Prehistoric Pedagogy : An imaginative new book explores Cherokee education from cradle to community

To find the key ingredient of Cherokee indigenous education, look no further than the culture’s women, whatever the era. In her new book, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, Julie L. Reed, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and associate professor of history at Penn State University, traces this fact of Cherokee learning back to the days long before Sequoyah’s lauded syllabary emerged in the 1820s.

“In a Cherokee context,” Reed notes, “an education required a deep knowledge of matrilineal and matrilocal practices, a system that foregrounded the importance of female kin for all learners.” She traces the leading role of mothers, sisters, aunts, and other women in Cherokee education from prehistoric days to the present. Reed’s fascinating first chapter, set in Western North Carolina, tells the story of precolonial Cherokee education through a composite character, “Ageyutsa,” who was born and raised in Kituwah, a vibrant native town that swirled around what today is Bryson City.

Long before Spanish explorers arrived to reshape this part of the so-called New World, this notional girl’s curriculum would have been woven into daily life. “The clear demarcations of what we most closely associate with schools today—schools, teachers, textbooks, classrooms, public buildings, though currently undergoing rapid changes—fall away when we think about a Cherokee school environment a millennium ago.”

Reed’s re-creation of that environment is rich with ethnographic detail, showing the traditions, practices, and rituals that have anchored Cherokee educators through times of tremendous change.