Carved wooden masks worn by male dancers during the Booger Dance, a ceremonial winter ritual of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians of the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina, constitute one of the most documented and most deliberately misrepresented ceremonial objects in Native American material culture. The Cherokee term for the Booger Dance is tsu'nigadu'li. The word "booger," which Eastern Cherokees use themselves, derives from an Appalachian regional variant of "bogey," meaning a threatening and disruptive supernatural presence. The masks were carved primarily from buckeye wood, Aesculus flava, a soft, easily worked timber available throughout the Appalachian highlands, with additional examples documented in hollowed gourds and wasp nests. A mask in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian under catalog number 20367 was collected by anthropologist Mark Raymond Harrington in 1908 from Lawyer Calhoun of the Eastern Band during fieldwork sponsored by George Heye. A 1994 example attributed to carver Luther "Toby" Hughes and documented by the Mask Museum, Basel, is constructed from cedar wood with horsehair, pigment, and leather straps. The Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa holds a painted buckeye example by carver Virgil Crowe measuring 9.5 by 25.4 by 18.4 centimeters, purchased with funds from the Frankie Van Johnson Fund. Will West Long, the most extensively documented Cherokee mask carver of the early 20th century and the primary cultural informant for anthropologist Frank G. Speck's foundational study Cherokee Dance and Drama published in 1951, is attributed with multiple masks now held at the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina. The majority of masks produced from the mid-20th century onward were carved for commercial sale rather than ceremonial use, a transition that generated scholarly debate about the object's status, function, and authenticity that remains active.

 Material and Craftsmanship

Buckeye wood was the preferred material for ceremonial masks due to its specific working properties. It is among the softest hardwoods available in the southern Appalachians, allowing rapid carving with knife and gouge. It holds detail without splitting when green and carves cleanly with the grain, enabling the broad, exaggerated facial features that define the booger mask's visual character. The mask attributed to Deliskie Climbing Bear in the Museum of the Cherokee People collection, identified by Myrtle Driver Johnson in an October 2022 consultation, is carved wood with remnants of dark pigment and nail holes around the mouth and forehead where fur was originally attached. Eight decorative slits are carved into the cheek area. The mask attributed to Will West Long in the same collection is wood painted with pigment, with twined cordage at the rear used for wearing.

Gourds were used as an alternative material when available in adequate size. A large dried gourd provided a ready-made convex form that required cutting for eye and mouth openings rather than carving from a solid block, making gourd masks faster to produce and structurally lighter to wear. Wasp nest material, hollowed out into a rigid shell, was used for a specific subset of masks specifically described in ethnographic documentation as representing white people consumed by smallpox or disfiguring illness: the papery, pocked texture of the wasp nest surface produced a visual analog to diseased skin without requiring additional surface modification.

Pigments were applied over the carved or formed surface in combinations documented by Speck and in the Fogelson and Walker analysis in the Journal of Cherokee Studies. Red, black, and white were the most common colors. Red ochre was available locally. Black was produced from charcoal or manganese compounds. White mineral pigments provided the base for paler face tones. Fur, horsehair, plant fiber, and commercially available material added eyebrows, beards, and mustaches. The total assemblage of a finished mask combined carved and formed base, applied pigment, and attached fur or fiber, making the object a composite of processed and raw materials whose specific combination was left to the carver's judgment and the performance context.

 Form and Features

Booger masks depict exaggerated human faces rather than animal forms, distinguishing them from Cherokee clan masks representing the bear, deer, or eagle used in other ceremonial contexts. The facial features are consistently enlarged beyond natural proportions: wide nostrils, prominent cheekbones, large mouths set in grimaces or rictus expressions, and eyes carved with a quality of fixity or blankness. The exaggeration is deliberate and directional, representing the faces of outsiders as the Cherokee perceived and satirized them. Masks representing European men were carved with exaggerated aquiline noses and abundant painted or attached facial hair, both features associated in Cherokee visual culture with white male foreigners. Masks representing African men used different exaggerations. Masks representing other Native nations used identifying markers known within the Cherokee community.

The gourd phallus worn by booger dancers as part of their costume rather than on the mask itself is documented consistently in the ethnographic literature as an element of the costume, not the face. Its inclusion in the performance made the costume's erotic content visible from the moment the dancers entered the performance space. The mask's facial expression, the costume's disorder, and the phallus together constituted a complete character: the outsider as simultaneously threatening, ridiculous, and obsessively sexual.


Masks named in Speck's documentation carry both a category identification, Frenchman, German, Black, Chinese, or other perceived outsider group, and an obscene personal name announced aloud at the ceremony: Black Buttocks, Sooty Anus, Rusty Anus, Big Phallus, and similar constructions. The name was whispered by the dancer to the ceremonial Driver, who announced it aloud to the assembled community. The combination of masked identity and announced name produced a compound satirical statement: the outsider type was already ridiculous by category, and the specific name added a layer of bodily scatology to the category identification.

 Function and Use

The Booger Dance took place during winter, after the first frost, in a private residence rather than a communal ceremonial space. Approximately thirty minutes of conventional social dancing preceded the boogers' arrival. Four to ten or more masked men then stamped into the room in ragged European-style clothing, sheets, and bed quilts worn as costumes. They fell on the floor in feigned seizures, struck and pushed at spectators, chased women and girls around the room, and gestured obscenely. This disruption was understood by the assembled community not as entertainment in the theatrical sense but as the physical enactment of a recognized social threat. The community then offered the boogers an opportunity to ask for what they wanted. The documented answer across all recorded performances was the same: first, "Girls!"; then, "To fight!" Rather than retaliate, the Cherokee allowed the boogers to dance their hostilities out individually, each performing a clown dance of what Speck described as "awkward and grotesque steps resembling a clumsy white man trying to imitate Indian dancing." The evening concluded with the boogers departing and conventional ceremonial dance resuming, including the Eagle Dance, the ceremonial star of the performance sequence.

Raymond D. Fogelson and Amelia B. Walker's analysis in the Journal of Cherokee Studies in 1980 identified the ceremony as encoding three successive moments of the colonial encounter: the white man attempted to steal Cherokee women; then he sought to fight; finally, he was reduced to making a fool of himself. This sequence, enacted in a single evening, worked through the full range of the colonizer's behavior in order and placed its conclusion at the moment of the colonizer's self-exposure as ridiculous. The ceremony did not defeat the Booger. It contained him, allowed him to display his nature, and watched him exhaust himself, returning the community's social space to its proper order after the outsider's chaos had run its course.

The healing function documented at the Gilcrease Museum, which describes booger masks as "originally worn during healing dances," is consistent with the ceremony's broader purpose: Speck recorded that the Booger Dance addressed the harmful powers of alien peoples and their ghosts, who were understood as capable of causing sickness or misfortune. Driving out the Booger through ceremony protected the community's health as well as its social integrity.

 Cultural Context

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are the descendants of those Cherokee who remained in the Appalachian highlands during the forced removal of 1838 and 1839, when approximately 16,000 Cherokee were marched westward to Indian Territory in what became Oklahoma under military supervision, and an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 died along the route known as the Trail of Tears. Those who evaded removal, led by the chief Tsali and sheltered by white North Carolina neighbors, eventually secured the right to remain in North Carolina through the individual efforts of William Holland Thomas, a white trader and state senator who purchased land on behalf of the Eastern Cherokee. The Qualla Boundary, the land base of the Eastern Band today at approximately 56,000 acres in Swain and Jackson counties, was legally established through this process. The Booger Dance's satirical depictions of outsiders, documented in their post-removal form by Speck in 1935 and 1936, developed within a community that had survived forced dispossession and had organized a permanent presence within the territory of the society that had attempted to eliminate their presence there.

The German, French, African, and Chinese figures represented in the Booger Dance masks reflect the specific demographics of outsider contact experienced by the Eastern Cherokee in western North Carolina across the 18th and 19th centuries. German and European immigrant communities populated the surrounding Appalachian valleys. African enslavement and post-emancipation presence in the region produced Cherokee awareness of Black identity as a distinct outsider category. The inclusion of other Native nations as Booger subjects in some performances reflected inter-tribal tensions rather than anti-colonial satire. The ceremony's content was updated to reflect current outsider contact rather than maintaining a fixed historical script, making the masks and names responsive to the community's contemporary social experience rather than performing a fixed mythological narrative.

 Discovery and Preservation

Frank G. Speck, folklorist and anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, observed Booger Dance performances at the Qualla Boundary in 1935 and 1936. His collaboration with Cherokee cultural authority Will West Long, Long's sister Roxy, his half-brother Lawyer Calhoun, and other Eastern Band members produced Cherokee Dance and Drama, co-authored with Leonard Broom and published in 1951. This volume remains the foundational ethnographic account of the Booger Dance and is the primary source for all subsequent scholarly analysis. Will West Long, born in 1870 and died in 1947, is the carver most consistently identified in the literature as the authoritative practitioner of the ceremonial mask tradition in the early 20th century. The Smithsonian's 1908 mask collected by Harrington from Lawyer Calhoun, Long's half-brother, preceded Speck's systematic documentation by nearly three decades, establishing that institutional collection of booger masks preceded scholarly analysis of their function.

Contemporary carver Billy Welch, who taught at the Eastern Band's school in Robbinsville for nearly two decades, is identified by Our State magazine and the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian as one of the most accomplished living booger mask carvers. He exhibited at the NMAI in New York in 2018. His practice of teaching mask-making to Eastern Band students represents the primary documented institutional mechanism through which the carving tradition is transmitted to younger generations. Welch has described the challenge of teaching the tradition in a school context where "an hour and a half a day is not enough time for students to learn the totality of the art form."


The Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina holds the largest institutional collection of documented booger masks with confirmed Cherokee provenance. The NMAI holds the 1908 Harrington collection example. The Gilcrease Museum holds the Virgil Crowe example. The Ulster Museum in Belfast holds a mask with an associated demonstration of Cherokee blowgun technique, acquired during a cultural exchange program.

The commercialization of booger mask production from the mid-20th century onward, identified in the Gilcrease Museum's documentation as the dominant mode of production between the mid and late 20th century, produced masks sold to non-Cherokee tourists and collectors at scale. The academic paper presented at the 2023 "mask and masking" conference documented through the NOMADIT abstract database, by a scholar reconsidering the masks "once at the heart of the Cherokee Booger Dance," is the most recent documented scholarly engagement with the question of what happens to a ceremonial object when it is primarily produced for commercial sale to people who have no access to or knowledge of its original function.

 Why It Matters

The Cherokee Booger Dance mask is the only documented ceremonial object in North American indigenous material culture whose primary satirical target was the colonial population living on land adjacent to its makers, and whose content was updated in real time to reflect current colonial and immigrant demographics rather than encoding a fixed mythological or historical script. The mask's function as a vehicle for containing and exhausting the disruptive energy of outsiders through controlled performance, rather than through physical confrontation or formal political process, represents a documented indigenous strategy for managing colonial contact that operated entirely within the ceremonial framework of the community rather than through any mechanism the surrounding colonial society could recognize or respond to. The transition from ceremonial to commercial production, documented by the Gilcrease Museum as the dominant mode of mask production from the mid-20th century onward, created a corpus of objects that retain the visual form of the ceremonial mask while being produced in the absence of the dance, the community witness, the announced obscene names, and the winter ceremonial context that defined the original object's function, making the commercial booger mask simultaneously the most widely distributed and least functionally accurate record of the original practice in any institutional or private collection.