Sometimes you just get this idea that you want to ’’get away from it all’’- the everyday existence, the daily slog, dull routine. Maybe life is usually pretty good, but you still experience that urge to do something different just once in a while.
That’s what happened to us this past week.
Saturday 3rd August was our 17th wedding anniversary, and just this once, we wanted to ’’do’’ something to celebrate. The other years have been filled with seeming endless money problems, raising children, work commitments when the day has fallen during the week. Finally, it had come on a Saturday, we had no familial commitments to worry about, and financially, we could afford to blow a little bit of money on ourselves. It felt good.
Living in Greenville, SC, we are close to many different places that make good day trips. We decided to go to Cherokee, NC, nestled high up in the Smoky Mountains. It was a choice we would not regret, and one that has created many wonderful memories.
The Cherokee Reservation is famous for Harrah’s Casino, one of those places where people go to try their luck at winning more than they pay out trying! However the purpose of our trip was cultural; I wanted to find out about the Cherokee history and my husband was interested in the same thing.
We had planned on three places to see while we were there. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, The Oconaluftee Indian Village (a living history museum) and the drama ’’Unto The Hills’’ which is a play telling the story of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, done in the evening in an open air theatre on the mountainside. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee are descendants of those who hid in the Smoky Mountains to avoid removal to Oklahoma in the tragic Trail of Tears. Those who survived the journey to Oklahoma are known as the Cherokee Nation.
Our first stop was the Oconaluftee Indian Village, which is a replica of a Cherokee village in the 18th century.
Everything is authentic and guides take you through, stopping at craftsmen and women, explaining the various crafts that were the mainstay of the Cherokee. For instance, beadmaking. Once the designs meant something, but the meanings have been lost in time and now the women make colourful belts and other trinkets, in the age old way, one bead at a time. Each bead is sewn separately so that if the item is snagged, it can be easily repaired.
Another craftsman chipped away at flint making arrowheads, explaining the different styles and uses.
We saw reproductions of Cherokee lodges - cabins of clay and grasses. Some visitors expected to see tipis, but those were a part of the Plains Indian culture, the Cherokee lived in ’’houses’’ and were farmers and hunters.
The Cherokee also appear to have believed in the equality of women, long before England and the US thought about it, much less accepted it. Although there were roles which were traditionally male and female, women took part in council meetings, and in fact clan connections ran through the female. It was a matriarchal society.
From 1827 they also published their own newspaper, which was written both in Cherokee ( the phonetic alphabet created by Sequoyah in 1820) and English.
The Cherokee tribe was made up of 7 clans, and seven is a number that figures highly in Cherokee traditions - for instance the Council House was 7 -sided. Marriage within one’s own clan was not allowed, and on marriage, the husband moved into the clan of his wife and any children were classed as being from the wife’s clan.
As with all Indians, the Cherokee used plants and trees for medicinal purposes, and there is a Cherokee garden with trees and plants, annotated with plaques explaining the part of the plant/tree and its uses. As the guide explained sadly, the Cherokee had a cure for all the diseases that it was used to, but had no cure for smallpox - a disease that arrived with the white man and wiped out half the population.
The village itself is open from May 15th to October 25th and admission is $12 for adults, $5 for children (6-13 years), but you can buy a ’’historical valu-ticket’’ for $16/ $8 respectively, which also covers admission to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and saves $4 on adult admission and $3 on children.
They have a website at : https://oconalufteevillage.com.