My ignorance unfurled before me like a sail.

Recently arrived in North Carolina, I bought a topographic map of the
state and let my eyes explore.  My gaze went naturally westward into
the crinkled, mountain ridges of the higher elevations, picking out
interesting places to explore.  The name "Cherokee" leapt out at me.
"Huh," I thought to myself, "Cool name, like the old Native American
tribe.  Wonder if they're related?"

Of course they're related.


  
It didn't take long to realize I was looking at the old territorial
homelands of the Cherokee people.  Reading up on the Cherokee, it all
came back to me: how white settlers moving westward from the farmland
of the eastern seaboard found the Cherokees inconvenient, how with the
help of the U.S. Army the Cherokee people were uprooted /en masse/ and
forced westward to a new Indian territory consisting of the crappiest
piece of real estate whites could identify, how the forced march --
now known as the Trail of Tears -- led to the death of probably 20% of
them.  The story worsened of course as I got into the details: the
Cherokee were not bellicose, they built small homes of thatch and wood
and tended gardens.  They were literate and socially
organized. Tecumseh produced a syllabary whose characters are
available on any modern computer system in the 21st century; they had
a newspaper; they strove to accomodate whites, whose ways were not so
different from their own.

White could have conceivably left the Cherokee alone, lived alongside
them, traded crops and goods.  We did not of course, because the
Cherokee had the misfortune of inhabiting valleys suspected of having
gold and mineral deposits, and we neither wanted to share nor be
denied riches we thought were ours for the taking.

I drove out to Cherokee to have a look around. The Qualla Boundary is
now home to the small group of Cherokees who stayed behind and refused
to be transported.  It's home to a casino now of course, but as I
sidled up to groups of dark-skinned men with straight black hair
picnicking in the riverside park, I heard Mexican Spanish, not
Cherokee. Maybe that's when the dismal understanding of what was left
of the Cherokee began to sink in: the kitchy "Trading Post" stores at
roadside, each offering shelves of every item possibly recognizable as
Native American regardless of actual origin: Oaxacan (Mexican) woven
blankets, Ojibwe dreamcatchers, Navajo turquoise and silver.  It got
worse on the outskirts of Bryson City, where signs advertised a weekly
Indian dance performance: the venue was a sandy, flat space down by
the river where three, large /Plains Indian/ Tee-Pees had been erected
(the Cherokee lived in wooden houses, for God's sake). That
corresponded to the enormous statue back in Cherokee of a standing man
with a feather headdress and one raised hand.  You could almost hear
the baby talk we ascribe to Native Americans: "How. Me Chief Silver
Bear, come tell you heap good story about my people. You listen now."
I thought back on an old car I'd driven, the Jeep Cherokee. That got
me thinking about the Jeep Comanches and the like: probably the same
story.  If you name a vehicle after a society whose land you've
appropriated by force, does that make it any better?  What now sells
is the cheapest, most ersatz interpretation of a real culture that
exists today. Nobody wants to see the reality of the Cherokee story,
they want tee-pees and dreamcatchers and this Disnefied /shit/ we
spread in place of reality.

I read glumly about the Trail of Tears, how Native Americans were
charged an outrageous price to make one river crossing by boat, how
they walked shoeless through the snows to Oklahoma.  I poked around in
the mountain valleys of North Carolina, where the old military
outposts are long gone from both the earth's surface and from any
sense of memory that I could tell. I queued for months to read the
library's copy of _Even As We Breathe_, a 2021 book written by a
Cherokee author. I found a Cherokee vocabulary to look up words that
interested me.  What depressed me the most was how we tell this story.
It goes like this:

    Once upon a time the white man uprooted the Cherokee to Oklahoma. Many
    died. It was awful.  Well, what can you do?  Here's the current
    situation, which is unchangeable ...
  
Whites tell the story, and therefore the story meets its unalterable
conclusion in Oklahoma.  Nothing to be done. Too bad, but hey we've
got Netflix now and running water and solar panels and isn't it great?
No, it's not great.  How absolutely telling, then, that the big
battles of 2021 and probably 2022 are being fought over school
curricula.  If you teach young, white children this whole situation
was a foregone conclusion, it perpetuates one of the many jointly-held
lies of this nation. Turns out, you only have to scratch this surface
before the offal rises: Noam Chomsky was right.  And I was taught a
version of this back in the 1970s.  We're not making the kind of
progress that we need.
  
Standing at the side of the waters of the Oconaluftee River as they
clatter over the stones, you wonder if we ever will.


--------------------------------------
_Even As We Breathe_, by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
_The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears_ by Theda Perdue and
  Michael D. Green
_Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook_ by Barbara R. Duncan and
  Brett H. Riggs  
_Cherokee History and Culture_, by Helen Dwyer and D.L. Birchfield  
_Year 501: The Conquest Continues_, by Noam Chomsky