ᎥᎪᎵᏍᎬ ᏌᏊ ᎠᎰᎸ/Building One Fire: Art and World View in Cherokee Life (review)

At first glance, this book draws readers in with its gorgeous illustrations of some of the best Cherokee art from Oklahoma and North Carolina. Some might even be tempted to mistake this book for something as casual as a coffee-table conversation piece. Yet Chief Smith sets a deeper purpose for the book in his opening message: "This book is not primarily an art book. Each artwork tells a story about what it is to be Cherokee" (8). In this respect, the audiences for the book include Cherokee people and scholars of Cherokee cultural expression.

Cherokee audiences can image themselves on a guided visit with Cherokee leaders as they gather the best images of paintings, baskets, pottery, jewelry, graphic art, photographs, beadwork, and mixed-media creations to fashion this good medicine. Cherokee heritage comes alive as they describe how this art might be understood through the lens of Cherokee philosophy. The left side of the dust jacket includes a description of the importance of one fire as a symbol of Cherokee community. From the one fire, smoke carries with it the prayers of our people upward to , Nitsudunvha, the One Who is Always Above. In return, the One Who is Always Above "sends to each person four sets of gifts with which to develop mind, body, and spirit. These gifts are brought by four messengers, one from each of the cardinal directions" (inside dust jacket). The story of how water spider brought fire to the Cherokee, narrated by premiere Cherokee storyteller Gayle Ross, is on the right side of the dust jacket and reminds us that all in the community, even the humblest of creatures, contribute to the one fire, the community of Cherokee.

The endsheets of the book, which join the cover to the pages, reproduce an excerpt of Sequoyah's scripted demonstration of numbers, which he wrote for John Howard Payne in 1838 (see Willard Walker and James Sarbaugh's 1993 essay in Ethnohistory for more on this). The production quality of this excerpt is so high that the varying flows of ink from his quill are evident, indexing the movement of his hand as he shaped each character (as are the translations of the numbers, sketched lightly in pencil, probably by Anna Kilpatrick). Every space and place in this book, in other words, lends itself to the overall goal and feel of the book: to richly illustrate and instruct through demonstration and careful selection of meaningful expressions.

This book also presents spiritual and cultural messages together. The early pages describe the one fire and the importance of the directions. The remainder of the book subsequently uses the four directions as the organizational structure for the art selected within: "The gifts of the four messengers, the colors and qualities associated with them, and the four point circle that embraces the sacred fire—all of these are part of Cherokee consciousness and creativity" (dust jacket). Opening to any page, a reader will find the images, mostly in color with a select few black-and-white, some filling the page, and some in an upper or lower corner. Each of the figures has a word or phrase written in Sequoyan that is loosely translated at the top of the page.

To help visually reinforce this organization, each word is written in a color of the direction wheel. For example, the art included in the north section of the book has blue headings; the east, brown; the south, black; and the west, yellow. All of these color-coded headings and phrases not only help visually remind the reader how the art is organized and framed but also offer important semantic information in Sequoyan as starting points for pondering the art through the philosophical lens of Cherokee life.

The book opens with teachings about the significance of the four directions, indicating what kinds of messages one might expect to hear coming from these. To start, Benny Smith, modestly described in the...