Hometown: Greenville, NC 

Year in School: Senior

Major: English Studies Pedagogy

Project Abstract:

Cherokee ethnobotany is the body of cultural knowledge involving Cherokee relationships with the natural world. The field of study reveals how Cherokee culture has traditionally named and classified botanical lifeforms, such as trees, vines, fungi, etc. When addressing this unique classification system, the patterns of naming and classifying are often puzzling. Previous work has done little to explain the cultural and sometimes cross-cultural significances of many of these names and does not offer enough linguistic data for in-depth comprehension of their given definitions. To begin solving such gaps in knowledge, I have compiled a comprehensive data set where Cherokee botanical names can be analyzed more efficiently to identify differences in dialect and make better sense of the different orthographies (writing systems) used by my sources. While looking at the data, I was able to extract certain words that seemed to have cross-cultural salience beyond the Cherokees and make comparisons with other indigenous linguistic groups. I found a number of words with cross-cultural relationships, all together to add to a living, growing, comprehensive ethnobotanical data set. This is just the beginning!

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Rainy Brake, Anthropology and Sociology