While doing some research on the New Echota Historic Site, I came across a video on YouTube. As it turns out, the wife of one of the New Echota rangers is a videoblogger called Lemonette. If you click on my post title you can watch a video in which she talks about her husband Gary.
Lemonette believes she is part Cherokee, even though she has no document to prove that claim, as she admits herself. At the same time, she makes fun of people who claim that their grandmother is a Cherokee princess.
Gary Greene himself asserts on his MySpace site that "I am member of the wanna know tribe...I am not a twinkie or a wanna be." But he acts as a "Cherokee" storyteller at New Echota without actually being Cherokee. Is this an illegitimate appropriation of Native American (his)stories? Or is he simply a mediator, a kind of teacher?
Saturday, November 3, 2007
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First, I'm pretty stunned by the idea of a driving video blog. This is probably one of these things that's been going on and I just haven't heard about it. Is that it? Aren't there, you know, safety issues?
I, too, find the way that Cherokee genealogy is both invoked and discredited fascinating. I think a big part of whether I would consider the storytelling at the site would depend on how the story is framed by the teller -- how much the ranger claims the authority of the Cherokee storyteller. (There's also the question of the source of the stories.)
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