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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.1 | The History Cooperative
101.1  
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March, 2005
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Reviews

A Forest of Time
American Indian Ways of History

By Peter Nabokov
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x, 246. Footnotes, index. $20.00.)

In their classic work, Cherokee Dance and Drama (1951), anthropologists Frank Speck and Leonard Broom documented an eastern Cherokee tradition known as the Booger dance. Boogers were men wearing grotesquely humorous masks who interrupted gatherings at Cherokee houses and broke the rules of Cherokee etiquette. They tried to pick fights and made obscene gestures toward women. They spoke in ugly growls and acted unpredictably. They tried to dance like Cherokees, but their movements were awkward and unseemly. The Boogers were more than rule-breakers. They represented outsiders, with many of the masks offering misshapen versions of white men's faces. The dance, then, not only illustrated the difference between proper and improper social behavior, but offered a commentary on European conquest and on the Cherokees' relations with their unwelcome neighbors. The Booger dance was, in other words, a form of history telling. . . .
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