Indian Dancing at Cumming Fair

Honoring Fathers:

We went to the Fair at Cumming, GA, last night. It's mostly like a fair anywhere -- rickety rides, unpleasant carnies, concerts, livestock, etc. However, the folks in Cumming decided to set aside a portion of their fairgrounds for their heritage exhibitions. There are several that treat what life in the small-town South was like before the post-WWII economic boom. There is also a small 'village' at the far end of the fairground that recalls the earliest days of America in the area, when this area was part of the Cherokee nation, and when the Old Federal Road was pushed through the wilderness from Savannah to Knoxville.

There are several Cherokee-style buildings on this place, plus a reproduction of the Tavern that sat on Old Federal Road at the ford of the Chattahoochee river. This was the center of early American life in what was then the wilderness, at a time when white settlers who wanted to live here had to apply to the Cherokees for the right to emigrate to their nation. In those days the deep forests of North Georgia were populated with wildlife that had not learned to be frightened of people: one of the early settlers, the day after she gave birth to a daughter, was attacked by a wildcat when she went to get water from the river. She choked it to death.

This 'village' is employed during the fair by various living history groups. I always enjoy spending time with reenactors or living historians: these are people who make sense to me. The drive to preserve and extend what you love, to let it inform your life and define the future, is something that I understand. One of the groups does traditional Native American dancing, although not of purely Cherokee styles. One was Cherokee, the next Chiricahua Apache (the lodge lionized in our most recent movie club film), the next of another line. The chief spokesman and lead dancer was Commanche, and performed the "men's traditional" dance.

This photo shows the Chiricahua Apache dancer. The building in the background is that replica of the Old Tavern that I mentioned above.



The coup stick carried by the Commanche was the man's own: it measures his and his family's victories. These include especially military service, his own and that of his father, grandfather, and so forth. He remembers them and honors them in his daily life, and in his art, both to inform himself and to teach his children to do likewise. Likewise, the women dancing bore tokens of warriors in their ancestry, and their dances involved bows toward the symbols of their warrior fathers.

That explanation earned quite a round of applause from the crowd. It is something they understood on a deep and personal level.