ABSTRACT
Gadugi is an ethic that weds praxis and belief. This civic action taken for social justice enacts a spiritual connection to community and people, to legacies of social action. Gadugi lends layers of meaning to rhetorical activism. It is ethical action undertaken for and with communities that is done in light of a higher spirit. Gadugi, a long-standing Cherokee ethic of community service based on political, ethical action, also folds in the honoring and respect of traditional ways of knowing. If Gadugi is represented by fire, then the ethical action for a public, a community, is more than a matter of praxis. Historian Wilma Dunaway describes the collective agrarian practices of Tsalagi in the 1820s and finds that another meaning of gadugi is found therein: “Men and women alike formed the gadugi, a labor gang that tended the fields and gardens of elderly or infirm members of the village”.
