Table Of Content

Fire and the Spirits : Cherokee Law From Clan to Court title: Civilization of the American Indian Series ; V. 133 author: Strickland, Rennard. publisher: University of Oklahoma Press isbn10 | asin: 0806116196 print isbn13: 9780806116198 ebook isbn13: 9780585259086 language: English subject Cherokee law. publication date: 1982 lcc: KF8228.C505S7 1975eb ddc: 340/.09701 subject: Cherokee law. Page i Fire and the Spirits Page ii Maker of Medicine ,by Joan Hill. Reproduced through the courtesy of the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Page iii Fire and the Spirits Cherokee Law from Clan to Court by Rennard Strickland Foreward By Neill H. Alford, Jr. University of Oklahoma Press : Norman Page iv By Rennard Strickland Speaker’s Sourcebook Series (7 vols.; Fayetteville, 196571) Sam Houston with the Cherokees (with Jack Gregory; Austin, 1967) Starr’s History of the Cherokees (editor; Fayetteville, 1967) Indian Spirit Tales Series: Cherokee Spirit Tales, Creek- Seminole Spirit Tales, Choctaw Spirit Tales, American Indian Spirit Tales (Muskogee, 196974) Language Is Sermonic (editor; Baton Rouge, 1970) Hell on the Border (editor, with Jack Gregory; Muskogee, 1971) The Cherokee People (with Earl Boyd Pierce; Phoenix, 1973) How to Get into Law School (New York, 1974) Legal Rights of Classroom Teachers (New York, 1975) Fire and the Spirits: Cherokee Law from Clan to Court (Norman, 1975) The Indians in Oklahoma (Norman, 1980) Oklahoma Memories (editor, with Anne Hodges Morgan; Norman, 1981) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strickland, Rennard. Fire and the spirits. (The Civilization of the American Indian series; no. 133 Bibliography: p. 239. Includes index. 1. Law, Cherokee. I. Title. II. Series. KF8228.C505S7 340’.09701 7415903 ISBN: 0-806116196 Copyright © 1975 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the U.S.A. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 Page v For my mother and her Osage grandfather; For my father and his Cherokee grandmother; For my alma mater, the School of Law of the University of Virginia, and her faculty; And, especially, for my mentor, Jack Gregory, and for Mary Page ix Foreword NEILL H. ALFORD, JR. The laws of American Indian tribes receive only fleeting recognition in most of the early accounts of the affairs of the English colonies in America and of the affairs of the new states following the American Revolution. We have the account by James Adair and those of a few others, but the history of the American Indian in the area of English occupation suffers from the lack of a highly organized and dedicated group of teachers and chroniclers such as the Jesuit missionaries in Central and South America. There was no Manuel de Nobrega and no José de Anchietas in the Carolinas. There was no Bartolomé de las Casas to plead the cause of the aborigine at the English Court. The scholar who now seeks to explore the institutions of any Indian tribe or nation within the area of English occupation must deal with bits and pieces of evidence. The chroniclers of Indian “affairs” in the English settlements viewed those affairs as “troubles.” William B. Stevens, who prepared the first history of Georgia of scholarly quality (History of Georgia from Its First Discovery by Europeans to the Adoption of the Present Constitution in 1798, 11 vols., 184759), wrote in his chapter “Settlement of Indian Affairs”: To give a history of these Indian difficulties the various turns in their treaties and negotiations, the skirmishing- like warfare so long kept up on the frontier, and the many harrowing details of massacre, cruelty and destruction, which were perpetrated in the white man’s settlements, would require more space than can be given to such detail; and therefore much must be left untold, and much more must be left to the imagination, while the historian sketches a brief and confessedly incomplete outline of events connected with the Indian affairs of Georgia. Page x Lamentably this has been the pattern, and only a reader who recognizes the major obstacles a scholar encounters in his investigation of any aspect of American Indian culture will recognize clearly the monumental task that Strickland has so successfully accomplished in his study of the laws of the Cherokees. Combining his vast knowledge of the culture of this Indian nation, based not only upon his years of research but also upon his fieldwork among the Cherokees of Oklahoma, with his clear perception and firm grasp of the processes by which legal systems develop, Strickland presents a description and analysis of Cherokee law that will serve as a landmark for scholars in the future. In very careful detail he describes the impact of a European legal culture upon a society in which all legal institutions have strong overtones of religion and magic. The processes that he articulates have parallels today when European institutions and tribal traditions clash. Much has been written in recent years concerning American Indians, and scholars have been particularly active in their study since the American Indian was identified as a member of an abused minority whose legal claims deserve redress. But among these writings Strickland’s book will be recognized as a distinguished and concise treatment of the building of legal institutions by an able and intelligent group of true native Americans.