Through Indigenous Eyes

Cherokee - Cherokee Stickball

Cherokee stickball is the ancestor of the modern game known as lacrosse. To the Cherokee, the game has profound spiritual, political, and social importance. It is also a lot of fun and continues to be played to this day among the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians. In previous centuries, the games settled disputes between different bands or tribes and were thus part of the judiciary of the tribe. Stories are still told about games played more than 100 years ago. T.J. Holland, the Cherokee Cultural Resources Manager and a frequent referee of stickball games, remembers the end of a game played in the late 1800s in which one player was “running to make a goal when one of the fans from the other team, sent a horse across the field… and the guy jumped over the horse and went around the goal to win. It was like a scene out of The Longest Yard or something [laughs]. He literally hurdled the horse. That would’ve just been something to see. I don’t think it was one of those clean, like one of those Olympic hurdles or anything but you never know."

Frank G. Speck, one of the most important anthropologists of the early 20th century, took the photographs seen in the exhibit. Speck worked with the Cherokee wisdom keeper Will West Long, one of the great indigenous anthropologists who also worked with James Mooney. The Frank Speck and Will West Long collections at the APS contain numerous photographs and ethnographic field notes about the dances and ceremonies that took place before stickball games were played. The voices that you hear, explaining the significance of the game to the Cherokee, are those of Tom Belt, a fluent speaker and respected elder from the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and T.J. Holland, the curator of the Junaluska Museum and a direct descendent of Will West Long. Both Tom Belt and T.J. Holland came to the APS for the Building Bridges conference and continue to serve on the advisory board.

This project is part of the APS’s digital knowledge sharing initiative, which has resulted in a partnership between the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI), the American Philosophical Society, the National Anthropological Archives and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology to create an exhibit about Cherokee stickball for the Junaluska Museum. The APS has also provided Tom Belt with digital surrogates of recordings that Frank Speck made on wax cylinders, which he has introduced into the EBCI's Kituwah Preservation and Education Program, a new school that immerses children in the Cherokee language.