Nathaniel Cummings-Lambert

My proposed research examines three land reclamation projects of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) in Western North Carolina. Land reclamation necessitates new legal and social relationships between EBCI community members, tribal agencies, state and federal governmental authorities, as well as local and national non-profit organizations. These projects center on mounds sites sacred to the Cherokee people that were lost due to settler colonial practices of dispossession. On the surface, the return of traditional territory appears to be about restoring property rights, but reclamation projects are also efforts to reincorporate sacred places back into Cherokee cultural life. However, new relationships and old tensions between Cherokee and non-Cherokee groups are mediated by sociolegal processes producing competing ideologies of cultural preservation at reclamation sites, affecting the formation and reproduction of the EBCI. Using mixed ethnographic methods, my research examines the contestations and construction of Cherokee social life at these three sites. Focusing on Indigenous infrastructures connecting social agents, institutions and Cherokee mound sites, my work examines these resurgent locations of Cherokee heritage, ceremony and identity, asking: How do shifting social relations and law mediate the ways EBCI understand and respond to the realities of historical erasure by engaging in decolonial practices?