TJ Holland - Cherokee Snowbird

Partial Transcript: Okay. I’m T.J. Holland. I’m a cultural resources supervisor for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, with the Kituwah Preservation Education Program, which is involved in language—we’re involved in language revitalization as well as cultural preservation. And as part of that I run Junaluska Museum here in Graham County.

Partial Transcript: The museum got started as a community organization really—The Friends of Junaluska. Prior to the establishment of all of this, Junaluska’s grave was on this site and it was really just—to get to it you had to go on a little trail up the woods, and it was just a small little wrought iron gate around the graveyard. The community got together and decided they wanted to clean it up and maybe try to do some things with it as far as making it a nicer place—widen the trails—and they did that. They built a monument around Junaluska’s gravesite and did some rock work and things like that, which led to the landowner—which had the property just down the hill from the grave—gave them a side of the hill to work in a medicine trail—a traditional plant trail that talks about Cherokee medicine as far as the medicinal plants and their uses. At some point later, once that was established, he gave them the house that he was living in. He is on up in years. I think he was going to live somewhere else to retire. The Friends of Junaluska set up Junaluska Museum, and in around 2000 the Friends of Junaluska turned it over to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with the Cultural Resources Department. And I’ve been here for almost seven and a half years now as the manager of the museum.

Partial Transcript: Sure. Junaluska is a one of the more well-known figures in Cherokee history, and up until the past several years was one of the most notable people in western North Carolina, no matter race. He was just very popular, and his name is used in Haywood County with the Methodist complex there. In Franklin, North Carolina, the Masonic lodge is the Junaluska Lodge, and his name is just kind of far and wide here. He was born around 1779 about fifteen miles from Nikwasi—Franklin, North Carolina—in Dillard, Georgia. He became real well known for his participation in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. That was part of the Creek Civil War and the War of 1812. Junaluska and his group of Cherokees—he recruited about a hundred warriors from North Carolina in the 500-warrior Cherokee force that went down there to fight with Andrew Jackson against the Creeks. They were in the middle of an uprising over whether or not to remove to move west. And in 1815 the Cherokees went down and fought the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, which gave Andrew Jackson a lot of momentum. He was, at that point, commissioned into the United States Army and went on down to New Orleans. In that battle, he became a famous man and propelled him to the White House. Junaluska came back as a revered war leader—kind of a war chief. He and his family had been headmen—leaders in their towns—and in the 1820s moved over into present-day Andrews, North Carolina, to the Valleytown where he and his brother, Wachacha, were headmen over there.

They were working to hide people in the mountains when the Army came in, in 1838, to avoid removal. There were treaties in place and a lot of subtleties in Cherokee removal that some people were legally allowed to remain via treaty. Junaluska was one of them. He used that position to kind of hide in plain sight and hide Cherokees in the mountains to kind of give them—keep them out of the way of the Army as they were coming through. He got found out. He, his brother, and some other men were arrested in Tennessee in late July or early August of 1838 and forced to go to Oklahoma. Wachacha and Junaluska hatched a plan to escape—to leave their detachment that was going west—and around Middleburg, Tennessee, they came back east. They took fifty people with them and broke them up into two groups. Junaluska was the older brother. He took the twenty-five oldest. Wachacha took the twenty-five younger. Junaluska, unfortunately, and his band got caught. Wachacha’s band made it back over. To this day in the Snowbird Community here in Graham County I would say it’s pretty safe to say about two-thirds of us trace our ancestry back to Wachacha. So in essence, most of us here Snowbirds see Junaluska as an ancestral uncle, which is a big reason why they formed the Friends to—the Friends of Junaluska—to work on the gravesite and improve that. It’s kind of looking back on him as an ancestral relative and to help to honor that.

But Junaluska was caught and sent to Oklahoma. They put him in chains and put him in the back of a wagon. That was his trek on the Trail of Tears. And he came back. He got out there around January or February of 1839. He was back here by 1842 and took up squatter’s rights in his old house in Valleytown. In 1847, North Carolina passed a resolution to make Junaluska a citizen of the state of North Carolina, and they gave him a hundred dollars, I think. And in their resolution it said that for his diverse effort, for his valorous effort at the Battle of the Horseshoe and other diverse occasions—and he lived out his life here in this valley below the museum as his property. He passed away in November 20th of 1858. He was about eighty-two years old.

Partial Transcript: There were a lot of dynamics in the Native American world since the time of British contact. The British made a habit of pitting tribes against one another and secretly funding both sides to keep them busy, to keep them at war so the British could be involved in treaties and land sessions. And that was their way of—as they put it—keeping the savages occupied is how they worded that. The Cherokees and the Creeks had been warring parties for hundreds—maybe thousands—of years. They just didn’t like each other. When the Creeks were in the middle of their revolt, it was spurred on by the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and Tecumseh had organized so many tribes in the Ohio Valley and the Cumberland Valley—and assisted by the British—to fight the newly-formed United States, or as they still referred to them as the colonists—the white settlers. Tecumseh learned a lot about uniting tribes and things as a young boy. He came down south with his brother to fight with the Chickamauga Cherokee leader, Dragging Canoe, at the turn of the 19th century. And Dragging Canoe had formed a confederacy that had some Choctaws, some Creeks, of course, Cherokee, and even some of the Europeans came over to fight with him. And they were leading raids in east Tennessee, southwest Virginia, and trying to hold out—to hold out against these encroaching settlers that were coming in. Dragging Canoe’s band—there was never a peace treaty signed. There was never a surrender. The Chickamauga just quit fighting around 1794. They just had enough. Dragging Canoe passed away in 1792, and they just didn’t see the need to keep on going. It was leading to a lot of death and misery.

When Andrew Jackson formed his Tennessee Volunteers to go after the Creeks that had revolted, that faction of Creeks were under the influence of the Shawnee. Tecumseh had come down to recruit the Cherokees, and the Cherokees didn’t want to join his confederacy. So he went further south and found this contingent of Creeks that weren’t willing to leave their land, that were not wanting to give any more up, and were willing to fight for it. He convinced them to join up with his faction, and there goes the Creek Civil War. Andrew Jackson had promised the Cherokees land and that they would not be removed. Junaluska wrote his—during the removal of the Cherokees in 1838 he told a private that had come in for—an Army private at Fort Butler—that Andrew Jackson told them that if they fought good he would give them a one-mile square of land—664 acres—after the Creek Civil War was over and Horseshoe Bend had ended. In 1817 a treaty was written that was ostensibly to remove the Cherokees west twenty years before it occurred. But there was a provision in that treaty that allowed for a one-square-mile tract of land to anyone who signed the provision of that treaty that were averse to removal, and Junaluska was one of the men that signed that. So the reason the Cherokees did side with the United States was that they were hoping to maintain their land.

Partial Transcript: A lot of our work with the museum is we are working with our exhibits and with our collections. We’re doing a lot of digitization of records at the National Archives and various universities and things across the country to gather this information. There are Cherokee documents and information about Cherokees all over the world. There’s a huge collection even in London that the Museum of the Cherokee Indian has brought together for the Timberlake exhibits. The purpose of what we’re doing—and I focus in on the middle 19th century, right in that removal era. We hear so much and it’s been—I guess you could say the story’s been forced that the Cherokees were unable to help themselves. They were forced to go, and the details have never really come out in North Carolina for the Eastern Band, and in learning and doing the research on guys like Junaluska and John Welch and Wachacha—that these guys were actively shaping their own destiny. They were working to maintain a Cherokee presence in North Carolina in our part of the world and to maintain many of the traditional town sites—Kituwa being very important to us as a mother town—that finally came back into the possession of the Eastern Band in the late 1990s. But to maintain that presence here—and that they were actively involved in not only hiding themselves but keeping other people away from the Army, working the legal system as far as the treaties went and getting into the minutiae of the treaties to maintain their presence here. And hopefully in doing that we’ll get these details out. As historians, we don’t talk about anything or present a story that we can’t back up with the documents. So in gathering these documents and things to give to—to tell these stories to the kids and to tell these stories to our adults as well within our community, within our tribe—that hopefully we can foster some self-esteem—that we weren’t just the hapless victims in this story, that we were actually involved in shaping our own destiny as to what became the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Partial Transcript: And you know it’s a mindset. I won’t call it a Western mindset because I don’t even think Europeans think this way. It’s a uniquely American mindset—that of linear time. We grow up in schools and in our history classes and our social studies classes and we see these timelines. You’ll start here at whatever period, you come forward, and you come to the present. Maybe even in the back of our minds the further that line goes away from that point in history the further removed we are from it. But at the end of the day, Native American tribes across the country—we deal with the impact of that history every day. There’s a reason there are reservations out west. There are reasons why our land base of the Cherokee nation encompassed seven states in the southeast. And now we’re broken up into three different tribes in Oklahoma and North Carolina. We live with that history and in our way of thinking. I used to say that we look at our history—if you see that timeline—to think of it as a piece of string. Now ball that string up and that’s our timeline. I’ve heard a couple of elders talk about it as being a room—that time exists in a room—and the doors in a room and where you walk in that door is where you walk in in time but that it’s all connected and it’s all here. As a more concrete example, unless we’re strictly talking about genealogy where we’ll talk about our great-great-great-great-great grandfathers or grandmothers we don’t use that. We’ll talk about Grandpa Wachacha or Grandma Nicie, and in conversation that’s how we refer to them. There are no greats in front of that. They’re our grandparents. If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t be here now.

Partial Transcript: Our tribe is not—I’ll speak for myself on this. I don’t have permission to speak for anyone else. But the way I see it, it’s not about a guilt trip. We’re not trying to make anyone feel guilty for what happened in the past, fact bein’ nobody alive today was responsible for what happened 150 or 170 years ago. They weren’t there. We can’t hold people today personally responsible for what happened then. What we can do is learn from it and use that knowledge of what happened to not let the same things happen again. Looking at how the government—and there was another gentleman in the community who talked about how the US government just came in and removed the Indians. They didn’t ask permission. They signed a treaty on paper to make it look legal, but that didn’t stop them from sending a lot of other tribes out either. What’s to stop that from happening today? And the only thing would be if enough people said that’s wrong and we can’t do that again. So it’s not about trying to beat anybody over the head about anything or to point fingers. It is simply to say this happened. Now let’s not let that happen again, and let’s learn from it and become stronger for it.

Partial Transcript: You know, looking back on those things and seeing what those guys did makes me want to make things better now because that’s all they were doing. They were just trying to make things better. The best life to live is that when you’re gone you’ve left the world in a little better place than when you found it. And if that means planting trees if that means learning traditional farming methods to keep not only those methods alive but to keep alive the mindset that went with it and the world as it was then—but also teaching the kids. There are so many things in our world now that are so different. Our grandfathers had names for the bends in the river. There were stories that went with those names. These places had histories that stretched back generations upon generations, and what I would like to do myself and through my job—I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to do that—to be able to gather that information, to talk to elders about what they remember hearing when they were young children from their grandparents and to give that to our kids now. Those things are not gone. And no, they’re not known necessarily by everyone, but hopefully when I’m gone there will be enough people that have learned that. And it’s not just that I’m doing that—that it’s me doing it. There are a lot of folks doing this and working together just to give to our kids so that they can remember those places. It’s not important if any of us are remembered by name. It’s not important that anybody writes down our biographies or anything like that. What’s important is that these places that our grandfathers remembered are still in our memory today.

Partial Transcript: I was physically born in Cherokee, North Carolina, at the VA Hospital at the time. Except for two years as a child, I’ve lived in Graham County all of my life. I’ve been very fortunate for that. I’ve been part of the Snowbird Community here. We’re part of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. We’re fifty miles geographically separated from what they call the Qualla Reservation or Cherokee, North Carolina. But we are part of the tribe, and to grow up in the community and to know people—and again, a lot of these stories and to be around to hear that—and even to be around now, to hear these stories talking about different folks in the past—relatives or sometimes not relatives—and of things that happened here and being in the position of working through the museum that we can record that or write it down and use that for the next generations to come.

Partial Transcript: Well, I’m of mixed blood. I’ve got family on both sides. But I remember listening to my grandpa talk to his sister on the telephone, and they only spoke in Cherokee—the first time I ever heard that. If I don’t do something about it I’ll go to my grave mad that I never learned. I’m trying my best now to make up for lost time. But I remember hearing him talking about that and different family members. Most of my family has always been in western North Carolina in one form or another—in the surrounding counties—so seeing the mountain culture on one side, seeing the Cherokee culture on the other—it may be that just over time that there are a lot of similarities. There are a lot of differences, but there are also a lot of similarities. I just remember being able to go through the woods. Me and my brother would go out and hang off trees and things like that. And being able to do that—and going to the National Archives, going to Washington, D.C., going to Philadelphia and these cities and things—I look around and I realize. I realized at one point why there are more atheists in a city than there are in the country. Because you look around and everything’s man-made. If there’s a tree planted on the sidewalk somebody planted that tree. There’s nothing there that can’t be torn down and rebuilt. It kind of understanding that—that you don’t—if you live in a city all of your life—and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a mindset. It’s a world. When you live here you’re very understanding of the fact that there are a lot of things that you can’t control. There are a lot of things that you make do with. And not making do as in settling for but I see places now where they’re literally cutting down the mountains and using the top of the mountain to fill in the valley, and it’s flat. And I drive by thinking if that’s what you want move to Arizona. There’s plenty of that. Oh, they’re not making mountains anymore. So I’m thankful, and I’m thankful that I’m still living here and that I can raise my son and little stepdaughter in a place like this.

Partial Transcript: I think the biggest lesson and one that I—the biggest lesson I want to teach to my son is that it’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s not about an individual. There are bigger things involved, and when you’re a member of a tribal community—if you are selfish in that then you’re no longer thinking about it in the terms of everybody else, the community. And that isn’t necessarily restricted to being a Cherokee or Native American when you look at the world in terms of the people around you and not in terms of what you can get out of it yourself.

Partial Transcript: I was talking to my son last night about passing on values and passing on things. I was talking to him and telling him some of the Cherokee stories and some of these story places. He looked at me and he said, “Is that real, Daddy?” And I’m used to hearing that, but I couldn’t just give a pat answer to that either because I knew that was a very serious question. I just said yeah. In that particular instance in that particular story that really happened. It didn’t happen in some faraway land. It didn’t happen in some place that we have to go for a day’s trip to go visit. It happened here. We can take him and point him to that. Here at the museum at the gravesite we have a wreath laying every year. The Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a monument to Junaluska in 1910, and every year we have a wreath-laying ceremony just to commemorate that and to commemorate his being honored. My little boy—I didn’t even know he was here. I knew one of the language teachers in Robbinsville that teaches Cherokee language to the kids and teaches it to everybody in the school, not just the Cherokee kids. They brought a little group to sing a couple of little hymns in Cherokee. I was so busy running around trying to make sure everything was working and going well that, when I looked up to see the little guys sing, I saw my little boy. And I thought that’s just how it needs to be. That’s right.

Partial Transcript: I think I got it. I think that the biggest lesson that we can teach our kids is also the biggest blessing that we have. We’re still here. Our grandfathers have been here for thousands of years and we’re still here despite smallpox, despite the United States Army, despite all of these things—boarding schools that tried to eliminate the cultures—that it’s still here and there’s responsibility that goes along with that. It’s not just a matter of saying this is our place and this is where we stayed but that we can still take our kids to these places, that we can still go ourselves. We can go to Kituwa where it all started. We’re here so that folks from the Cherokee Nation—the United Keetoowah Band—can come east and be at these same places, these places where their grandfathers were taken away from. It’s still here to be had.

Partial Transcript: I think one of the similarities between Cherokee cultures and these mountain cultures here is that sense of community. You hear the old mountain folks talk about how they used to get together and plow each other’s fields or somebody would do that for everyone and get together and things like that. They’d get together and have meals together as a community. Snowbird is a very strong community. Traditionally there was a thing called Gadugi, and Gadugi is free labor. It translates to literally everybody’s bread—something along those lines. In the old days there was a community garden. Everyone had their own spot but then there was the community garden that everybody tended. Everybody was involved with planting. The kids would be running in the fields all day long, playing, and keeping out the crows. And then everybody came together at harvest time, brought it all in, and put it in storage so that you had yours and you had your storage and everybody’s storage house was one. It was one big building. So you only took out what was yours unless something happened and you needed more. And if you did need more there was more there to be had. Two of our most important natural resources are our elders and our children. You have the people that transmit the knowledge and the little ones that are the sponges to absorb it. In the middle—we’re just there to keep it all going and to make sure that that connection is maintained. Later on when people started having more farming plots and things moving on they formed the Gadugi, and everybody was in charge of different things. There was one—they call him the runner. When someone died in the community, when someone passed away he would go to everyone’s house and let them know somebody had died and to set up the services. There was the coffin builder. And all of this—there was no charge. It was a service but it wasn’t for anybody to make money off of. Everybody had their jobs in the community. Those groups under the name Gadugi—sometimes it’s simply free labor coming back.

Louise Reed, who works with me down at the museum, is much more involved in the community than I am, unfortunately. That’s mea culpa there. I need to be more involved. But the community club at Snowbird has emergency funds. If someone gets sick and the family needs to get to the doctor they have some money that they just give them for gas, for food, for things like that. There are fundraisers all the time for these types of things. We raise money for our graduating high school seniors. It’s not a lot of money—just more of a token—but just to say that the community supports you. The community is proud of you. And it’s tight, and everybody is looking out, hopefully, for the best interest of everybody else. Wood splitting and things of that nature—split wood, take it to an elder’s home that’s not able to do it themselves, make sure they have enough firewood. All of the time somebody is giving out food from the garden—things like that. So I think that’s the one thing missing from the world at large. Everyone’s turned inward. How does it develop that people don’t know their neighbors and things like that? I kind of have an antisocial tendency. I understand the desire and the want of privacy and everything. It’s good to have, too. But there’s a balance with things. Sometimes if you need your time you need your time. But at the same time, I’m part of a community. I’m part of something bigger than me, and I know that if I need something I can get help.

Partial Transcript: Not really. Not really. I think the only phrase—what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. We have 00:48:44 (???) (s/l di-u-ta), which is the right way. And it’s one of those words that you can use to scold your kids—straighten up—or it can be the right way of doing something. It also means the right way of being. You’ve got to do it right. In the Cherokee way—in the traditional way if you make a big decision you don’t just think about yourself and your kids. You make that decision based on what’s going to happen seven generations in front of you. That’s why I think a lot in the native community we’re not rash to make a decision. There are not many knee-jerk reactions, and it’s usually not made by yourself. There are consultations with other people—the people you respect in the community, your own elders—and you think about these things. You think if I do this what’s this going to look like for the grandkids down the road. And again, you’re putting yourself behind the line in priority.

Partial Transcript: I think the past is important because it’s what connects us. It’s what connects us to who we are. If it weren’t for our past generations we wouldn’t be here. I think it’s an important tool to learn from—to learn your lessons of what happened or if that worked do it again. If it didn’t work understand why. I think our past is very important. It shapes the present. It shapes you right now if it weren’t for that. I think also in our point of view this is where God put us. This is where the Creator put us. We wouldn’t be here were it not for our grandparents. So I think it’s of the utmost importance that we remember the past. If we don’t remember names that’s fine but that we remember the things that we remember and why it was here. I think it leads to greater understanding of things. It’s much easier to be at peace with what’s going on now and to either be called to action or to appreciate. With the way things are now when we not just learn the past and learn about what happened but understand it—it makes you slow down, I think.

Partial Transcript: Okay. The Snowbird today—we’re a community of about right around 600 people. Again, we’re part of the Eastern Band. Our land is in tribal trust. It’s not technically a reservation but in a lot of ways, there are a lot of similarities. It’s scattered out all through Graham County. It became Snowbird sometime in the late 1800s, early 1900s. It adopted the name Snowbird. Prior to that, it was Cheoah, and Cheoah was the traditional town name of this entire valley, made up of several different towns over time including 00:32:04 (???) (s/l Gun-eech-ee-loo, God-os-too), and Buffalo Town. All taken together it was known as Cheoah, named Otter Place. I’ve heard some talk that it was from the animal in the creeks but also that there was a man here at one time named Otter and that it was really referring to him—that it’s Otter’s Place. We have a couple of our mounds intact still in Graham County. It’s private property now but they’re still there. Folks are sensitive enough not to do anything to destroy them or anything. As being a community of the Eastern Band, we have council representatives. The Tribal Council is the equivalent of our legislature. There are six townships in—six? Maybe seven. Edit this out because I was supposed to know that. But there are the townships in Cherokee, Snowbird, and Cherokee County over the mountain in Murphy. We’re considered one township, so we have two council representatives for us in our legislature.

Partial Transcript: One of the funny things is that the name Snowbird—we have a map from 1838 that the Army drew as kind of a reconnaissance map. Across the ridge it says Snowbird Mountains, and we’ve had folks come up from Florida that saw the map and said, “Well, isn’t that nice. They named that town after us. They named those mountains after us.” I told them it predated them being here by a few thousand years. The name Snowbird— Tuti Yi, Snowbird Place—comes from a story that back in the olden days the animals were a lot bigger, and there would be giant animals that lived in certain places. There was a giant Snowbird living in that mountain range, that’s where he had his nest, and that’s where the Snowbird name came from.

Partial Transcript: This is a newer story. This is from back in, I think, maybe the late ‘70s, early 1980s. Snowbird is in the sticks. It’s way back and there’s Snowbird Creek that runs through it. Our council members—and a lot of them still are but in this time period especially—were really involved nut just within tribal business and tribal politics but also involved in county business as well. They attended all of the county commissioner’s meetings and planning boards and all of that stuff to know how that would affect the community. At one time there was talk of building a trash dump. There was talk in trying to find a place for a trash dump in the county, and it was needed. The spot they had chosen was some land way back in the mountains above Snowbird—above the community center and above where most folks lived. And of course, the runoff from that would have been in the creek. Our council members—my grandfather attended that meeting and came back to the community club meetings, which are held once a month, and told them what was going on. They told them the plans and all of that, and the community joined together strongly and kept that from happening. That landfill was not built up there because our community members were not just part of that community but part of a larger county community as well. They knew what was going on. Had they not been there to do that it would have went on business as usual, and nobody would have known it until it was too late.

Partial Transcript: What gives me hope for the world is that there are still some good folks out there in all manner of color and creed. There are still people doing good things. There are still people doing right. We live in a world that gives us instant news. Good news doesn’t sell. You’re going to hear the bad news. You’re going to hear about what’s going on over there and this catastrophe happened. And even fifty years ago, those types of news stories would have been a few days in coming if they got here at all. But today with connectivity being what it is we hear everything the second that it happens. So I try to use that as kind of a gauge of perspective as t hearing a lot of the bad news and things. But on the community level—just on the little part that I’m around—just seeing what’s going on, seeing that our language is being revitalized, that there are little babies now that are speakers, that when we go out and give these talks to kids—when we go out and talk about the history and talk about the culture and things like that, the kids are really inspired. The kids really and sincerely want to learn because it’s not what’s been in the books for all of these years. It’s not been what’s been translated or interpreted and put into a book and told this is the only way it was. It’s more of an n open dialogue. This is what happened. This is how they were thinking. Now how do you think? And rolling that around and letting folks think—it comes down to the individuals, I think. I’ve never heard of a mob of one, but when you have individuals thinking about things and truly trying to do right—that’s what makes the world a better place. I read a quote the other day, and I know how it is when people quote quotes. But peace cannot be something that’s accomplished by doing but accomplished by being, and I think that speaks a lot to all cultures and all manners of thought. You can only be peaceful. You can’t do peaceful.