The Cherokee people are one of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, they were concentrated in their homelands, in towns along river valleys of what is now southwestern North Carolina, southeastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, edges of western South Carolina, northern Georgia and northeastern Alabama consisting of around 40,000 square miles.
James Mooney was an American ethnographer who lived for several years among the Cherokee. Known as "The Indian Man", he conducted major studies of Southeastern Indians, as well as of tribes on the Great Plains. He did ethnographic studies of the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement among various Native American culture groups, after Sitting Bull's death in 1890. His works on the Cherokee include The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), and Myths of the Cherokee (1900). All were published by the US Bureau of American Ethnology, within the Smithsonian Institution.
Melungeon was a slur historically applied to individuals and families of mixed-race ancestry with roots in colonial Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina primarily descended from free people of color and white settlers. In modern times, the term has been reclaimed by descendants of these families, especially in southern Appalachia. Despite this mixed heritage, many modern Melungeons pass as White, as did many of their ancestors.
Horatio Emmons Hale was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman. He is known for his study of languages as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), is a federally recognized Indian tribe based in western North Carolina in the United States. They are descended from the small group of 800–1,000 Cherokees who remained in the Eastern United States after the U.S. military, under the Indian Removal Act, moved the other 15,000 Cherokees to west of the Mississippi River in the late 1830s, to Indian Territory. Those Cherokees remaining in the east were to give up tribal Cherokee citizenship and to assimilate. They became U.S. citizens.
William N. Fenton was an American scholar and writer known for his extensive studies of Iroquois history and culture. He started his studies of the Iroquois in the 1930s and published a number of significant works over the following decades. His final work was published in 2002. During his career, Fenton was director of the New York State Museum and a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York.
The Yamasees were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans who lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida. The Yamasees engaged in revolts and wars with other native groups and Europeans living in North America, specifically from Florida to North Carolina.
Edward Pasqual Dozier was a Pueblo Native American anthropologist and linguist who studied Native Americans and the peoples of northern Luzon in the Philippines. He was the first Native American to earn a PhD in anthropology in the United States.
Cora Alice Du Bois was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally. She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954. After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University (1971–1976) and for one term at the University of California, San Diego (1976).
The Battle of Taliwa was fought in Ball Ground, Georgia, in 1755. The battle was part of a larger campaign of the Cherokee against the Muscogee Creek people, where a contingent of 500 Cherokee warriors led by war chief Oconostota defeated the Muscogee Creek people and pushed them south from their northern Georgia homelands, allowing the Cherokee to begin settling in the region.
Tsali was a noted leader of the Cherokee during two different periods of the history of the tribe. As a young man, Tsali joined the Chickamauga faction of the Cherokee in the late 18th century, and became a leader in the fight against the American frontiersmen and their constant expansion into tribal lands. Later In 1812, he became known as The Prophet, and urged the Cherokee to ally with the Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh, in war against the Americans. Two decades later, in what seemed a fulfilment of his earlier prophecy, he resisted the forced removal of the Native Americans from their mountainous, western North Carolina towns, and as a result, a large following of like-minded Cherokee gathered to him. Following Tsali's martyrdom, the three hundred fugitive followers of his that remained free after his sacrifice became the forebears of some 14,000 registered members of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians living today in the Qualla Boundary.
Two-spirit is a contemporary pan-Indian umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional third-gender social role in their communities.
In the anthropological study of kinship, a moiety is a descent group that coexists with only one other descent group within a society. In such cases, the community usually has unilineal descent so that any individual belongs to one of the two moiety groups by birth, and all marriages take place between members of opposite moieties. It is an exogamous clan system with only two clans.
The Northern Kentucky Norse men's basketball team represents Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights, Kentucky, United States. The school's athletic program began a transition to NCAA Division I in the 2012–13 school year. For the first three seasons of the transition, it was a member of the Atlantic Sun Conference. In the final season of the transition in 2015–16, the Norse joined the Horizon League. The Norse were coached by John Brannen until April 14, 2019, when he left to take a job with the University of Cincinnati Bearcats. Before him the Norse program's coach was Dave Bezold, who had an overall record of 138 wins and 72 losses. On April 23, 2019 Darrin Horn was hired as head coach by Northern Kentucky. Since joining Division I in 2012–13, the Norse have made three NCAA tournament appearances, most recently in 2023.
Maggie Axe Wachacha (1892–1993) was renowned for reinvigorating Cherokee culture and for her work in ethnobotany.
Hazel Manross Whitman Hertzberg was an American historian. Her scholarship focused on the Indigenous people of North America. She was a professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Marcia Alice Herndon was an American ethnomusicologist and anthropologist. She specialized in the ways culture and music reflect each other. Herndon grew up in a family of country music performers in North Carolina. After completing her master's degree in 1964 at Tulane University, she performed classical music for several years. Earning a PhD in anthropology and ethnomusicology in 1971, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. She is widely known for her contributions to Native American music studies with books such as Native American Music, as well as collaborating on Music as Culture, and Music, Gender, and Culture, which analyze the overlapping of musical forms and cultural structures.
The Cherokee One Feather is an English language newspaper in North Carolina published on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina. It has been published since at least 1967. Robert Jumper is its editor.
