History as Connection

Following the Vowell sisters' podcasted trip along the Trail of Tears, I couldn't help but compare it to my own trip in getting to Oklahoma. Our routes in getting here were disparate, but many of our reactions were the same. We were silly, we were somber, we were confused at what we saw. We sought connection, but how to really connect to something nebulous like history? We went in with the heavy and serious intent of knowing something of ourselves. For the Vowell sisters, it was to discover something of their own past, as people of Cherokee descent. For me, it was to feel something of the past as a part of the place I call my home, North Carolina--how I should think of this space in terms of that past, what part do I have in it. Remnants of that past still play a role here in our mountains, where there's still Cherokee land; our state is also the home for one of the biggest populations of American Indians east of the Mississippi. How is it that most people have no idea of it? It's a past that is distant for most Americans; hardly known, it seems--but a past not distant at all for a great many Cherokees. So I began my trip there in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Like Sarah, I often recused myself from the heavy or lofty purpose of the cultural tour I was embarking upon. I stopped in at the Harrah's Casino, ate at the sprawling and beautiful hotel. That was one of the first of several Casinos we'd go on to see, each seemingly larger than the last--complete with man-made waterfalls, gaming floors with gleaming cars and motorcycles, resorts towering into the sky. I also went to the Museum of the Cherokee Indian and learned of history dating into the BCs, a place rife with arrowheads and ancient dug canoes. I soon found out that in Indian Country, there was always a juxtaposition of past and present, with a flashing casino right near the marker designating a Trail depot or the burial site of a prominent Cherokee leader. Here the past and present exist simultaneously, in a much more conspicuous way than we're used to. It can be jarring.

Sarah tells us how she had trouble reconciling with this, as kids tromped and played over the site where Cherokees began their deadly and anguished Trail. At times it is too much to handle. Just as she giggled staying at the Chattanooga Choo Choo, I laughed at myself amid the gaudy purple and chrome cars in Elvis's personal collection at Graceland. We needed the detours. (Besides, some say Elvis was Cherokee.)

Yet you can't really ever take a full detour. Even at Graceland I had to face up to the sprawl of poverty around the mansion grounds. The same could be said of the casino--as soon as I came upon the sign "Entering the Cherokee Reservation" in NC, trailers and old, rusted out cars lined the narrow shoulder of winding mountain road. The same poverty could be seen in the rural northeastern Oklahoma...in Briggs, Stilwell, Marble City, Bell. The struggles of the past aren't distant. They still continue.

I was particularly struck by this as I neared the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the day before coming to Tahlequah. Now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum, seeing the empty balcony where Martin Luther King had stood, now adorned with a flowered wreath, yellow ribbon rustling in the wind, with crumbling brick buildings, windows broken out, all around--I thought to myself, there is still so much farther to go.

There is a continuing class struggle in Indian country. Wilma Mankiller writes about it in her book, about the self-respect poor people can earn for themselves by taking things into their own hands. While the Museum standing in dedication to Dr. King marks that we have come some way, along with an African American US President, and a female former Principal Chief of the Cherokees, there is more work to do. If anything, Chief Mankiller's book showed that Indian people exemplify the poorest of the US, but this struggle is not just an Indian struggle.