Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it be both? Today on our blog Michael J. Zogry, author of Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity (University of North Carolina Press), describes the junctures between ritual, sport, and identity:

How the Cherokee Ball Game Confounds the Sport vs. Ritual Dichotomy

By Michael J. Zogry

In daily life people often speak of sports as being “like” religion, and certain people avow that a particular sport is their religion. Other opinions of sport recognize ceremonial, perhaps even religious behaviors on the part of individuals participating in or attending sporting events, but stop short of labeling them as religions. As a scholar in the academic study of religions, I have long been interested in this phenomenon. For many years, the prevailing scholarly standpoint seemed to be that games, including the subset of sport, were not religious activities, no matter how closely they seemed to resemble them. I began to investigate why it is that standard European-American conceptions of religion did not include athletic activities, and searched for the answer to this question: Can a game be a ritual? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had argued no in the 1960s, and I was surprised that many contemporary scholars relied upon his work to conclude the same. But I was not convinced by his argument, so I set out to determine an answer for myself; this was the genesis of my book about anetso, the Cherokee ball game.

A few weeks ago this blog hosted several links to stories about the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team. This single-racket and ball activity is deeply rooted in the cultures of the member Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, as it is in the cultures of neighbor nations such as the Huron and Passamaquody. These racket games generally are regarded to be precursors to the sport of field lacrosse, the rules of which were codified in 1867. By then the indigenous games in this geographical region were well-established; the Jesuit father Jéan de Brebeuf, stationed in what was then New France, had written about the Huron game in 1636.

In fact, racket and ball games have a long history among First Nations who once or still hold lands along the eastern seaboard of North America, throughout the interior of the what is now the southeastern United States,  in the Great Lakes region and immediately westward, not to mention in certain areas of present-day California, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest.  In the land area that is now the southeastern United States the double-racket and ball game has been most prevalent, among nations such as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Seminole and member nations of the Muskogee (Creek) Confederacy.

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, certain members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation have continued a centuries-long practice by engaging in a:ne:tso (anetso), what has, in English parlance, come to be called the “Cherokee ball game.”  Noted as early as 1714 in non-Cherokee written accounts, missionaries, ethnographers and other itinerant travelers have described and discussed anetso regularly for almost three centuries.

Furthermore, Cherokee cultural narratives (“myths”; I choose not to use this term because it implies the story is false) record games that were played by “other-than-human persons” even before humans inhabited the earth. In the foundational cultural narrative of Kanati and Selu, the first Cherokee man and woman, the phrase “to play ball against” is used as a figure of speech. This narrative is analogous to the Hebrew Bible story of Adam and Eve, and other narratives in which individuals play anetso are of the same significance as those contained in other texts considered to be key components of particular religious systems.

Ostensibly an athletic contest that at one time pitted teams from the local community against one another in a regular seasonal schedule of games, it is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. However, interpreted as “game” within a broader framing of “religion,” anetso simultaneously resists and problematizes such classifications. Anetso, as an event, is itself the focus and hub of a “ceremonial complex” (or cycle), an extended series of activities that historically has featured virtually every activity that Cherokee people and non-Cherokee observers have identified as elemental of Cherokee “religion” or “ritual.”

Considered as a unit, the anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities that complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as ritual vs. game, public display vs. private performance and tradition vs. innovation. Over centuries the ceremonial complex has undergone alteration, yet a ritual history of anetso reveals that the activity itself as well as several of the constituent activities of the complex have shown remarkable persistence, disputing the trajectory of decline and degeneration plotted even in the recent past by many scholars of First Nations’ cultures. For centuries anetso also has been a staple of public performances for the benefit of visitors.

At the present time, typically two or three games of anetso are played once a year during the Cherokee Fall Fair, attended by Cherokee people from the local area and a number of tourists. As such it can be interpreted as a marker of cultural identity that Cherokee people perform or self-present to a diverse crowd of spectators, both community members as well as other onlookers. For certain participants and observers alike anetso has remained vital as a series of practices as well as a symbolic link to a shared history, a distinctly emic vehicle of cultural identity and sometimes even a packaged response to the objectifications of tourists, academic and otherwise.

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Michael J. Zogry is an associate professor of religious studies at University of Kansas. His new book Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity, is now available from University of North Carolina Press. This year, the Cherokee Fall Fair will be October 5-9 at the Cherokee Indian Fair Grounds in Cherokee, North Carolina.

In the introduction to her book, Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita, Jennifer Nez Denetdale speaks of traveling to the Southwest Museum in Pasadena, California to view photographs of her great-great-great grandmother, Juanita, as well as her woven dress or biil, in Navajo. The dress, which had been a treasured possession of Juanita’s, had been appropriated by George Wharton James in 1902. Now, the dress has been returned to the Navajo tribe and will be on display in the Navajo Nation Museum through an exhibit curated by Denetdale. Below Denetdale describes the emotions and significance of bringing the dress back to its rightful home.

Bringing Juanita’s Dress Home
By Jennifer Nez Denetdale

Yesterday morning I drove over to Window Rock with my family who live in Tohatchi, New Mexico, our home community. The Diné cultural advisor Robert Johnson had driven all the way to Pasadena, California, in a tribal vehicle that meets specifications for bringing my great-great-great-grandmother’s dress and textile–a saddle blanket–from the Autry National Center. With him is conservator Angie McGrew who is at the Southwest Museum, now a part of the Autry. Angie traveled with the dress and textile to assist with proper display.  My son, mom, sister and I arrived at the Navajo Nation Museum where we found the  museum curator Clarenda Begay and Angie already at work in the gallery. For a couple of weeks, Robby, who has worked for the Museum for ten years, has been busy painting the walls red, a nice contrast with a certain hue of blue, sort of between blue and turquoise.

The dress woven and worn by Juanita will be displayed at the Navajo Nation Museum.

Early in 2010, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, Manuelito Wheeler, invited me to be guest curator for a show on Manuelito and other Diné leaders. He had read my book and, along with other museum staff, was supportive of my research. This show marks my first experience as a curator, although I had served as a consultant for several museums over the years. Yesterday we gave interviews to local radio stations, in both Navajo and English. My cousin, who is president of Tohatchi Chapter, has always been enthusiastic about my work and he readily agreed to be a speaker at the exhibit opening and also to provide interviews for broadcasting. He is very proud to be a descendant of Manuelito and Juanita. Back in the museum, I showed him the two boxes which held the two precious items. Like the rest of us were, he was tearful. We thought of our grandmother and my mom said, “She is here and smiling at us.”  Finally, in the gallery, with the displays ready for the two items, we watched as Clarenda and Angie open the boxes.

Juanita in 1902. Photo by George Wharton James.

In 1997 I had traveled to Pasadena to visit the dress and the textile. I had spent several hours sitting near them, gently touching them, looking at the dress and its careful mending. More than ten years later, I was given the opportunity to see treasures that my great-great-great-grandmother had valued. The Indian artifacts collector George Wharton James who met my grandmother says that she prized the dress and kept it carefully stored away and only after some coaxing, she had allowed him to carry it away. The dress is a rare one, dated between 1868 and 1874, it shows much wear, with patching on the backside. We marveled at the dress and our eyes teared as we imagined our grandmother’s life. Where and when had she worn the dress? Our grandmother had lived through one of the most traumatic times in our history and the dress had seen the hardship. It had traveled so far and now it returned home, after more than one hundred years.

By yesterday afternoon, we had all contacted many Diné, including the descendants of Manuelito and Juanita, to invite them to the exhibition opening. One of the assistants watches as we hover over the dress and remarks, “It’s going to get pretty emotional in here tomorrow evening.” The Diné get emotional whenever we think of what our ancestors have endured in the nineteenth century. We marvel at their endurance and their determination to live in the Diné way. Friday evening we will once again take some time to remember our ancestors who had a vision for the future, for they thought of us.

The exhibit on Manuelito & Diné leaders opens Friday, August 27th at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona with a reception from 5 to 7 PM. The exhibit will run through February 2011. Jennifer Nez Denetdale is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico.

Navajo Nation Museum and Library

Our partners at the University of North Carolina Press were kind enough to share this guest blog post from Tiya Miles, author of the recently published, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (see the original posting here). In the book, Miles teases out the complex, multiracial history of  Diamond Hill, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. As she reconstructs the history of the plantation, Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill’s founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s.

In July,  Miles traveled to the Chief Vann House Historic Site in Georgia to participate in the annual celebration of the historical plantation home. The Friends of the Vann House sponsored a signing for Miles’ book, which is the first history of the House on Diamond Hill. Over the course of the day, past and present were juxtaposed in an experience that truly gave life to history.

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In the three months since author Malinda Maynor Lowery’s book Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) was published, Dr. Lowery has had several opportunities to meet with community members and extend the conversations provoked by her book. For our blog, she reflects on the conversations sparked, the feedback she’s received, and her own troubles reconciling decolonization within scholarship.

Troubles Decolonizing a Colonial History
By Malinda Maynor Lowery

Much work in the the field of Native American history has centered on Indians’ relationships with European colonizers and the U.S. government, perhaps rightly so. As historians, we are trained to analyze primarily the written word, words written mostly by colonizers. And while some scholars have done remarkable oral histories and ethnographies of Native communities, a history based on oral sources or indigenous knowledge is not automatically more relevant to Indian communities, just because it avoids the colonizers’ words. Sources don’t by themselves make Indian history more relevant to Indian people. We have to put the information we gather to work, or history forever remains a telling about an other, rather than an authentic rendering of a truth about human nature and societies.

Dr. Lowery shared photos from her book during a lecture at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke in April.

My book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South, has been called on to do several kinds of work since its release. Some of it, I feel, genuinely approaches a decolonizing purpose–an affirmation of inherent sovereignty–while some of it reinforces agendas set forth by the colonizer, thus yielding that sovereignty. To paraphrase scholar Kevin Bruyneel (The Third Space of Sovereignty), indigenous peoples claim a retained sovereignty while American law and policy possess a “colonial ambivalence” toward sovereignty that continually compromises our ability to express it. Colonialism thrives on the supposedly fixed boundaries between written and oral, indigenous and European, sovereign and dependent, colonized and colonizer. Indeed, our scholarship often resides within these boundaries as well and strengthens colonialism; but I hope that I can put this book to work in a way that will cross, expose, and disable those boundaries rather than strengthen them.

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Today our partners at the University of Minnesota posted a reflection from editor Jason Weidemann on last month’s meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) in Tucson, Arizona. He wrote:

“In May I had the opportunity to attend the annual Native American and Indigenous Studies meeting in Tucson, Arizona. Always an energetic and passionate gathering, this year’s was even more so given that the meeting took place against the backdrop of Arizona’s recent passage of a stringent new immigration law and a measure banning ethnic studies courses in public schools….”

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