When a Simple Weekend Getaway Is Actually Something Way Bigger
Or: You can't outrun your ancestors. Ghosts can run real fast.
C/W racial / cultural violence against indigenous people, attempted genocide
Lord howdy, nothing could have prepared me for some of the more problematic tourist attractions in Cherokee.
Ginormous plaster statues of Native men in feather headdresses; motels with names like “Injun Wigwam” or “Indian Teepee”; Pan-for-Gold businesses by the river.
We’d come to town for my son and husband to compete in a mountain bike race, and even though they’d cautioned me to gird my loins, I was still gobsmacked.
The vibe in Cherokee is hard to describe. It’s 50% beautiful mountain town, rich with history; 50% problematic stereotypes in neon.
It feels almost surreal.
The history of the area is all too real, though: a mix of heartbreak, violence, and resilience.
On our drive there, we read up (HISTORY NERD ALERT!) and listened to a podcast interview with a local Cherokee mountain biker and trail builder (highly recommended, even if you’re not into biking).
We learned that Cherokee sits inside the Qualla Boundary, which is land that the U.S. government holds in trust for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI). The EBCI purchased the land in the 1870s (uh, yeah, it was already theirs), which means that it is not really a reservation as such.
Reservations were created by the U.S. government as relocation sites for Indigenous people forcibly removed from their ancestral land. Often pretty far away.
In contrast, the Qualla Boundary is the ancestral land of the Cherokee people — or a small corner of that land. Cherokee people can own and sell property within the Qualla Boundary.
But the welcome sign says “Cherokee Indian Reservation,” so … obviously I don’t know the full story.
Back to our trip.
The EBCI relies on tourism for income. This includes a big casino; the aforementioned problematic tourist attractions; less or non-problematic, Native-driven education and activities; and Fire Mountain, the mountain bike park hosting the race my fellas would ride. Also a great brewery. We did our best to spend our money at Indian-owned establishments. (Friends, we succeeded.)
Per usual, while the boys raced, bestest dog Pepper and I took a “hike” on the Oconaluftee River Trail. We moseyed at the snail’s pace of Pepper’s golden years, with a lengthy stop at each of the signs inviting us to reflect on Cherokee history, spirituality, culture, and land.
These were, and continue to be, intricately entwined. You couldn’t pull them apart if you tried.
As I sat by the river with Pepper, thinking how there was ZERO litter around, I had a big “DUH” moment.
The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indian is … Cherokee.
Like I said, it was a “duh” moment.
I did not say it was a profound revelation.
The “duh” was that the Cherokee people — literally many of the folks I’m saying hey to on my walk — are the people my ancestors stole land from.
Look, I don’t mean “stole land” as in “generally settler-colonized.” Settler colonizing in general? That’s all of my ancestors. The whole lot.
Most of my forebears emigrated from England in the early 1600s. The remainder — the line from Martin Luther (yes that Martin Luther - the fomenter of the Protestant Reformation was my 13th-great-grandfather) — emigrated from Germany around 1702.
A few of my Mayflower-riding ancestors settled near Plymouth, but the vast majority came over courtesy of the Virginia Company of London (some indentured, some not) to colonize what became known as Jamestown, in British Colonial Virginia.
All of the land that all of my people settler colonized was the ancestral, unceded land of Native Americans.
Unceded means the land was never turned over by treaty or legal process.
Unceded means stolen.
I have all sorts of feelings about these ancestors and the atrocities they committed or were accomplices to. For sure.
But before we move on, let’s not let me off the hook.
Am I any better than my ancestors?
Ok, I am committed to dismantling white supremacy. So I’ve got that in my corner.
And sure, I haven’t gone to war or led a forced march… but what do we include when we talk about violence?
Occupation, one could persuasively argue, is a way of perpetuating violent settler colonialism.
I currently “own” and occupy on unceded land of the Occaneechi, Shakori, Lumbee, Cheraw, Catawba, Eno, and Sapori people here in Durham, North Carolina.
Stated. Noted.
What I mean specifically about stealing land from the Cherokee, though, is that my third-great-grandfather, Methodist Episcopal Reverend Drury Flowers, “won” a plot of land in the Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832.
Please know I’m putting big lobster-claw air-quotes around “won.”
This was one of several land lotteries in Georgia in the 1830s.
Before 1832, colonizers — yes, including all of my ancestors — had already been murdering and/or forcibly removing Native Americans for two centuries.
Two. Centuries.
Then, in 1829, gold was “discovered” by settlers in what is now northern Georgia.
(I assume the Indigenous folks knew the gold was there, but weren’t the greedy assholes many of my ancestors and other colonizers were.)
Surprising exactly no one, this “discovery” initiated a gold rush. Colonizers swarmed.
But the colonizers, they were scared of Indians. They wanted Indigenous people out of the way. I mean, a small chance of finding gold, or honoring Indigenous human beings’ lives and dignity?
You do the math.
You know who did the math? President Andrew Jackson, that’s who.
In 1830, Andrew Jackson, one of the worst of our long list of truly appalling U.S. presidents, signed into law the Indian Removal Act. This allowed the U.S. to “give” lands west of the Mississippi River to Native Americans in “exchange” for their ancestral lands in extant eastern states.
So. The land was “cleared” of Indigenous people by U.S. soldiers. Soldiers used whip, bayonet, or gunpoint to impel Native people to walk to removal camps. Here they awaited the “official” forced march to Oklahoma.
Some Native people resisted.
Some were killed on the spot.
Some hid, many eventually converging in what would become the Qualla Boundary.
But the majority of the Eastern Woodlands Indians did not hide or resist, presumably to stay together with their families and protect their young and old.
Over the course of the 1830s, close to 100,000 Indigenous people were removed from the southeastern states. Estimates vary depending on the source, but between 4,000-15,000 people died on the marches to Oklahoma.
Some of you may have heard of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. There were in fact multiple Trails of Tears - and let’s be super clear about what they were.
They were forced marches, initiated and carried out by the U.S. government and military, of the Eastern Woodlands Indians (the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations). The marchers went for more than 1200 hundred miles, in every imaginable weather condition, across rivers, over mountains, and through forests, sometimes manacled, often being whipped or beaten, to what is now Oklahoma.
The Cherokee Trail of Tears started in 1830. Remember: gold was “discovered” in 1829.
I can’t imagine the shock of this forced displacement.
Partly I literally can’t imagine it because, like my third-great-grandfather Flowers, my religion and spirituality is not tied to the geography, plants, rocks, rivers, or animals of my home. Not at all.
These folks, though: their spirituality is the land is the culture is their spirituality is the culture.
All aspects of their physical, cultural, social, and spiritual lives were, and continue to be, interwoven and inseparable.
Being forced to leave must have felt like being ripped out by the roots. Or cut off at the knees.
“The soldiers gathered them up, all up, and put them in camps. They hunted them and ran them down until they got all of them. Even before they were loaded in wagons, many of them got sick and died. They were all grief stricken they lost all on earth they had. White men even robbed their dead’s graves to get their jewelry and other little trinkets. They saw to stay was impossible and Cherokees told Gen. Scott they would go without further trouble and the long journey started. They did not all come at once. First one batch and then another. The sick, old, and babies rode on the grub and household wagons. The rest rode a horse, if they had one. Most of them walked. Many of them died along the way. They buried them where they died, in unmarked graves… The road they traveled, history calls the "Trail of Tears." This trail was more than tears. It was death, sorrow, hunger, exposure, and humiliation to a civilized people as were the Cherokees.
—Elizabeth Watts, a Cherokee woman whose mother was born along the Trail of Tears.
A volunteer soldier from Georgia who participated in the removal recounted: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
— from Mooney, James. Historical Sketch of the Cherokee. 2005.
So yeah.
Returning now to my paternal third-great-grandfather Reverend Flowers.
Actually, you know what? Maybe that’s enough for today. We’ll get to Reverend Flowers next time.
For now, I don’t know, maybe do something to reflect on this history, or the history of the land where you are.
Whatever your culture and background, it’s worth thinking about:
How are you in relationship with violent settler colonial history?
How does it affect you? What harms has it done to you?
In what ways do you recognize and respond to this history?
In what ways do you perpetuate this history? (Are you complacent?)
In what ways do you try to repair / transform the legacy of violent settler colonialism?
You can look up the traditional your location here.
Whew. These are heavy questions. Thanks for hanging tough to engage with them.
And as always, thanks for reading.
See you next time.
XOXO
Christian religion was a big factor. The pastors had few objections to the genocide. Many thought it was God's will that white Christians took over everything. Black slavery was justified with selected passages from the OT Bible.