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2Hani! (Here!) Anetso as an Enduring Symbol of Cultural Identity in an Era of Great Change (1799–1838) One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as “sit up straight” or “don’t hold your knife in your left hand,” and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical or verbal manners, so putting them beyond the reach of consciousness and explicit statement. —Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice Values Given Body Two hundred years ago, the Moravian missionaries John and Anna R. Gambold complained about the Cherokee ball game in a mission school report to their bishop, Carl Gotthold Reichel.1 The passage in the July 1808 report read: “That ball game seems also to have had a bad effect on our Indian children. It seems that they imagined that because of it they were at once accepted into the class of men, and believed they could demand more freedom.”2 The Gambolds’ complaint to their superior is a revealing statement. Participation in the ball game was an assertion of identity for Cherokee boys that signaled a change in their social status according to Cherokee cultural norms. The missionaries themselves provided this information even as they dismissed what the boys “imagined” was now their right to more freedom. This is but one of many references to the ball game included in journal entries and correspondence of missionaries in the Cherokee nation. As Theda Perdue commented in one work, references to ball games “pepper” mission journals.3 More often than not they are complaints, whether the missionaries were Moravian, Baptist, or from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). In certain cases, the reports read as if the shaker top was loose and the 68 Hani! pepper dumped out on the page. For example, in December 1827, Isaac Proctor , a missionary and teacher at an ABCFM mission school in the Cherokee Nation, wrote a letter to the national corresponding secretary of the organization , Jeremiah Evarts, in which he also complained about the ball game.4 Proctor was in the midst of reporting on the Cherokee students when, after a passage in which he praised his students’ character, he grumbled: “It is truly painful, however, to see young men, sons of professors, who have a good education strolling about whooping & yelling in the most savage manner and yet it is a fact respecting many of them who attended Mr. Hall’s school. Some of them the other day assembled in plain sight of the Mission house, stripped themselves entirely naked, and for some time played Ball.”5 Nineteen years after the Gambolds’ report, missionaries still were complaining about the ball game, and they would continue to do so until most left the Cherokee Nation in advance of its removal to Oklahoma. What can one infer from these missionary accounts of students playing the Cherokee ball game, nearly twenty years apart? As far as we know, none of the Cherokee students involved left written comments about what they were doing or why they were doing it. This of course is not uncommon; in historical documents as well as in the context of scholarship about Cherokee people, the voices of Cherokee actors in history often are silent. Thus, in arguing for my interpretation, I maintain that discussion of anetso in nineteenth-century written comments of missionaries provides a type of historical “voice” for Cherokee people. Through passages such as those above and several more below, I contend that we still can hear Cherokee voices loud and clear. Furthermore I argue that what we hear is a clear message: for the Cherokee boys enrolled in the mission schools, participation in the ball game was an unmistakable statement of identity, the staking of an ontological position . Whether the statement was primarily an assertion of their identity as Cherokee people, or rather as men instead of boys, or both, remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that the students chose to express their identity in a way that the missionaries could not possibly ignore, indeed, in a way that challenged the missionaries to ignore it. In this context I find provocative Pierre Bourdieu’s statement in the epigraph to this chapter regarding “the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology...

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