Monuments to Absence by Denson Andrew;

Author:Denson, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Tourism and Termination

By all accounts, Unto These Hills proved a spectacular success. More than 100,000 people saw the show in its first season from July through early September 1950, and attendance rose to around 150,000 the following summer. Those numbers surpassed attendance for The Lost Colony and for Paul Green’s second outdoor drama, The Common Glory, a play about the American Revolution staged at Williamsburg. Over the next decade, attendance for Unto These Hills averaged about 130,000 each year.57 The CHA paid off its debt after only one season, and its leaders quickly made plans to expand their operations. In 1951, the association began work on a living history museum, named the Oconaluftee Indian Village, depicting Cherokee life in the mid-eighteenth century. A year later, it purchased a privately owned museum with an extensive archeological collection, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Like the drama, the village and the museum proved popular and profitable.58 Thanks to the CHA, the State magazine crowed, Cherokee was quickly becoming “the biggest single travel goal in North Carolina.”59 Indian agent Joe Jennings was even more enthusiastic, calling Unto These Hills the “greatest thing [that has] happened to the Cherokee Band since its start.”60

The striking success of Unto These Hills, however, immediately raised questions about the extent to which Cherokee people benefited from the CHA’s operations. White businessmen ran the association, after all, and the drama employed relatively few citizens of the Eastern Band. The association profited from its use of Cherokee history, but what did the tribe gain? In 1951, doubts like these inspired Cherokees to circulate a petition calling upon the CHA to transfer 10 percent of the earnings from Unto These Hills directly to the Eastern Band. The tribe could then use these funds to support better social services for the Cherokee community. The petition also demanded that the CHA employ more Cherokees.61 The State criticized this development, insisting that Indians were already the greatest beneficiaries of the drama. Some Cherokees, the magazine remarked in a patronizing tone, had forgotten how diligently men of vision like Harry Buchanan had worked to create Unto These Hills. “From start to finish the idea, planning and execution of the pageant came from those who had a broader goal in view than the creation of a public grab-bag.”62 The CHA rejected the call for direct payments to the tribe, but it did make an effort to convince Cherokees that its presence contributed to the tribal community’s well-being. It promised to hire as many Cherokees as possible, and it engaged in public good works, like the establishment of a scholarship program for Cherokee students. An official history of the WNCAC described the association in terms more appropriate to a charity than a tourism enterprise. “There is good reason to think that the Drama has renewed the Cherokees’ pride in themselves,” the authors observed. “Certainly it has tended to bring them out of the backwater in which they have lived for many scores of years.”63 The tribal government, meanwhile, managed to acquire a more direct benefit from the CHA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.