Seven students and three faculty members spent two days on the Qualla Indian Boundary in Western North Carolina recently, meeting with tribal officials and studying Cherokee history and contemporary Cherokee public policy and governance.
Two highlights of the “forty-eight hour study abroad experience” were meeting with a tribal elder and sitting in on a session of the tribe’s innovative juvenile drug court.
Tribal elder Jerry Wolf recently returned from Northern Ireland, where he led a tribal delegation that had taken part in an historic reconciliation ceremony between the tribe and descendants of U.S. President Andrew Jackson, whose parents and older siblings had emigrated from the former Irish province of Ulster, and Ulster government officials. President Jackson oversaw an almost total ethnic cleansing of Western North Carolina and Northern Georgia of Cherokee and other settled, self-governing Native American people in 1838, contrary to a ruling by U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall and the U.S. Supreme Court. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians are the descendants of Cherokee who managed to hide out in the most remote areas of Western North Carolina from the summer of 1838 until November 28, 1870 when the tribe formally established the Qualla Indian Boundary through agreements with the U. S. Congress and the North Carolina General Assembly.
The students are participants in a POL 375 course, Comparative Criminal Justice Systems. Students examine the nature of criminal deviance and a society’s response to it across several nations and cultures. Their study includes an exploration of the social, political and governmental systems that shape, and in turn are shaped by, social, legal and political culture, especially the role of law enforcement, the courts, and legal, educational and human service systems.
This year marks the second consecutive year that a delegation from Elon has visited the Qualla Boundary. Last fall, Cherokee Tribal Court jurist, the Honorable J. Matthew Martin, presented a guest lecture on campus. Political Science adjunct professor Granville A. Simmons headed the Elon group. Professor Simmons was assisted by fellow political science professor Kerstin Sorensen and Larry Vellani with Elon’s advancement office. Vellani and Professor Betty Morgan originally designed the course two years ago with the assistance of a Project Pericles course enhancement grant.