A Cherokee Christmas: Anita Hornbuckle Flanagan still honors Native American traditions.

By Chelsea Retherford | Living 50 Plus

Christmas dinner at the Flanagan house in Tuscumbia might resemble lots of other holiday meals typically served around the U.S. this time of year, but there are a few differences that make the Flanagan Christmas table extra special.

While Anita Hornbuckle Flanagan often includes holiday staples like turkey and dressing, using cornmeal in most of her recipes in place of flour, she also sets her table with other dishes that might be less familiar to anyone who isn’t part of the Cherokee Nation or Eastern Band.

“With most Native American families — or at least, I can speak for the Cherokee Eastern Band — it’s kind of the same as anybody else’s Christmas,” Flanagan said. “There might be some little differences. On the Boundary, instead of taking cornbread or biscuits, they might make fry bread, or someone might bring a bowl of kanuchi.”

A favorite in the Flanagan household, she added, is a recipe Flanagan learned from her grandmother called “Three Sisters Mash.” The dish takes its name from the cultural practice of growing “the three sisters” crops — corn, beans and squash — together.

This practice originated with the Cherokee and Iroquois people, who found that each plant supported the others’ growth with the corn providing structure for climbing beans, and squash providing ground cover to help the plants retain moisture.

It’s little details like these that Flanagan hopes to pass down to her grandchildren as they learn about and take part in their grandmother’s culture.

“My husband jokes and tells me that I have one foot in the white world and the other in the Native American world,” Flanagan said with pride.

Though she has called Tuscumbia home for most of her life, Flanagan was born on the Qualla Boundary, otherwise known as Cherokee, North Carolina. Unlike Native American reservations, the Qualla Boundary territorial land is held in a federal trust with titles owned by individual tribal members.

When Flanagan was about three years old, she went to live with foster parents, who she credits for raising her.

“For my foster parents, it was very important that I knew my history,” Flanagan said. “So, they would send me back to my grandmother, too. I definitely had a very blended family tradition. They were very active in teaching me about my Native American culture.”

Flanagan feels lucky to have lived close to her biological grandmother, Juanita Hornbuckle, for most of her childhood. Later, her foster parents would move the family to Tuscumbia to be close to her foster father’s mother, Lucy Hargett.

Though her Grandmother Hornbuckle never left the Boundary, Flanagan remained close to her throughout her life, visiting whenever she could. She also developed a close bond with her adoptive Grandmother Hargett.

“She was just an amazing seamstress,” Flanagan said of Hargett.

“So, I learned the basics of sewing — construction, pattern making and that sort of thing — from my white grandmother, and then I learned from my Native American grandmother,” she added. “She taught me decorative placement. With every Indian tribe, you can look at a Native American woman, and if she’s dressed in cultural clothing, you can tell what tribe she’s from by the placement of her ribbons, the beadwork, and that kind of thing.”

Flanagan puts the teachings she learned from each of her grandmothers to practice nearly every day through her home business. As an established seamstress, she sews pants and alters suits and other clothing for clients, but she’s also made a name for herself in constructing cultural clothing and Native American regalia.

Her work is showcased every year at the annual Oka Kapassa Festival in Tuscumbia, as many of the cultural demonstrators, storytellers and dancers — including nationally renowned, Alabama-Coushatta hoop dancer Lyndon Alec — are often adorned in clothing made by Flanagan.

The elaborately beaded dance regalia, like the garments worn by Alec, is time-consuming to make and can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000, Flanagan said.

“It’s all heavily decorated, and it’s all handmade,” she said. “Now, some of the clothing itself is done with a sewing machine, but all the beadwork, ribbons and feathers that go into the decorative work are traditionally hand-tied and hand-applied.”

That same personal touch is applied in the kitchen too, Flanagan said. When her Grandmother Hornbuckle taught her to cook, the processes of making the dishes were as key to the recipes as the ingredients.

“In our culture, whenever someone serves you something, you eat it,” she said. “Even if it’s got something in it that you think you don’t like. You honor the cook by eating, because there’s a lot of work that goes into many of these foods.”

Flanagan went on to describe the process of making another of her family’s favorites, bean dumplings, which require the cook to dip their hands in an ice bath before reaching into a pot of boiling bean broth, which is used to form the dough.

Though some such recipes are cumbersome, she’s ensuring they survive the next generation by passing them on to her children.

“It makes me smile that my kids are willing to make that effort,” Flanagan said.

When she met her husband, he was already a father to two children, both of whom Flanagan treats as her own.

“When my husband and I married, they were young, so they have literally grown up in my culture,” she said. “We have a daughter together as well, but they are all my kids.”

Flanagan said all three of her children took an interest in her family’s heritage, and all three were lucky to meet Grandmother Hornbuckle before she passed several years ago.

The growing family still takes trips to the Qualla Boundary whenever they are able. When her children were young, Flanagan said it wasn’t unusual for the family to visit North Carolina two or three times a year.

Several of those visits were planned around the Eastern Band Fall Celebration, held every October on the Qualla Boundary.

“It’s a festival day for us, and it’s a celebration of the harvest,” Flanagan said. “It’s a day that’s been passed down for many generations, and today we’ve even incorporated the county fair into it. So, they have rides and events like an old-fashioned fair. There’s a canning competition, a competition to see who made the best pie or the prettiest quilt, and those types of contests. Plus, there’s a lot of our cultural arts and crafts and cultural games like stickball.”

While it’s been many years since the family has experienced Christmas on the Qualla Boundary, Flanagan said she and her husband hope to take their grandchildren north for a holiday season one year soon.

“We keep saying that,” she said. “That’s one of our goals for the family. We want to take all of the kids and grandkids up to spend Christmas and New Years in the mountains.”

Read More: Recipes by Anita Flanagan