Wait! Casinos, aren’t the only Cherokee Culture?

“Made in China,” reads the sticker on the backside of my rubber Tomahawk. As you drive through the downtown area you see Native Americans in full suit, and I don’t mean button up and tie. Yes, they are dressed like not so true Native Americans from the past. The article is certain to tell us that this is not the true Native American culture.

Driving on into Cherokee you will see a Visitors Center/Museum, it contains many artifacts of Cherokee culture, and they aren’t made of rubber. The Native American ancestors of this region are very excited in sharing with visitors their culture; they are the first to tell you that Native American life is nothing mike depicted in comic books or western movies. This Mecca of artifacts offers tours every ten minutes and shows off Native American beadwork, pottery, canoe hulling, blowguns, weaving, arrowheads, dwellings and more.

As an outsider coming into this culture it would be a good idea to think about these possessions in the Museum as items in your home. Asking the right questions isn’t always the biggest thing when observing a difference in culture, especially when you are in the position where you can sit and listen to others questions.

The article includes broad information to the true and not so true culture of that Native Americans. It also tells of a place in the area that a visitor can go to find out specific information about the culture. During these demonstrations one can learn specific information, however a fieldworker could go and listen to questions from specific visitors or even ask questions that have to do with the project that they are doing. In example if the fieldworker was doing research on growing plants and how Native American in the past they could ask the person demonstrating the Agriculture part of the tour. The fieldworker wouldn’t want his questions to get a broad sense of how they produced bigger better plants in the past. They wouldn’t want the answer, “Well they put fish into the ground when they are planting the crops.” A fieldworker would want to know how and why they did this, when they began doing it. What effect did it have on the plant? How much bigger were they?

As far as an overall picture of the culture of the Cherokee, a fieldworker may want to know why they are so keen on telling visitors about the true culture of their ancestors. Why did they stop doing certain things their ancestors did ect? As a fieldworker, you want accurate answer to the questions you are answering; therefore it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some research on how it was done in an encyclopedia. Then use that information to ask specific technical questions to the tour guides in this specific example.

Native American culture is a very deep and well thought out culture; they had one of the first forms of written language. Also many others firsts and things stolen from these Native American in the past have had its effect on our society. But look to what degree we have forced them to change. Think about the picture we have depicted of them, big feather suits, and tepees. None of this is completely true. I hope they don’t have such crazy ideas of how we live.

http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/living/article/0,1406,KNS_2796_4858703,00.html