Dances are associated with certain traditional Cherokee games. Separate groups of women and lacrosse-like players are about to begin a pre-game dance in 1888.
Smithsonian Institution
Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle Dance in 1932.
Charles S. Grossman
Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the Cherokee Indian Fair in 1936.
These clans, which largely paralleled the five main towns of Birdtown, Wolftown, Painttown, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove, stabilized the population into groups and offered, through such methods as the dance, an outlet for communication and expression. Through the Friendship dance, for example, young people could meet each other. The Bugah dance depended upon joking and teasing among relatives. And the revered Eagle dance celebrated victory in the ball games between Cherokee communities.
The whirlwind changes of the mid-20th century tipped whatever balance the Cherokees had gained. The Great Depression, World War II, and the explosion of tourism and mobility and business opportunity brought inside the Qualla Boundary both a schedule of modernization and a table of uncertainty. The dance declined in importance. Surrounding counties seemed to take better advantage of the new trends than these natives who had been cast into a political no-man’s-land.
By the 1950s, the Eastern Band could look forward to a series of familiar paradoxes: relatively poor education; a wealth of small tourist enterprise and a dearth of large, stable industry; an unsurpassed mountain environment and an appalling state of public health. A 1955 survey of health conditions, for instance, found that 90 percent of 600 homes in seven Cherokee districts had insufficient water, sewage, and garbage facilities. More than 95 percent of the housing was substandard. Diseases springing from inadequate sanitation prevailed.