Join us for the powerful conclusion of the Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home lecture series as we welcome Rebecca Nagle, a distinguished Cherokee writer, activist, and direct descendant of Major Ridge. In this compelling presentation, Nagle will explore the evolving role of Cherokee women in modern society, highlighting their resilience, leadership, and contributions to culture, politics, and advocacy.

Drawing from history and personal experience, Nagle will discuss the ways Cherokee women continue to shape their communities while honoring their heritage. This thought-provoking lecture offers a unique opportunity to engage with the lived experiences of contemporary Cherokee womanhood and its deep-rooted connection to the past.

Don't miss this inspiring event that bridges history and the present, bringing the Chieftains Museum lecture series to a meaningful and insightful close. This lecture is brought to you via Zoom. To receive the Zoom link, please register here.

Join Dr. Brian Campbell from Berry College’ Environmental Science Department for a presentation on the importance of seed saving with an open seed swap afterwards. Admission is free so bring your friends, family, and seeds!

Wanda Patterson graduated from West Georgia College in 1969 with a Master’s Degree in Secondary Education. She taught English and journalism for 30 years at Sprayberry High School in Marietta. Since retirement, Miss Patterson has devoted much of her time to research concerning American Indians in general and the Cherokee in particular. She is a charter member of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association. On behalf of the chapter, she edited a volume of poetry by Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge, as well as serving on the Trail of Tears Speakers Staff.

Miss Patterson has been a member of the Fielding Lewis Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution for eleven years. In her role as Historian, Miss Patterson published a book celebrating 112 years of the accomplishments of the Fielding Lewis Chapter of DAR. Miss Patterson also serves on the Georgia DAR Regent's Speakers Staff.

Come make some music with us this morning as we will be making homemade drums/ shakers!

🌟 Become a Part of History at Chieftains! 🌟

Are you passionate about history, education, and making a difference in your community? Join us at Chieftains for Volunteer and Docent Training! 🏛️✨

We’re looking for enthusiastic individuals to help share the rich history of Major Ridge, the Cherokee people, and our local heritage. Whether you want to lead tours, assist with events, or help behind the scenes, we have a role for you!

Why Volunteer at Chieftains?
✔️ Learn fascinating stories of Cherokee culture and local history.
✔️ Meet like-minded history enthusiasts.
✔️ Make a meaningful impact on our community.

No experience is necessary—just bring your smile and passion for learning and teaching! Training will provide all the knowledge and tools you need to succeed.

👉 Reserve Your Spot Today! Contact us at 762-327-6124 or Click HERE

Come be a part of preserving history for future generations! ❤️✨

#VolunteerOpportunity #DocentTraining #ChieftainsMuseum #CherokeeHistory #MakeADifference

🌟 Become a Part of History at Chieftains! 🌟

Are you passionate about history, education, and making a difference in your community? Join us at Chieftains for Volunteer and Docent Training! 🏛️✨

We’re looking for enthusiastic individuals to help share the rich history of Major Ridge, the Cherokee people, and our local heritage. Whether you want to lead tours, assist with events, or help behind the scenes, we have a role for you!

Why Volunteer at Chieftains?
✔️ Learn fascinating stories of Cherokee culture and local history.
✔️ Meet like-minded history enthusiasts.
✔️ Make a meaningful impact on our community.

No experience is necessary—just bring your smile and passion for learning and teaching! Training will provide all the knowledge and tools you need to succeed.

👉 Reserve Your Spot Today! Contact us at 762-327-6124 or Click HERE

Come be a part of preserving history for future generations! ❤️✨

#VolunteerOpportunity #DocentTraining #ChieftainsMuseum #CherokeeHistory #MakeADifference

Toddler Time at Chieftains Museum 🍼🎨📚

Join us for Toddler Time, a special event designed for little ones aged 5 and under! 🌟

What to Expect:

• 📖 Story Time: Immerse your child in fun and engaging tales!

• 🎨 Craft Activities: Hands-on fun to spark creativity and curiosity.

• ✨ More Fun Surprises!

Admission:

• Free for Members

• $10 for Potential Members

Due to limited space, RSVPs are required to secure your spot!

Members: Simply call the museum to reserve your spot or email us at manager@chieftainsmuseum.org!

👉 Potential members: Reserve Your Spot by clicking HERE

Bring your toddlers for a morning of learning, fun, and creativity in a historic setting!

As our thanks for supporting Chieftains Museum/ Major Ridge Home, join us at the museum for hors d’ouevres, refreshments & an exclusive opportunity to peruse our photograph collection. Become a member by December 5th to partake in the member festivities!

Emily Legg is a Cherokee Nation citizen and an Associate Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Miami University in Ohio. Her research centers Indigenous methodologies of storytelling as a decolonial and materialist research practices in writing and rhetoric, and she brings these methodologies to her historiographic recovery work as well as her teaching and research in Professional Writing, and Digital Rhetorics. Her most recent book is titled Stories of Our Living Ephemera: Storytelling Methodologies in the Archives of the Cherokee National Seminaries, 1846-1907, and in it Dr. Legg develops Indigenous storytelling methodologies and applies Cherokee cultural teachings to archival research on the Cherokee National Seminaries during the nineteenth century in order to counter and resist narratives of assimilation.

Presented by Dr. Theresa Gaul, “Writing for Her People: Epistolary Activism in the Cherokee Life and Letters of Catherine Brown tells the story of Catherine Brown. Catharine Brown (1800? – 1823) was a young Cherokee woman whose voice had an unusual reach to Anglo-American audiences in the early nineteenth century. A student in the early missionary schools established in the Cherokee Nation, her letters frequently appeared in US newspapers, and after her death a memoir based on her letters and diary became very popular, going through dozens of editions. This lecture examines her letters as the venue for her activism on behalf of Cherokee people as they faced increasing encroachment on their homeland and the threat of removal. As arguably the earliest Indigenous woman author of published, self-written texts in the United States, Brown attempted to write into existence a cross-racial and transnational network of supporters for the Cherokees. Writing as a Cherokee woman in the feminized genre of letters to Northern white women she called her “sisters,” Brown effectively enacted a gendered and politicized strategy through her writings that complemented the more overtly political writings of Cherokee men of her generation, though it has received less attention. 

Theresa Strouth Gaul is director of the Core Curriculum and professor of English at Texas Christian University. An award-winning researcher, teacher, academic leader and diversity and inclusion advocate, her scholarship focuses on US women’s writing, early Indigenous writers, and letters as a literary form. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 (2014) and To Marry an Indian:  The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1825-1839 (2005) established her reputation as a foremost practitioner of archival methodologies of literary manuscript recovery. She has served as co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, editor of the book series Legacies of American Women Writers and volume editor for A Companion to American Literature, Vol A, Beginnings to 1820 (2020). 

At her university, Professor Gaul has directed Women and Gender Studies, chaired the English department, and co-founded TCU’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiatives. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book, Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023, centering Indigenous perspectives of the history of her university’s relations with Native peoples. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century multicultural literary history of Texas.

Presented by Dr. Alice Taylor-Colbert, “Sehoya” tells the story of Major Ridge’s wife Susanna Wicket Ridge. At a time when Cherokee male leadership, confronted with the creation of the American nation in the late 1700s and early 1800s, attempted to adapt to that reality by establishing new political norms and governmental structures, Cherokee women, such as Susanna Wickett Ridge, led the cultural and economic adaptation necessary for their people’s survival. Unlike many of the male leaders, Cherokee women retained the essence of their traditional Cherokee heritage despite the adaptations they chose. The life of Susanna Wickett Ridge is one full of challenges, opportunities, tragedies, and victories. In studying Susanna, one discovers the persistence of the Cherokee spirit, a spirit that bears fruit, not only through offspring, but also through the products of the earth and through human action. Her strength enables her to endure adversity, to adapt, survive, and create a better future. The Cherokee people are thriving in three federally recognized tribes today because Cherokee women like Susanna made that possible.

Dr. Taylor-Colbert earned her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in American Studies from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has served five universities as an American history and public history professor and/or an academic administrator, including Campus Dean (CEO) of USC Union, before leaving higher education in 2019. During her career, she enjoyed teaching Southern history and culture, Cherokee Studies, Museum Studies, and American history of all eras. As a public historian, Taylor-Colbert began her career at the Atlanta History Center, has led museums, archives, historic sites, and galleries owned by the universities she served, and now leads Development and Strategic Initiatives for South Carolina Humanities. Taylor-Colber is currently a board member of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association.

The lecture is sponsored by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York. The Foundation intends to further the humanities by supporting projects and programs that address the concerns of the historical studia humanitatis: a humanistic education rooted in the great traditions of the past; the formation of human beings according to cultural, moral, and aesthetic ideals derived from that past; and the ongoing debate over how these ideals may best be conceived and realized

The lecture is free and open to the public.

Presented by Greg Smithers, “Where have the Nûñnë'hï Gone?” tells the story of the religious and cultural changes which shaped Cherokee identity throughout the early nineteenth century. During the opening years of the nineteenth century, Elders liked to tell stories about the Nûñnë'hï. In Cherokee folklore, the Nûñnë'hï are said to be a race of immortal spirits. Back in 1776, when American troops were destroying one Cherokee town after another, the Nûñnë'hï stirred. At Nikwasi, they rose from their slumber to save Cherokees from certain death, allegedly leading women and children to safety. Now, several generations later, the Nûñnë'hï seemed to have abandoned the Cherokee. Growing numbers turned to Christianity, but at what cost? Prominent Cherokees – people with names such as Vann, Ridge, Hicks, and Boudinot – turned to Christianity, prompting criticism from Cherokees who longed for the return of the race of immortal spirits. In this talk, Dr. Smithers will explore some of the key religious debates among Cherokees, as they grappled with questions of faith in the decades leading up to the Trail of Tears.

Dr. Greg Smithers is a Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America (Beacon Press, 2022), Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), and The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity." (Yale University Press, 2015). His research has focused on the rich and textured history of the Cherokee people, Indigenous history of the Mountain South and Sunbelt, environmental history, and the history of race, gender, and sexuality. In 2019, he was awarded the British Academy Global Professorship and Virginia Humanities Fellowship. His recent work has focused on the history of waterways in Cherokee history. This research is funded by the British Academy and includes an interactive website entitled “Cherokee Riverkeepers,” a collaborative project of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield.

“A Point of Contention” tells the story of ABCFM missionary resistance to Cherokee Removal in the face of their complex relationship to slavery in the Cherokee Nation. When ABCFM missionaries defended Cherokee sovereignty and opposed the Jackson administration’s implementation of Indian Removal, they had to navigate a complex debate over the political, religious, ethical dimensions of their activities. Their Jacksonian political opponents charged them with turning a political matter into a moral issue, while members of the emerging northern abolitionist movement criticized ABCFM missionaries for accepting Cherokee slaveholding as only a political question. As missionaries, Cherokee Christians, and missionary supporters argued over the place of slavery in the mission movement, they set out new—and narrow—definitions of “politics” and “religion.” 

Emily Conroy-Krutz is an Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and American Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 2024), Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell University Press, 2015), and a co-editor of The Early Imperial Republic: From the American Revolution to the US-Mexico War (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Her writings on foreign relations, religion, reform, empire, and gender have been published in leading academic journal and periodical, ranging from the Journal of the Early Republic to The Washington Post. She is the recipient of SHAFR’s 2021 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize, the 2019 Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize from ASCH, and a 2018 China Residency from the OAH. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Yale Divinity School Library, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Schlesinger Library, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, and the Humanities and Arts Research Program at Michigan State University.

This virtual lecture is generously cosponsored by Cherokee Presbytery (PCUSA) and Columbia Theological Seminary.

Presented by Wanda Patterson, “Spring Place & Oochgeelogy” tells the dramatic story of the first missionary group to be permitted to establish schools and mission stations in the Cherokee Nation--the Moravians. The lecture will focus on the origins and development of Moravian missionary activity in the Cherokee Nation, highlighting the patterns of cultural exchange between Moravian missionaries and the Cherokee at the Spring Place and Oochgeelogy mission stations in present-day Chatsworth and Calhoun, GA.

Wanda Patterson graduated from West Georgia College in 1969 with a Master’ s Degree in Secondary Education. She taught English and journalism for 30 years at Sprayberry High School in Marietta. Since retirement, Miss Patterson has devoted much of her time to research concerning American Indians in general and the Cherokee in particular. She is a charter member of the Georgia Trail of Tears Association. On behalf of the chapter, she edited a volume of poetry by Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge, as well as serving on the Trail of Tears Speakers Staff.

Miss Patterson has been a member of the Fielding Lewis Chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution for eleven years. In her role as Historian, Miss Patterson published a book celebrating 112 years of the accomplishments of the Fielding Lewis Chapter of DAR. Miss Patterson also serves as State Committee Chair of the DAR Regent’s Speakers Staff

Presented by Dr. Tim Alan Garrison, "To be an Indian: The Ridge-Boudinot Family, Indigenous Identity, and the Marshall Court" tells the story of John Ridge and Elias Boudinot and the development of the US Supreme Court's perception of indigenous identity. Through the late 1820s, John Ridge and his cousin Elias Boudinot engaged in numerous speeches and public epistolary addresses which were heard and read throughout the nation. These literary performances described the progress of Indian/Cherokee civilization and sought to define indigenous identity in the white Jacksonian American mind. Among those who were likely influenced by Ridge and Boudinot was Chief Justice of United States Supreme Court John Marshall, who would play a pivotal role in the judicial drama of Cherokee Removal. Evidence suggests that the writing and speeches of the Ridge-Boudinot family had a role in shaping John Marshall and the US Supreme Court's understanding of indigenous identity, thus helping to lay the foundations of American Indian judicial policy. 

Dr. Tim Alan Garrison received a JD from the University of Georgia and PhD from the University of Kentucky, where he focused on the history of the American Indians of the South, United States Indian policy, and American legal history. For over twenty years, he served as professor of history at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Garrison held university positions as Director of Native American Studies (2005-2009) and Chair of the Department of History (2014-2019). He received the rank of professor emeritus at Portland State and has served as the Pre-Law Advisor at Clemson University since 2020.  Garrison has authored and edited numerous articles, volumes, and monographs on the history of American indigenous life and legal policy in the American South. He is currently working on a history of the United State Supreme Court’s “Cherokee cases” which will be published by the University Press of Kansas.

The Cherokee language is deeply tied to Cherokee identity; yet generations of assimilation efforts by the U.S. government and anti-Indigenous stigmas have forced the Tri-Council of Cherokee tribes to declare a State of Emergency for the language in 2019. While there are 430,000 Cherokee citizens in the three federally recognized tribes, fewer than an estimated 1,500 fluent speakers remain—the majority of whom are elderly. The covid pandemic has unfortunately hastened the course. Language activists, artists, and the youth must now lead the charge of urgent radical revitalization efforts to help save the language from the brink of extinction.

This feature-length documentary was shot on-location in Oklahoma and North Carolina throughout 2019-2022; through intimate interviews, vérité footage of community gatherings, and extensive archival materials, the film explores the nuanced ways the Cherokee language is vital to maintaining a unique cultural identity and relationship with the world.

Chieftains Museum/Major Ridge Home is proud to partner with RIFF and Berry College in presenting this documentary.