30th Anniversary Edition of Snowbird Cherokees
Douglas Hume
Press Release
Sharlotte Neely, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northern Kentucky University
Publication of 30th Anniversary Edition of Snowbird Cherokees
The 30th Anniversary Edition of Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence is in the process of being printed. The ISBN number is 978-0-8203-6092-8. It is published by the University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia 30602, www.ugapress.org and sells for $23.95. Since its original publication the book has inspired a documentary film of the same name and remains the only ethnographic study of Snowbird, North Carolina, a remote mountain community of Cherokees who are regarded as simultaneously the most traditional and the most adaptive members of the entire tribe.
On this October 1st, 2021, the University of Georgia Press will publish the 30th anniversary edition of my book, Snowbird Cherokees. The date is meant to coincide with the annual Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’ (EBCI) Cherokee Indian Fair in Cherokee, North Carolina.
The new thing about this new edition is a foreword co-authored by Trey Adcock, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma Cherokees) and Gil Jackson who is a graduate of the University of Georgia, an enrolled member of the EBCI (North Carolina Cherokees), a Snowbird Cherokee, and an old friend. Both Trey and I earned our PhDs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—Trey in 2012 in education (culture, curriculum, and change) and me in 1976 in anthropology (ethnology and social anthropology). I have signed over all royalties from this edition to the two of them as they continue their efforts to save the Cherokee language. A small portion of the new foreword will be written in Cherokee. Both Trey and Gil are fluent in the language.
Among other things Trey writes: “I first came across Sharlotte’s work, both her Master’s thesis on education in the Snowbird community and the only major academic work published on the community, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence, during my time as a PhD student in the Culture, Curriculum and Change program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“As an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, I was researching the experiences of American Indians across the educational spectrum and Sharlotte’s thesis provided a rare glimpse into the role day schools played in the BIA system. Snowbird Cherokees was also a refreshing break from overly generalized anthropological narratives that fetishized and distorted people as objects. I was immediately struck by both the depth of the analysis and the care in which she undertook the work. This was different. The voice of the community was at the center of the study, not her own.”
It was fun having Trey and Gil write the foreword. Way back when I was a grad student at UNC-CH, anthropology professor Dr. John Gulick was encouraged to allow another edition of his famous book, Cherokees at the Crossroads, to be published. The book was based on a huge late 1950s project through UNC-CH’s Institute for Research in Social Science by John and his UNC-CH and other graduate students to study the EBCI, and John thought the book was dated. So, he asked me, a grad student just starting my MA thesis research with the Cherokees, to write an epilogue, which I did. It’s nice now to be able to offer the same kind of opportunity to a new generation of Cherokee researchers.
The contact person at the University of Georgia Press is Nathaniel F. “Nate” Holly, a scholar of the Cherokees in his own right, who can be reached at nfh...@uga.edu. I can be reached at sharlott...@gmail.com.
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