Jerry Wolfe

Art Form: Folklore/Study of Folk Arts

Cherokee, NC

Phone: 828/497-3481

 

About Jerry Wolfe

In the early years the Cherokee people lived in little villages.
And their only means of travel was trails.
And the trails normally followed the river.
And from one little village to the next village,
maybe they had a runner that carried news.

So begins Jerry Wolfe’s story of Tlanusi’yi, “the place of the leech,” as the Cherokees knew it long before it became the town of Murphy, North Carolina.

An elder in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Jerry Wolfe is a master of Cherokee stories and other traditions that are central to Cherokee culture in western North Carolina. Through cultural outreach programs of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, he talks to thousands who visit the Qualla Boundary. He also assists teachers in the Cherokee schools. When the tribal community rededicated the Kituwah mound at the site of the mother-town of the Cherokee, he was a natural choice to offer a prayer in the Cherokee language.

Jerry Wolfe is from Big Cove, one of the most traditional Cherokee communities on the Qualla Boundary. Born in 1924, he grew up in a log cabin with his mother, father, and three half-sisters. “We just lived off the fat of the land,” he says with a smile as he describes how the family carried drinking water from a nearby spring and grew virtually everything they needed in order to survive. His parents, Owen and Luciana Wolfe, spoke the Cherokee language. “My dad, I had to speak to him in the Cherokee language because that’s all that he knew,” he says. “We didn’t have anything to watch like television, or a radio to listen to, so he’d always tell some kind of happening or legend. So I remembered several of the stories he told.”

Like his father, Jerry Wolfe played Indian ball, or “stickball,” when he was a young man. “When I was growing up,” he says, “the Cherokee Indian ball games were the talk of the town.” The games then, as now, were rough, played with no pads and few rules. Players used three-foot long sticks, constructed with sinew webbing at one end, to carry a leather ball through a goal to score. The opposing team did whatever it could to prevent scoring, including tackling, wrestling, and swatting opponents with the ball sticks.

Over the years, Jerry Wolfe has become widely recognized for his knowledge of stickball. He is always asked to announce the stickball games held annually at the Cherokee Fall Festival, especially the women’s games. In addition to providing commentary, he educates spectators about stories and traditions that have defined this Cherokee game for at least five hundred years. When Cherokee women wanted to revive the tradition of women’s stickball, they came to him for help. With his coaching, and with the ballsticks he made, Cherokee women played their first stickball game in 130 years at the Cherokee Fall Festival in 2000.

Several ballsticks carved by Jerry Wolfe are on display in a permanent exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Art and Craft. According to tradition, hickory must be used to make the sticks. “When I get the timber, I usually sprinkle some tobacco on the stump of the tree from which it was cut,” he says. “ I do that as an offering, a payment. You’ll have better luck if you do something like that in return.”

Touring Artists Directory Profile

Preserver of Cherokee Traditions
An elder in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Jerry Wolfe is a master of Cherokee stories and other traditions that are central to Cherokee culture in western North Carolina. Through cultural outreach programs at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, he talks to thousands who visit the Qualla Boundary. He is widely recognized for his knowledge of stickball and announces the stickball games held annually at the Cherokee Fall Festival. In addition to providing commentary, he educates spectators about stories and traditions of this Cherokee game. Wolfe received a North Carolina Heritage Award in 2003. He enjoys working with people of any age and often presents programs with his wife Juanita, a basket maker. His fee is negotiable. Travel expenses are additional.