Thesis (M.A. in Sociology)--Vanderbilt University, Dec. 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

This study surveys the dreams and ideas of the missionary movement as shown in the life of the Worcester-Robertson family who lived among the Cherokee and Creek Indians. The sources include pertinent material in the papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia; the Indian Archives and Alice Robertson papers, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City; the Alice Robertson Collection, University of tulsa; family papers, interviews and correspondence.

The experiences of minority nurses in Appalachia as across the country, from 1900-1964, varied by ethnicity. African American nurses were denied admission to "White" schools of nursing and were banned from employment in White hospitals. African American patients were admitted to small, inadequate "Negro" or "Colored" wards in Knoxville area hospital basements, which were often described a dark, cold and damp, if they were admitted at all. In response to these dire conditions, the first African American hospital in Appalachia, the Eliza B. Wallace Hospital was founded on the Knoxville College campus in 1907. The school added a nurse training program which was the first and for many years the only nurses training available to Appalachian African American women. The Helen Mae Lennon Hospital, a second hospital for African Americans was founded in the 1920s in Knoxville and also had a nurse training program. During this era,the U S government had an "assimilation policy" of "Americanizing" or "civilizing" Native Americans. Eastern Band Cherokee Indian women could be and were admitted to White schools of nursing including Knoxville General Hospital's program. they could and did join the US Army Nurse corps in WWII. The experiences of both groups will be examined along side the White nurses experiences.

In Selu: Seeking the Corn-MotherÆs Wisdom, Awiakta enlists the reader to participate on the path to knowing Selu, Corn-Mother to us all. In particular, the book provides a reader with a text that blends ancient Cherokee teachings of the oral tale of Selu with contemporary Western, Appalachian-American thought and experience. Awiakta adopts and adapts Selu in order to capture and express the essence of the tale within a contemporary American aesthetic. Though Awiakta's approach is didactic, it rises above mere teaching to achieve an aesthetic characterized by accessibility, simultaneity, and liminality. She purposely combines stories, poems, teachings, histories, and cultural reflections to produce art that is dynamically personal and cultural. The purpose of this study is to investigate how Awiakta's construction of art surpasses didacticism to express the liminality of the author's cultural identity.

The Treaty of New Echota was signed by a small group of Cherokee Indians and provided for the removal of the Cherokees from their lands in the southeastern United States. This treaty was secured by dishonest means and, despite the efforts of Chief John Ross to prevent the removal of the Cherokees from their homeland to west of the Mississippi River, the terms of the treaty were executed. In May of 1838, under the command of General Winfield Scott, the removal of the Cherokees commenced. Scott encountered many difficulties including inefficient commissioners and superintendents, drought, disease, and the wavering policy of the Van Buren administration in his quest to fulfill his assignment. He considered the humane treatment of the Cherokees to be his primary concern and did everything in his power to assure that they were not mistreated. These events led to the tragic “trail of tears.”

““Fraught with Disastrous Consequences for our Country”: Cherokee Sovereignty, Nullification and the Sectional Crisis” explores how the national debates over Indian sovereignty rights contributed to the rise of American sectionalism. Although most American citizens supported westward expansion, the Cherokee Nation demonstrated effectively that it had adopted Western civilized standards and, in accord with federal treaty law, deserved constitutional protections for its sovereignty and homelands. The Cherokees’ success divided American public opinion over that nation’s purported rights to constitutional protections. When Georgian leaders and the state militia harassed Northern white American missionaries who supported Cherokee sovereignty rights, even citizenship rights seemed in question. South Carolina’s leaders capitalized on the Cherokee debate by framing their own protest against federal tariffs as a complementary states’ rights issue. Thus, in 1832, nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cherokee sovereignty protections against Georgia’s removal efforts in Worcester v. Georgia, South Carolina issued an Ordinance of Nullification, proclaiming its state right to nullify federal taxation. Current historiography tends to suggest that most Americans at that time ignored Cherokee sovereignty to confront South Carolina’s Nullification challenge. Alternatively, this project proposes that the debates over Cherokee sovereignty exacerbated Americans’ fear over South Carolina’s Nullification crisis, because together they representing a two-state challenge to federal authority. While current historiography also recognizes that expansion was a critical feature of American sectionalism, the debate over Indian sovereignty within already established Eastern states demonstrates that the politics of expansion was not simply a Western borderlands issue. Nullification threatened the Union because Georgia and President Andrew Jackson simultaneously ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret constitutional law, while promoting the vital importance of constitutional law. To explore the sectional tensions that linked Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification, this project reviews the earlier period in American politics when these issues evolved separately to demonstrate the effect of their eventual connection. The first chapter provides an example that shows how the Cherokees protected their treaty rights successfully during this earlier period. Chapter Two considers the unique histories of South Carolina and the Cherokee Nation, and their collective challenges to the evolving American political economy. Chapter Three explores how the non-white republic of the Cherokee Nation contributed to the weakening of race-based slavery positivism, despite its own investment in slavery. Chapter Four demonstrates how a widening circle of congressional figures began connecting publicly the debates over Cherokee removal, tariffs, and slavery, made especially visible during the Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate. Chapter Five delineates the national discord over the extra-legal violence against white missionaries who protected Cherokee interests. As evident through the recently discovered prison journal of Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester—of Worcester v. Georgia—this chapter also demonstrates that despite their rhetoric otherwise, Jacksonians recognized the sectional toxicity when the American public connected Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification. / History

Globally, wind power is leading the renewable energy revolution. While carbon neutral and cost-effective, wind energy infrastructure is immobile and has the potential to profoundly change land use and the visible landscape. As wind technology takes its place as a key contributor to the US energy grid, it becomes clear that these types of projects will come into greater contact with areas occupied by humans, and eventually with wilderness and other more natural areas. This increased visibility and close proximity necessitates the development of future wind farm sites that afford opportunities for auxiliary uses while maintaining their intrinsic value as energy producers. In short, it is important for wind farms to be versatile because land is a finite resource and because over time, increasing numbers of these sites will occupy our landscapes. In the Eastern US, the majority of onshore wind resources suitable for energy development are found along ridge lines in the Appalachian mountains. These mountains are ancient focal points in the landscape, and subsequently host myriad sites of historic, recreational, and scenic significance. In the future, these windswept ridges will likely become targets for wind energy development. This thesis demonstrates a methodology for the thoughtful siting and design of future wind projects in the Appalachian mountains. Opportunities for offsite views, diversified trail experiences, and planned timber harvests are realized by locating a seven-turbine wind park adjacent to the Appalachian Trail in Cherokee National Forest in Carter county, Tennessee. The proposed wind park demonstrates the sound possibility of thoughtfully integrating wind infrastructure along Appalachian ridges in conjunction with forestry and recreation opportunities, such as hiking and camping. The design is a wind park rather than a wind farm because in addition to its inherent function as a production landscape, it is also a place that is open to the general public for recreational use. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Master of Science / This thesis concerns a predominantly white university, Western Carolina University, with historical links to the Cherokee people as well as contemporary links to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. I chose to analyze WCU's student newspaper within a 50-year period before and during the beginning emergence of the American Indian Movement to determine in what ways, if any, do students engage with settler-colonial narratives to selectively remember events and express their student body collective identity. Within the analysis process, I determined the narratives of Ancient Peoples, Exoticism and Romanticism, and Civilized and Uncivilized Peoples most significantly impacted student identity formation. My results demonstrated how students' newspaper articles intertwined campus identity narratives with a perpetuation of settler-colonial beliefs.

[pt] A dissertação apresenta uma leitura de obras do artista visual e escritor Jimmie Durham (1940). A escrita é parte fundamental de seu trabalho, e se faz presente tanto na forma de ensaios e poemas como em pinturas, esculturas e instalações. Por ter nascido nos EUA de suposta ascendência escocesa e cherokee, o pensamento de Durham transita por cosmovisões distintas. Ele provoca a linguagem, contesta os limites identitários, reelabora geopolíticas e confunde a noção hegemônica de História. Sua obra escancara os absurdos da normalidade e aponta para a permanência de mecanismos de segregação, opressão e exploração de origem colonial, instigando uma autocrítica do pensamento ocidental. Esta dissertação trata também de trabalhos e textos desenvolvidos pelo artista para o contexto específico brasileiro, e inclui a transcrição de uma conversa inédita com ele. Durham catalisa a imaginação em direção a outro modo de existência, do qual a cosmologia e a temporalidade inscritas nos idiomas ameríndios fazem parte. Esta dissertação conta com escrita de aspiração descolonizadora, acionada pela pulsação da potência estética e intelectual da obra de Jimmie Durham. / [en] The dissertation presents a reading of works by the visual artist and writer Jimmie Durham (b. 1940, –). Writings are a fundamental part of his work, either as essays and poems or as part of paintings, sculptures, and installations. Since he was born in the USA, with an alleged Scottish and Cherokee ancestry, his thinking transits through different cosmovisions. He teases language, he challenges identity limitations, re-elaborates geopolitics, and disturbs the hegemonic notion of History. His body of work exposes the absurd of normality and points out to the permanence of segregation, oppression, and exploitation mechanisms of colonial origin. It instigates Western thinking to do an auto-criticism. This dissertation also approaches texts and works he has developed to the specific Brazilian context, and includes an exclusive conversation with the artist. Durham catalyzes imagination towards another mode of existence, in which there are cosmology and temporality intrinsic to Amerindian languages. This dissertation has a decolonizing aspiration that is triggered by the pulse of the aesthetic and intellectual potency of Jimmy Durham s work.

Lynn Riggs was an early to mid-20th century Native American playwright who wrote twenty-four full length plays, his sole enduring success being Green Grow the Lilacs, the play upon which the musical Oklahoma! is based. For much of the early part of Riggs’s career, he was considered a uniquely pioneering and promising playwright, cited in competition with Eugene O’Neill as vying for the position of best playwright of their age. But while O’Neill has gone on to be considered America’s Greatest Playwright, the life and works of Lynn Riggs, save for his contribution to Rodgers and Hammerstein, have gone largely forgotten and unexamined. It is the purpose of my paper to 1) provide a biographical sketch of the man, 2) give an overview of several major themes that run through his work, and 3) provide some theory and analysis as to why the promise of this young and distinctly Native American voice was never adequately fulfilled in his lifetime. I will attempt to argue that a combination of circumstances including Riggs’s poor home life, his at times misogynistic and racist points of view, America’s inability to see Native Americans as other than caricatures and, quite simply, bad luck put much of Riggs’s writing on a fast track to failure and contemporary obscurity.