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: The research objective was to examine if secular trends can be identified for cranial data commissioned by Boas in 1892, specifically for cranial breadth and cranial length of the Eastern and Western band Cherokee who experienced environmental hardships. Materials and methods: Multiple regression analysis was used to test the degree of relationship between each of the cranial measures: cranial length, cranial breadth and cephalic index, along with predictor variables (year-of-birth, location, sex, admixture); the model revealed a significant difference for all craniometric variables. Additional regression analysis was performed with smoothing Loess plots to observe cranial length and cranial breadth change over time (year-of-birth) separately for Eastern and Western Cherokee band females and males born between 1783-1874. Results: This revealed the Western and Eastern bands show a decrease in cranial length over time. Eastern band individuals maintain a relatively constant head breadth, while Western Band individuals show a sharp decline beginning around 1860. Conclusions: These findings support negative secular trend occurring for both Cherokee bands where the environment made a detrimental impact; this is especially marked with the Western Cherokee band. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written versions of Cherokee myths, recorded in the late nineteenth century, refer to earthen mounds, rattlesnakes and raptors, and other aspects of Cherokee cosmology. These themes are manifested in the iconography of engraved shell gorgets and masks from late prehistoric and protohistoric sites in Cherokee town areas of southwestern North Carolina. Comparable iconography is seen on gorgets and masks from surrounding areas of the southern Appalachians. This paper summarizes themes from Cherokee myth and legend that are related to iconography engraved on gorgets and masks, describes the content and context of these artifacts from southwestern North Carolina, and discusses the implications of these finds for understanding connections of late prehistoric and protohistoric Cherokee towns to the broader networks in the Southeast through which gorgets and iconography circulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early to mid-nineteenth century, the expanding market revolution caused the broad distribution of a wide variety of mass-produced goods, even to frontier regions of the United States. This analysis uses the material assemblages from three contemporaneous sites (ca. 1840-50) in southwestern North Carolina that represent the households of Cherokee and white tenants and enslaved African Americans. Analyses of three distinct artifact classes suggest a homogenized material culture in which faunal remains are more illustrative than other artifact classes in identifying ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay takes as its case study the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma's 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen (African-Cherokee descendents of slaves once held by members of the Cherokee Nation) in violation of the treaty the Cherokee Nation signed with the United States in 1866 to end the Civil War. Arguing that indigenous sovereignty and political status is incommensurable with the 'internal' to the United States, the essay provides a genealogy of 'internal colonialism' in order to track how it has emerged as descriptor within postcolonial theory for indigenous peoples' relations with the United States. In order to place indigenous critical theory into conversation with subaltern studies, the essay argues that disaggregating processes of racialization from colonization makes the ongoing settler colonization of indigenous nations visible in conversation with subaltern studies at the same time that it reveals the persistent racisms that have continued to inflect Cherokee nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mississippian societies of southwestern North Carolina are generally thought to have been less centralized and less hierarchical than their counterparts elsewhere in the Southeast. This paper compares and contrasts mortuary patterns at the Warren Wilson, Garden Creek, and Coweeta Creek sites to reconstruct patterns of social and spatial differentiation within late prehistoric and protohistoric communities in southwestern North Carolina. These sites include, respectively, a late prehistoric stockaded village, a platform mound and village, and a protohistoric Cherokee town with a public structure and several domestic dwellings. Distributions of burial goods and the placement of burials indicate that some social distinctions were reflected in the treatment of the dead by Mississippian and protohistoric groups in southwestern North Carolina, and that those distinctions were embedded in the architecture and built environment of these sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public structures known as townhouses were hubs of public life within Cherokee communities in the southern Appalachians before and after European contact. Townhouses themselves were architectural manifestations of Cherokee towns. The architectural symbolism of townhouses was related to the symbolism of late precontact Mississippian platform- mounds, mythical connections between earthen mounds and Cherokee townhouses, and color symbolism that was widespread in the Southeast during the eighteenth century. These points are evident from documentary sources, oral tradition, and the sequence of protohistoric Cherokee townhouses at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2008, Bennie Keel retired from the National Park Service after a career in archaeology that spanned five decades. At the beginning of that distinguished career, Bennie worked in North Carolina, where he made lasting contributions to public archaeology and our understanding of the archaeological record, particularly as it relates to Cherokee ancestry and native peoples of the Piedmont region. Moreover, through his fieldwork at sites such as Garden Creek, Coweeta Creek, and Upper Saratown, he helped train dozens of future archaeologists, and the experience he gained from these projects served him well as one of the federal government's principal advocates for archaeology over the past three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including how racial constructs fit with multiculturalism and identity, how the Cherokee Freedmen shaped the citizenship and educational rights within the Cherokee Nation, and race discrimination in schools.

The internationally known and respected Cherokee Indian artist Jimmie Durham created the conceptual mixed-media installation The Caliban Codex in anticipation of the 1992 quincentennial Columbian celebrations that were held throughout the Americas. He used Shakespeare's The Tempest as a vehicle by which to critique colonialism's appropriation of language and its power to assert colonial authority. He also addressed physiognomy as it was employed during the nineteenth century in a pseudo-scientific endeavour to 'prove' the biological legitimacy of racism. In each case Durham employed the methods of mimicry and mockery to address the ambivalent relationship between the coloniser and the colonised as it continues to be experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective social status (SSS) is associated with physical and mental health in diverse samples. However, community, cultural, and ethnic influences on SSS are poorly understood, especially among rural and American Indian populations. We aimed to examine similarities and differences in how community poverty, family context, and life course attainment predict SSS among Cherokee and White youth in Appalachia. We assessed culturally and developmentally appropriate aspects of life course attainment among 344 Cherokee and White youth (age 19-24) using the Life Trajectory Interview for Youth (Brown et al. 2006. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, 15, 192-206). Combined with information regarding community context and family history, these data were used to examine common patterns and ethnic differences in community, family, and cultural influences on SSS. Overall, both Cherokee and White youth rank their families lower in SSS than previously studied US youth. Family poverty during childhood and low parental education negatively influence family SSS, Cherokee youth rank higher on subjective socioeconomic status (SES) than Whites, as do participants in high poverty areas. However, White youth rank higher on peer SSS. Ethnographically generated items perform better than standard demographic markers in predicting SSS. Educational attainment is associated with peer SSS among Cherokee (but not White) youths. Cultural identity, community context, and local reference groups are crucial determinants of SSS. Both White and Cherokee youth in Appalachia exhibit SSS rankings consistent with socioeconomic and cultural marginalization. On a local scale, however, living in high poverty areas or minority communities may buffer individuals from some negative social comparisons regarding subjectively perceived SES. Meanwhile, social monitoring in small minority communities may constrain optimistic bias in assessments of peer popularity and status. Social ecology, family context, and individual attainment appear to exert distinctive influences on SSS across different cultural and ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines nineteenth-century local, regional and national newspaper coverage of the first-major American gold rush, which began in 1828 when as many as 20,000 people headed to the hills of northern Georgia to seek their fortunes. So much gold was discovered that a United States Mint was established in Dahlonega, Georgia, a town named for the Cherokee word for gold. The mint produced more than $100,000 during its first year, and more than one-and-a-half million coins by the time it closed in 1861. Accounts of this gold rush are ‘as fascinating as any fiction’, yet unlike the storied gold stampedes in California, Colorado, Alaska and the Black Hills, the Georgia rush has been lost to American collective memory. The purpose of this article is to seek to understand why. Despite boosterism and increasing nostalgia in coverage, the story was overshadowed by the Civil War, the exploitation of the Cherokee, the hardships of Reconstruction and the sensationalized gold rushes in the American West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines in the Israel-Palestine context, the displacement of the Cherokees by North American colonists. Treaty violations; American War of Independence; Israel's `iron fist' policy; John C. Calhoun's ultimatum; New Enchota accord sealing Cherokee removal; Cherokee `self-rule'; Lack of sovereignty and land base.

Analyzes the perspective of the Cherokee tribe on the trust relationship. Reciprocal responsibilities of the tribe and the United States to maintain positive relationships toward one another; Regenerative concept of trust practiced by the Cherokees; Impact of the trust concept on the tribe's political and legal relations with the government.

Features the Cherokee Nation Youth Fitness Camp. Need for intervention to the cultural genocide of native Americans; Philosophy of the camp; Camp schedules and programs. INSET: Untitled (history of Cherokee Nation Youth Fitness Camp)..