Milepost 469: Rick “Youngblood” Bird (right) dances to recorded American Indian music while a tourist drops money in a tip bowl for Bird and his three fellow dancers in downtown Cherokee, N.C. Bird was a professional wrestling star in the 1970s and 1980s and now performs American Indian dances for tips to help educate tourists about his ancestry.
The birth of the Blue Ridge Parkway coincided with a dramatic shift in federal government policy.
After many decades of encouraging Indians to assimilate, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began promoting the preservation of Indian culture. The Cherokee feared that the government planned to make them exhibits in a national park. A 1934 report from the North Carolina Committee on the Federal Parkway may have fed their fear.
"Their cabins, their council house, the baskets, pottery, bows and arrows they make, their dances
and games have changed but little from what it was when the white man first came into their mountain fastness," the report said. "These people form a picturesque and interesting feature for visitors to the Smoky Park."
In 1938, the Charlotte Observer opined, "Closed-mouthed Cherokee Indians of brownish, reddish
and coppery hues . . . will furnish the crowning touch of interest to everyone who motors over the Blue Ridge Parkway."