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Cherokee song from the Trail of Tears (Appalshop via YouTube). at 14:45.

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What you say about the novel, Rinehart [the novel’s publisher], advances, etc. sounds very good to me, but I must tell you how I work. I don’t have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the [proverbial] old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again. — Flannery O’Connor, in Quote Investigator.

Several days ago when I was writing a blog post on Orange Shirt Day, a day set aside in Canada and, increasingly, in the US to seek truth and reconciliation for Native American families whose children were forced to assimilate to white majority culture, I happened to remember Walker Calhoun, an Eastern Band Cherokee elder who made it his life’s work to revive traditional Cherokee legends, music and dance.

Which led me, (not for the first time in my life) down a rabbit hole. Or, perhaps more productively, it led me hippity-hoppity down a well-worn bunny trail.

And there at trail’s end in Peter Rabbit’s rabbit hole (to stretch the metaphor beyond endurance), I discovered — or rediscovered – an academic concept called creolization, defined by Google’s AI Overview (with a nod to Wikipedia) as a process whereby “relocated peoples and societies blend inherited and incoming traditions to create a new cultural expression.”

It’s a form of cultural blending, or acculturation, that’s been applied in French, Spanish, English and Russian colonies in the Caribbean, Latin Americ and Alaska, among others, including a “polkabilly” band called the Goose Island Ramblers of mixed ethnic heritage in the upper Midwest. I’ve found it useful in more than one context, as often as not in a context of suggesting a theoretical framework for cultural pluralism in America.

Lately I’ve been tunneling down a couple of related rabbit trails. Orange Sirt Day is Sept. 30, and nearly two centuries before, on Sept. 29, 1838, a band of 800-plus Potawatomi Indians were marched through Springfield under military guard on their way to a reservation in Kansas. It was part of the cultural genocide caused by the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

“Dressed in their finest clothing,” said a historian for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library, “they passed through Springfield in a striking display of pride and resilience.”

But the occasion was the forced removal, what today we would call ethnic cleansing, of Potawatomi Indians from their ancestral homelands to make room for the settler colonialism of the day. Contemporaneous with the Trail of Tears that saw the Cherokee people similarly removed to Oklahoma, the Potawatomi removal is known as theTrail of Death.

Anyway, for several resaons, American Indians have been top of my mind lately.

So has a historical process of assimilation variously known as cultural hybridity or creolization. In addition to traditional Cherokee music and dance, Walker Calhoun, whom I once had the honor of meeting, surprised me with his mastery of a regional syle of banjo-picking favored by white banjo players in southern Appalachia and known as drop-thumb clawhammer.

With that in mind, I did a keyword search on Calhoun’s name and drop-thumb banjo, and I turned up more than I could have imagined.

In a video of his 1991 performance at the Seedtime on the Cumberland festival in Whitesburg, Ky., Calhoun performed a variety of music ranging from the Cherokee Quail Dance (at 8:00, demonstrated by his teenage grandchildren) to a traditional murder ballad “Down in the Willow Garden” (at 12:20) and an arrangement of a southern Appalachian folk hymn that was sung on the Trail of Tears (at 14:45). If you watch both songs, it’s like a seminar in how drop-thumb banjo picking got its name.

I can’t prove any conection, of course, but Calhoun’s grandkids’ dance steps remind me powerfully of flat-footing, a regional variation of clogging in western North Carolina that combines elements of Scots-Irish, Black and (I think) American Indian dancing. You can make your own comparison HERE by watching Mason Winfree flat-footing to Murphy Cambell’s “Shady Grove,” and read more HERE of my musings — and American Folklife Center director Alan Jabbour’s — about Black and Native American creolization in southern Appalachian fiddle tunes.

As far as I’m concerned,Walker Calhoun’s performance at Seedtime on the Cumberland was entirely authentic. The video was produced by Appalshop of Whitesburg, which defines its mission, among other things, as to:

  • Document, disseminate, and revitalize the lasting traditions and contemporary creativity of Appalachia”; and
  • Tell stories the commercial cultural industries don’t tell, challenging stereotypes with Appalachian voices and visions.

Anyway, the video sent me hippity-hoppity down another rabbit trail.

You see, I was familiar with Appalshop before I left the Tennessee mountains, and I admire their work. I also admired Walker Calhoun’s body of work reclaiming old Cherokee traditions from the work of outside ethnographers and the fading memories of the generations who preceded his.

So I am entirely convinced there was nothing commercial, nothing remotely like Nashville-style crossover, in Calhoun’s rendition of “Down in the Willow Garden,” although it’s best known as an old-time country standard famously recorded by Charlie Monroe in 1937. The other song, the one from the Trail of Tears, I recognize as a very free translation of “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah,” an 18th-century hymn in the Welsh nonconformist tradition. I can’t be certain of the exact text in Cherokee, of course, but I know the Cherokee oral tradition says it was sung on the Trail of Tears. Certainly, the original text (translated here from Welsh into English) fit the occasion:

Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land;
I am weak, but Thou art mighty;
Hold me with Thy powerful hand.

Calhoun sang it at Appalshop’s Seedtime festival to another tune, known as “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand,” a gospel song from the early 1900s and beloved both in Black and white churches in the South. (I’ve also heard him sing it, on a tape recording published by Western Carolina University, to yet another tune that sounded a lot to my ears like “Wayfaring Stranger.”) Tthis swapping around of song titles, texts and melodies is entirely a part of the overlapping and intertwined ballad, folk hymn, gospel and shape-note singing traditions of the old South. It dates back to a time when hymnals were most commonly printed in text-only editions.

John Newton’s text of “Amazing Grace,” for example, was composed in England and first set in America to the tune we all know in the 1844 shape-note tunebook The Sacred Harp; but the words appear as a floating verse in other Southern folk hymns as well.

Even before that, Newton’s text was translated into Cherokee in the Cherokee Hymn Book of 1829. The translation, by Samuel Worcester, a Congregational missionary, and Elias Boudinot, bilingual newspaper editor of mixed heritage, was pretty loose. For example, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me” comes out (translated back into colloquial English) as:

God’s Son
paid for us.
After paying for us.
Then to Heaven He went.

Like so many hymnals of the day, Worcester’s and Boudinot’s didn’t print the music. Instead, it was a text-only paperback with the words translated into Sequoyah’s syllabary. A few had English-language headnotes, according to a summary list by the Cherokee Bible Society of Franklin, NC. I’m familiar enough with the hymnody of the period to recognize (or think I recognize) songs including “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,” “Psalm 23 the good shepherd,” “Guide me, Jehovah,” “There is a happy land” and “There is a fountain.” Enough to suggest the songs, or language derived from the songs, were part of the early 19th-century Protestant culture.

I knew a lot of this 15 and 20, years ago when I was teaching a Native American cultural studies at Springfield College in Illinois, a branch campus of Benedictine University, especially the part about Cherokee people singing “Amazing Grace” on the Trail of Tears. Many of them were good Baptists (largely because they appreciated the congregational polity that allowed them to accommodate traditional Cherokee values without a white bishop looking over their shoulder. In a 2006 assignment, I even quoted historian William G. McLoughlin, who cited a contemporary Baptist publication “throughout the long trip they held regular services and sang their hymns in Cherokee to keep up their spirits.”

But until now I didn’t make the connection with creolization, or with cultural hybridity, a close synonym preferred by some social scientists.

Google’s AI Overview defines hybridity as “the process of mixing elements from two or more distinct cultures to create a brand new cultural expression, identity, or form:,”and adds: “Cultures are not pure or fixed. They change, move, and blend into new shapes […] You can see it in fusion food, music styles, fashion trends, and language.”

I like both terms, and I think each describes the experience not only of the Cherokee people – as I now understand it – but also 19th– and early. 20th-century Swedish-American Lutherans who moifdified the European pietism they brought over from the old country; what emerged was a creolized, or hybrid, church culture that adapted norms from Sweden, where the state church was Lutheran, to meet American Protestant expectations regarding church membership and polity.

Over the last 10 or 12 years years, I’ve discussed both hybridity and creolization as alternative forms of acculturation in several historical papers and articles. (See? I told you it’s a well-worn rabbit trail.) In the Cherokee context, however, I prefer creolization; it derives from colonial discourse in the Caribbean, and it has connotations of resistance to the white European majority culture that I like. Here’s our old friend AI Overview again, when I asked it to fill me in on Cherokee creolization history. Its answer:

In historical archaeology and anthropology, the term creolization describes how diverse groups in contact select, transform, and merge cultural elements to create entirely new, hybrid identities. While traditionally applied to African diaspora and settler communities, historians use creolization to explain Cherokee adaptation and resistance from early European contact through the forced removal era.

Rather than passive assimilation, Cherokee creolization was a conscious, strategic process of cultural hybridization used to preserve tribal sovereignty and counter colonial displacement. [Bold type in the original.]

I like the emphasis on resistance here. It seems to fit the facts of the case. What’s more – it leads me down another rabbit hole.

A historical page on the website for the Museum of the Cherokee People puts it decorously – but with complete accuracy — like this: “Throughout our history, Cherokee people have been tactfully innovative in the resistance of colonization and settler colonialism.” What’s more – it led me down another rabbit hole.

Or maybe it isn’t such a rabbit hole after all.

Peter Rabbit’s hole, as Wikipedia informs us in its article on Beatrix Potter’s “mischievous, adventurous young anthropomorphic rabbit,” lives with his sisters Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail in “a rabbit hole that has a human kitchen, human furniture, as well as a shop where Mrs. Rabbit sells various items.” Sometimes, to stretch the metaphor a bit further, a rabbit hole is more than a hole in the ground.

And sometimes a stray thought encountered in the cozy depths of a rabbit hole can develop into an academic paper.

You can read in my blog about a moment I had while driving home from the Quad-Cities on Christmas Day in 2019 (depending on your tolerance for historical musings about 19th-century Swedish immigrant church polity). To make a long story short, we were tooling down I-155 south of Peoria with Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” airing on the public radio station from Champaign-Urbana, when I got an insight – from Ebenezer Scrooge! – that helped me resolve a longstanding case of writer’s block.

Just about the time we turned south onto I-55 at Lincoln, God bless us every one, a stray thought came to me, a thought of Scrooge crying, ““I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! […] Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this!” Another way of saying the same thing: Focus, Pete. Focus!

The upshot: I started writing, and in October I presented a paper titled “Swedes in Roger Williams’ Garden: Acculturation in Immigrant Churches, 1848-1860” at the Conference on Illinois History.”

Fast forward to the present moment: I’ve been fighting writer’s block again. Ever since Trump’s second term began, I’ve been swamped by his headline-grabbing, flood-the-zone tactic of introducing a new outrage du jour before I can finish writing a literate response to the last one. Swamped? I’m exhausted.

But this month, while I was blogging about Orange Shirt Day, and the intergenerational trauma created when Native and First Nations children were forced to assimilate to majority white culture at boarding schools, I had a stray thought or two. I remembered how hard it was for Walker Calhoun to revive lost Cherokee traditions, and it led me to things like assimilation, resistance, hybridity and creolization. Focus, Pete! Others had to do with the Potawatomi people’s anniversary, which was coming up at the end of the moth:

  • What if the Cherokee adopted Euro-American ways – from southern Appalachian banjo picking to English hymns like “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah” — as a form of  “strategic process of cultural hybridization used to preserve tribal sovereignty and counter colonial displacement?” Of, as the Eastern Band’s museum down in Carolina puts it, “tactfully innovative” resistance?
  • “What if the memory of good Baptists singing “Amazing Grace” – another English text sung to an Anglo-Celtic folk melody first notated in Spartanburg, SC – on the Trail of Tears is also part of that postcolonial process of cultural hybridization?
  • What if the Potawatomi people of Menominee’s band, who in 1838 were marched at gunpoint from their home in Twin Lakes, Ind., through Illinois and Missouri to a Catholic mission in what is now Kansas, were engaged in a similar, if largely unstated process of resistance to coilonial assimilation?
  • Their parish priest, who accompanied them on the Trail of Death as much as his failing health permitted, celebrated Mass and administered last rites as he was able. I can’t get their similarity out of my mind to he Baptist Cherokees who sang translations of Isaac Watts and John Newton into their language out of my mind.

Removal of Menominee’s band is usually known as the “Trail of Death.” I don’t particularly like the term – it was coined in 1909 by an amateur historian named Jacob Piatt Dunn, and I think he reflects some of the romanticized attitudes of his period although he was entirely sympathetic to the Indians. But it reflects reality – of 859 tribal members, more than 40, mostly young children, died.

According to Google’s AI Overview, the Trail of Death march began Sept. 4, 1838, after Indiana militia “ambushed the Potawatomi by trapping them inside their own village chapel” back in Indiana, and ended Nov. 4 at Saint Mary’s Sugar Creek Mission in Osawatomie.

Fr. Benjamin Marie Petit, a French priest, accompanied the Indians, many of whom were his parishioners, and “documented the horrific toll of typhoid fever and exhaustion” in letters to his bishop. Fr. Petit died on a Jesuit mission at St. Louis “shortly after the trek due to debilitating illnesses contracted on the trail.”

The parallels with Cherokee memories of the Trail of Tears, with good Baptists who “held regular services and sang their hymns in Cherokee to keep up their spirits” are obvious. So, I believe, are the postcolonial vibes I get from reading about the ethnic cleans and about forced assimilation of Native children into the majority white Euro-American culture.

Google AI Overview, with a hat tip to the Gender Policy Report at the University of Minnesota, defines settler colonialism as:

[…] an ongoing structural process rather than a single historical event. Its primary goal is the acquisition and control of Indigenous land by replacing the native population with a permanent settler society. Scholars often describe this as driven by a “logic of elimination”, meaning that indigenous nations must be displaced, removed, or assimilated for the colonial state to establish and legitimize its own sovereignty and private property relations.

There’s plenty here to work with. Beginning in the 1600s, the Potawatomi people had a long history of contact with European colonial traders, missionaries and, eventually, settlers. The available evidence suggests they adapted willingly to the French approach to cultural relations, in concert with fur traders, Jesuit missionaries whom they called “black robes,” but they weren’Witht able to accommodate increasing demands, especially for land, as American settlers pushed westward into their ancestral lands in the early 1800s.

With that in mind, I don’t think it would be going too far to say that Menominee’s band from Twin Lakes, Father Petit’s parishioners, were engaged in the same kind of “tactfully innovative” resistance to Anglo-American culture as their Cherokee counterparts. This is not to suggest they weren’t devout Catholics. Their descendants, now known as the Citizen Potawatatomi Nation of Oklahoma, are still Catholic, and Fr. Petit’s love for his congregation – there’s no other word for it – seems to have been amply reciprocated. Children’s novelist Peggy Anderson said as much in a recent interview by the communications coordinator for the Indiana Historical Society:

[…] I was surprised at how tenderly the Potawatomi people loved the young French priest, Fr. Pettit who accompanied them on the journey. It is so clear from his diaries and letters how he loved them, and they loved him. He respected and honored their Creation spirituality, and they honored this Jesus that Fr. Petit shared with them.

While Anderson’s book, Two-Moon Journey: The Potawatomi Trail of Death, is fiction, it is based on research not only into the written historical record but also into Potawatami oral history (her family are enrolled members of the Citizen Band). A quotation from Fr. Petit gives some of its flavor:

I saw my poor Christians, under a burning noonday sun, amidst clouds of dust, marching in a line, surrounded by soldiers who were hurrying their steps. Next came the baggage wagons, in which numerous invalids, children, and women, too weak to walk, were crammed.

There’s another element to Anderson’s young adult novel, a plot twist that develops what Chelsea Sutton of the Historical Society calls a ”theme of forgiveness.” It’s fiction, but Anderson took pains to say it was based on historical accounts, including oral tradition she got from a Catholic sister whose ancestors were caught up in the removal:

When Sister Virginia Pearl shared the vivid memories handed down to her by her mother and grandmother, the intensity of the suffering of the Potawatomi People on this forced journey became so real to me. That triggered a question that continued to nag me as I wrote: How could it ever be possible to forgive such a horrible injustice as what was done to the Potawatomi people, as well as all those other American Indians forced to leave their homelands?

I don’t know how to work this into a historical paper, but I’m struck by how closely this mirrors the dual emphasis in Canada’s official observance of Orange Shirt Day as a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

In the meantime, the old local government and courthouse reporter in me sits on my shoulder and whispers there’s a story in here somewhere.

And the recovering academic perched on my other shoulder chimes in with the stray thought that it just might lend itself to a postcolonial treatment. I don’t have a nuf graf or thesis statement in mind yet, but it might go something like this:

When Potawatomi and Métis people of mixed indigenous and French ancestry were marched in 1838 through Illinois from their ancestral homes in northern Indiana, many of them were observant Catholics who had voluntarily adopted selected aspects of French and Anglo-American culture in an effort to adjust to the settler colonial culture brought west by white American settlers. (See Elizabeth Bollwerk, cited below.) They were forced out by the land-hungry white settlers as surely as the “Five Civilized Tribes” to their south.

Does that make them creoles? The quick answer: Probably not. I’d say that term should be reserved for people who call themselves creoles, whether they’re in New Orleans, Haiti or Alaska.

I am quite comfortable in saying the cultural adaptations made by Menominee’s band, the ancestors of today’s Citizen Potawatomi Nation, show clear signs of creolization as defined by Ulf Hannerz and other cultural anthropoligists who have studied the phnomenon elsewhere. That said, I still need to sort out how the facts on the ground in 1838 — at least as they have come down to us today — fit into the broad historical themes of settler colonialism, cultural pluralism and perceived conflicts between the two.

In short, like Flannery O’Connor writing to her literary agent in 1948, I need to take my stray thoughts and write some more before I know what I’m thinking.

References

Peggy Anderson, “Hot Off the Press—Two-Moon Journey,” interview by Chelsea Sutton, We Do History: HHS Blog, May 15, 2018, Indiana Historical Society https://indianahistory.org/blog/hot-off-the-press-two-moon-journey/.

Elizabeth Bollwerk, “Controlling฀Acculturation:฀฀A฀Potawatomi฀Strategy฀for฀Avoiding฀Removal,” Midcontinental฀Journal฀of฀Archaeology,฀Vol.฀31,฀No.฀1฀(Spring฀2006),฀pp.฀117-142 https://www.academia.edu/695665/Historical_Archaeology_A_Midwestern_Case_Study_Controlling_Acculturation_A_Potawatomi_Strategy_for_Avoiding_Removal.

Brownielocks and the 3 Bears, Pre\sent: Here Comes Peter Cottontail,”  
Brownielocks, 2002 https://www.brownielocks.com/bunnytrail.html.

“Cherokee Songs, 1829” Cherokee Bible Society, Franklin, NC https://sites.google.com/site/cherokeesongs/1829.

“Cherokee Resistance to Colonization,” Museum of the Cherokee People, Cherokee, NC https://motcp.org/learn/cherokee-history/.

“Quote Origin: I Do Not Know What I think Until I Read What I’m Writing,” Quote Investrigator, Jan. 26, 2023 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/01/26/think-read/.

“Remembering Walker Calhoun, A Cherokee Musician, Dancer, And Teacher,” Arts Across NC Blog, Nov. 3, 2019, North Carolina Arts Council, Raleigh. https://www.ncarts.org/blog/2019/11/03/remembering-walker-calhoun-cherokee-musician-dancer-and-teacher.

“Hold To God’s Unchanging Hand, Stewart Brothers, Hymn Revival: Live in Baltimore, (YouTube), March 23, 2026 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuXQMPMpVq8.

“Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand A Cappella Hymn,” Westside Church of Christ, Salem, Va., May 16, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWC78-tTQoM.

William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839, quoted in HUM 221: Cherokee religion … gospel sings and a ‘harmony ethic’ Hogfiddle, March 15, 2010 https://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/search?q=cherokee+hymns.

These citations from my blogs also belong here:

[Uplinked Sept. 30, 2026]

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Published by Pete Ellertsen

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