Earth and Fire As you stroll with anticipation into the Village, you learn that one source of this smoke is a well-used, wood-fired rock kiln. Here, you find potters making earthenware using the same methods used in this region for thousands of years. There’s been little cause for change, as well-made, well-cared-for Cherokee pots withstand the hottest cook fires and last for generations.
Perfect Imperfections By hand-building pots without wheels or molds, Cherokee potters give their work extra energy, much as a hand-drawn circle has more life than one scribed by a compass. The potters decorate their still-moist pots with geometric patterns they incise with wooden tools, impress with carved wooden stamps, or both. There’s great art in applying these designs to flow seamlessly with no awkward joins. If you’ve done any pottery in school or at a glaze your- own-pottery cafe, you’ll be surprised to see Village pots go into the kiln with no glaze whatsoever. Cherokee potters create the hues of their wares not with glazes but by mastering the interactions between the clay, the wood they choose to fire it with, and the way they build and tend their fires. Fire performs another function that would otherwise require glazing: making the porous earthenware liquid-tight. After firing, the potter sprinkles a fine-grained flammable-like bran or ground corncobs into the almost red-hot pots. She tilts them this way and that to coat their interiors with smoke. Then she pours the smoldering grains onto the ground and inverts the pots over them. Remarkably, when these pots cool, they hold no smoky odor or taste.
Managing Burnout You see Cherokee patience in action at the next source of wood smoke. Here, in the clearing, a man creates a huge canoe by the traditional Cherokee method: burning away the core of the log to create a dugout-like form without all the digging. There’s a trade-off involved. Manually digging out the hull might take days or weeks of intense, exhausting labor. Burning out the hull can take six months. But these are six months of much lighter labor: periodically tending and shepherding the fire, steering and controlling it with earth and clay as the embers (along with some skilled finish carving) turn a great log into a swift, lightweight, 30- to 40-foot-long canoe with a uniform one-inch-thick hull. Elsewhere in the Village, another key Cherokee craft – “knapping” flint arrowheads and blades – can take minutes but requires great skill and patience to master.
Seven Clans, One Fire The Cherokees paired their keen flint arrowheads with bows of such power that Hernando De Soto’s soldiers, while passing through Cherokee territory in 1540, could not pull these bows back to full draw. Yet in Cherokee hands, warriors could release seven arrows with dead aim in the time it would take to load and fire a muzzle-loading rifle just once. The Cherokee weapon you see demonstrated in the Village, the blowgun, is less fearsome unless you’re a bird or small animal. Cherokee blowguns are made of river cane cut into six- to eight-foot lengths and smoothed inside with a smaller cane or flint drill. Darts are made from straight, sharpened sticks with thistledown tails that provide an air seal and promote straight flight. Though no longer used to hunt game in Cherokee, the annual Cherokee blowgun championship is still a spirited contest.
