Wood and Wisdom: Keeping the Wooden Bow Hunting Traditions of Our Cherokee Ancestors Alive
It is likely that the majority of cultures on the planet have used wooden bows for hunting at one point in time, but the knowledge and skills to make and use wooden bows for hunting are being rapidly lost as industrial agriculture pulls us further out of connection with our ancestral foodways. As part of his efforts to preserve the ways of his ancestors, twenty years ago Chris set out to learn everything he could about traditional Cherokee hunting bows and hasn’t stopped making them since.
Like many indigenous people in North America, Chris did not grow up steeped in the traditional knowledge and practices of his people, due to the colonization of these lands, and attempted genocide and splitting of his people. Chris is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians - his family stayed here in North Carolina while countless others were sent along the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma.
He started building bows as a young child with nothing but his intuition to guide him. After cutting saplings he thought were flexible enough, he’d tie his shoe strings to them as makeshift bowstrings. He started making arrows out of dead dog fennel stalks and kept refining what he was doing, still without guidance.
As a teenager, Chris purchased a few manufactured bows and practiced hunting with them - deer, rabbits, squirrels. As more and more gadgets came on the market to make bow hunting easier, he began to feel he was getting away from the essence of the craft.
He came back to where he’d started when he ran across an edition of a magazine called Primitive Archer in which he read an article by a Western Cherokee man called Al Herrin. Inspired, the 16-year-old Chris wrote a letter to Mr. Herrin asking for more information on building traditional Cherokee hunting bows. Al responded with a letter and a signed copy of his book “Cherokee Bows and Arrows”.
Signed copy Mr. Herrin sent to 16-year-old Chris is response to his letter
That was all Chris needed! He read the entire book and followed all of Al’s instructions. When he would run into a challenge he couldn’t solve himself, he’d write to Al who always responded with the solution.
This invaluable support from an Elder removed from Chris’s childhood by the ravages of European settlement allowed him to reconnect with a way of life taken from him. His intuition guided him in this direction but without the support of this Elder it would have been a different story. Chris now has access to a sacred way of gathering food for his family and community passed down from the ancestors who tended this land he still calls home.
Al Herrin crafting a hunting bow
After years of working with these hunting bows Chris is ready to share the knowledge of how to make them. If you are ready to receive that knowledge and hold it with respect we invite you to join us for a two-day Cherokee Bow Building Class.