Freeman Owle - River Heroes

Partial Transcript: I’m Freeman Owle. I’m a member of the “Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation,” and I’m also a teacher—historian—from this part of the world.

Partial Transcript: I started telling stories to my classroom in about 1978 as I came back to Cherokee to teach. And so I found it a very handy tool to be able to get the attention of the children and to teach them their culture. So I told a lot of stories every day. Even today they still request that I come and tell stories to them. So it’s not like trying to keep their attention. It’s like finding enough time to do it. So it’s a good thing.

Partial Transcript: It really does because when we tell these stories we’re talking about them and their history because the students that I teach are Cherokee. And when I travel throughout the country to tell stories, it’s just a new ideology in their minds because they’re so adjusted to computers and used to using that type of thing which is nowhere near having a person to person conversation and story interaction. So I see they find it as something new.

Partial Transcript: First of all the Cherokee consider the rivers as being very sacred. That they would go down from their villages to the east which their villages were always built on the west side of the river. So they’d approach the eastside where the sun would come up in the morning. And so that was very important that they go down and do their cleansing exercises each and every day in the water. So the water itself was a cleansing—a spiritual type body. And they considered the river as being a “Long Man”—a living being. And so they truly respected the water itself and made sure that they kept it clean and it was appreciated. And you can tell by looking at the waters behind us even here today that we still have clear water. And that’s very important thing to the Cherokee people.

Partial Transcript: I think probably that the Cherokee would go into the water at all times of the year. And different seasons were very important and they—it’s a beautiful time in the fall of the year. But it was a year round experience; that you go in and make yourself right with the creator of heaven and earth. And you did it until you got it right. If you came out and you were not cleansed, the medicine man would send you back in again to start all over and do it again. So every season in these mountains is beautiful as far as I'm concerned. It’s hard to outdo the beauty that you find here. So water was important to them at all times.

Partial Transcript: He would hold a crystal up in front of your face and if you were reflected upside down then he would make you go back and do it again. And I have sort of figured well you might have been reflecting from the water. And if you were that was a double reflection, so it’s upside down. So you had to be coming directly from yourself into the crystal. And then you were upright.

Partial Transcript: Yes. The “Long Man”, of course, was, as I mentioned before, was giving the importance to the water itself. And also the singing waters is where the waters would come across a shallow place like a shoals and particularly in Muscle Shoals, which is Cherokee territory also. They call those the Singing Waters. And in North Carolina we have a lot of places where uses fords and so on. And the waters themselves seem to be talking. The old elders tell me that if you go out into the night or the early morning like two or three o’clock in the morning, that the water will be singing and talking, but all of a sudden at some point in time in the night it’ll just become completely silent. I sort of feel like that that’s when the earth is in total darkness in the middle of as far as it can go in the darkness that everything stops being echoed, and it is like it’s quiet out there at night. Even the ripples in the water stop according to the elders. And so water was used in the medicines of the Cherokee.
There are stories of them going into the forest and gathering different herbs and medicines. And of course they would bring them into the water to see if they were quality and purified. And so you couldn’t use them unless they were blessed by the water. And then they would take them to the individuals. They even used the water to make tea and that type of thing. And so it is a very valuable thing. Fire can be—water can be like fire. It can be helpful. But also it can be flooding and dangerous and terrible. So we have a lot of creatures that they say that live in the waters. They often talk about the little spirits, the little people of the mountains that the Cherokees believe in. That the higher elevations you have the good ones. Down on the broom sites, level-ground type thing you have those that are mischievous. And then the water itself, in the very deep holes, you have the cannibals that come out. And they will still weigh the souls and the spirits of the individuals, probably something related to sleep apnea. But they have to have some way in those times to explain that type of phenomena. So yes.

Partial Transcript: I think one of the stories that I enjoy telling is a story of “The Thunder Sisters”. These Thunder Sisters were found at the dance one night, and this gentleman didn’t know who they were, sort of like a friendship dance they had every full moon. And so these beautiful ladies ended up just appearing in the dance circle. So this guy began to watch them, and he wanted so much to go speak to them because he didn’t know them. He wanted to know where they were from. And before the dance was over they just sort of disappeared. So the next full moon dance he watched for them. And sure enough, they appeared all of a sudden. And he began to go over and try to talk to them, and he finally met them. And they agreed that maybe he could go home with them. And they said they’d take him. And so he got out there after the dance was over, and they went toward the river. And so they motioned him to get in the river with them. And they were walking on basically the moss or the algae and the water. And so they were just leading him upstream—led him upstream to a point where they found this waterfall. And they went behind the waterfall. And behind the waterfall was a huge massive cave high on the mountain. And so as they got inside, they told him to sit down. And he sat down on this big, round, huge boulder. And when he sat on it, its head came out and its feet out, and it started crawling away. And it scared him. It was a huge turtle. And so he found another normal rock to sit upon. And then all of a sudden he heard this huge clap of thunder. And so he said, “What is that?” They said, “That’s our brother coming. And if you want to be able to stay with us, you have to meet our brother.” So all of a sudden, there was a noise and clatter outside. And they went out to look and this huge snake had landed with this guy on top of it sort of like thunder himself. And so he said, “Well, if you want to be able to stay with my sisters and I, you have to ride this horse”—or snake they called it. So he got on that huge snake, and it took off. And it scared him so badly that he fell off of it. And so eventually the next morning he awakened on the side of the river bank holding on to this limb submerged in the—he was basically submerged in the water except for his head hanging out. And so I guess that’s one of those stories that you try to figure out that was he dreaming or did he really make that journey? But that is one of the water stories that the Cherokee people tell.

Partial Transcript: That’s at a very young point the Cherokees believed that we live in this beautiful earth and that everything is sacred. Everything was put here by the creator, Ogidogda, of the heavens and the earth, and that we should take care of it. And water was one of the main things that the Cherokees looked for because they had to have it to drink. They had to be close to a river so they could have transportation. They stayed close to a river so they could have food because the streams are filled with fishes in those days and places to purify themselves and bath. And so taking care of that stream was of vital importance. And if you think about what this world looked like—this land, this continent—when the settlers came, they found a place that was covered with trees all the way to the Mississippi River. They found streams that were all clear enough to drink out of at that time. And it was just demonstrated at that point that the Cherokees had taken care of this land for twenty or thirty thousand years. And it was very vital that they have a place for their children to be able to swim in the water, that they have a place where the children would be able to see a tree, and we think that is sort of outrageous, but no. It’s a possibility now because you see trees dying everywhere. We feel like that for seven generations we should look ahead and protect the waters and the lands and the forests and the skies and the air. And so that the seventh generations, our children, and our great, great, great grandchildren would have an opportunity to see and to enjoy this earth as we have.
And it is suffered that the earth will come back. It may shed itself of people, but the earth will survive. And so I think it’s the Native American’s wish and hope that people will be wise enough to realize that we’re in this thing together, and we must take care of where we live without being greedy and taking and destroying and just not worried about the byproducts like the mercury in the streams from the gold mining and all that kind of thing. I was in Pennsylvania once—Philadelphia—and someone of the people there told me that the river had caught on fire a few years before. And that almost made me cry because I don’t believe that we can live without the waters. If you think about it, there’s a same amount of water on this earth that there has been for thousands of years. And only after the space ships started taking the water into outer space was that amount of water changed. And so it was going in that cycle. And the waters were the same as those waters that our ancestors had used to bathe in, to drink, and to use thousands of years ago. But now we have to be more careful because we can change it.

Partial Transcript: Of course we had canoes that we would travel on the Oconaluftee. And that’s the name of this beautiful stream here behind us. And this Oconaluftee would go into the Tuckasegee, and the Tuckasegee into the Tennessee, the Tennessee into the Ohio. And you were pretty close to Cincinnati by that time. And so you’d come back down into the Mississippi River and return to the Gulf area. And the Cherokees didn’t have that far to come back home. In fact that was all the way around back up into the Northern parts of the Shawnee and then back in to Cherokee territory and Mississippi and Alabama, Tennessee. So it was a good, round trip, and it was good for trade because you could cover all that territory and so many uses for it. The fishes in the stream; the huge mountain trout and the native bass that were in the area at the time and so many areas they even had fresh water sea shells—uh, fresh water shells like mollusks that they would use for their jewelry and trade items. There was a lot of food that could be gotten. A lot of the water file would come through here and you only took what you needed. And that way it continued on.
And the Cherokees are still to the point where they don’t like to take a rock away from the streams. Or they don’t want to take animals they don’t need or take resources that they’re not going to use. It’s a whole different attitude of using what you need and not getting everything you can because you might be able to sell it somewhere for greed or finding some resource and using it totally out just to be able to get all of it yourself and not share with others. Even the clay that they use from the river banks was a thing they made the pottery out of. And if you think about it—about everything the native people used, I would say probably everything was bio-degradable. We left no footprint behind. We used the pottery which went back to the earth. And that’s a very important thing to remember.

Partial Transcript: We have the name of the Oconaluftee and the old folks tell me that that means “about up to your waist”. And that would be a significant thing to know and remember. It is how deep is that water. So you won’t go out and step in it and sort of disappear. The Tuckasegee or Daksiyi means the river of the turtle. And Tanasi was a name that was taken from the village site in Tennessee and given to the Tennessee River. And so Tennessee itself is a Cherokee word from Tanasi—one of the ancient villages that was located in the over hill towns near Loudoun and those areas. So those names were given to the rivers to signify what they were known for and it was very Cullasaja would be the sweet of the sugar river—the sweet river. Cullasaja. We have the Nantahala which is a river that flows north; one of the very few rivers that flows in the northern direction. And the Nantahala means where the sun always shines in the middle of the day. And the Nantahala Gorges, very famous for that because the waters are so cold and the sun shines very little in that region. So it’s a nice place to go and swim in a very cool stream.

Partial Transcript: It did. But some of those names have been lost because they’ve been taken over by the adulterated names like The French Broad. I don’t know if there were any Frenchmen on it or not, but more than likely. And the Cherokees got along with the French very well and considered them as being very gentleman-like. And they were more interested in the trade itself like the trade of furs and they would actually marry into the Cherokee tribe so that they could be a part of the family. And so the Cherokees trusted them. And so the Spaniards came, they wanted gold. And by the way, there’s gold in this Oconaluftee River. They had their barge at the end of this island for about ten or fifteen years. And that barge was pumping up, dredging up sand and debris from the bottom of the river, and they were separating gold from it. So my dad told me that years and years when he was caretaker of this island.

Partial Transcript: I think probably the tribal council was faced with a possibility of pump—being a dumping PCB on a roadways which would flow directly into the rivers and ruin them forever. They always have had the opportunity to put plants on these rivers because of the water supply. They’ve turned those away over the years. Gold mining operations which would dump mercury and arsenic and all that kind of stuff into the streams stayed away from that and went to timber cutting instead and very controlled use of the timberland and that type of industry. But they’ve always sort of shied away. And I think the administration and the council even back to Chief Jarret Blythe. And he was in there for many terms. And he always tried to keep this place clean. And all the chiefs from that day forward have respected that, and they’ve tried to keep it pure and clean for the people themselves. And so they have turned toward tourism and they’ve been very, very careful about their septic systems to get rid of them and to use a system that would take care of the waste without dumping it into the rivers and destroying—and making everything smell bad. So I think our heroes have gone way back to Drowning Bear and all of those old chiefs all the way up to the chiefs today. And they protect it. And the people expect them to protect it. If they saw the Oconaluftee River dirtied and messed up, the people themselves would be very irate. Because the river is all we have basically that was the way it should be when the old days before the settlers came. The trees have been cut down and they’re trying to grow back now. But the waters are one of those things that were not affected other than the trees being cut and the level of the water’s reduced because of the lack of timber. But overall the Cherokees want to keep it clean and they’ve done a good job of it.

Partial Transcript: Yeah, we are trying very hard to build places like this island that we’re sitting on which is free to the public so that they can come and to see the river and possibly see the difference in the waters as compared to what they find out in their own home territory. And think, “Man, we can do something to clean this stream up.” And they have tried to—well they’ve turned in—The Army Corps of Engineer has a lot to do with it now. And it’s a good thing because they will not let you change the direction. They will not let you do anything to the banks unless it’s approved by them. And so I think it’s good that this is Army Corps of Engineer territory, that they help us keep it clean. So it’s a good thing. More power to them and more cleanliness to us. In the old days, the Cherokees used a lot of the fishes, even the minnows in this area, to make fish soup, which was a good thing. I think it was just a very important that we try to keep all of this stuff out of here and keep it clean.

Partial Transcript: I think it’s a real shame that we have to use products that give off such a byproduct that we think we can go and stick our heads in the sand and bury that stuff and not affect anything. Because eventually it’s going to leech away and the asphalt that they bury it in is going to be leeching through that. And we need to think more long term than that, and just making a big pile of copper and zinc and arsenic and all of these things that can come from all of this coal ash. And that is a very destructive thing. And we need to figure out a better way to process that coal ash than just burying it and hoping it will go away because it’s not. We need to be more aware of what we use to produce electricity so that it’s not destructive to the earth. And we may get by with it today. And our houses may be heated and warm. But if we’re poisoned by the water tomorrow, then that’s not a good way to think about it. That’s not looking out for the people of tomorrow, let alone seven generations ahead. And most of that’s even greed. It’s get all the money we can and use the cheapest energy we can to make the rest of the energy and we don’t have to worry about it. We’ll bury it until let somebody else think about it later. But that's not fair—very greedy.

Partial Transcript: I know that my father and his father would take their families down to swim in these streams even when I was a child. And so my fondest memories would be fishing with a cane pole on the banks of the Oconaluftee. We’d wade until it got a little bit dingy. And then we would dig our earth worms if we would go down, catch the bass and the red horse—we call them big suckers—and the white horse and the mountain trout. And we were able to eat those. And we didn’t have to worry about poisons being in them because there was not that type of industry here. So hopefully we can continue to make this a place where people can eat the fish that they catch. And that’s a good indication that the stream is clean. And we have creatures in the stream that clean it like the suckers. If we don’t kill them, then they’ll help take care of it keep it clean.

Partial Transcript: I think that ideology that I was talking about a while ago that we have to keep it clean because nobody else is going to do it for us. It is our future for our children. And we have to think about that. We can’t always move to some other place like it’s been possible in the past years because this place is becoming too crowded. And we definitely cannot at this point move into outer space onto another planet. So we have to make sure that this one is not toxic. And we’ve got to do that in a way that we do not pollute and destroy our own place—the only place we have to live. Else people will be shed from this earth. It’s like a liking on the rock. Let’s leave a good spot. Not a mark that can be destructive to all human kind.

Partial Transcript: Because if we do not remember the history and the way things were, we’ll soon forget how things should be. The water should be clear—should not be poisonous or polluted or able to catch on fire. Because that water is a 60 to 70 percent of each and every body that lives on the human body that lives on this earth today. And without it we’ll be the dust of the earth. And to dust we shall return without the water.

Partial Transcript: The early stories of the Cherokees told was the creation of the earth. Said that God, Ogidogda, had created the heavens and the earth. But the earth was muddy. And so he wanted it to dry up. And he kept waiting and waiting for the land to be dry. But it was still remaining muddy. So he started sending the birds down to check out the earth. And they flew down and they flew back and forth until all the birds he had created were tired and worn out. There was only one bird left in the whole buzzard, Egwa(??) su-li. So the buzzard said, “What are you trying to do?” He said, “I’ve run out of birds to fly. I need you to help if you can. And the vulture said, “I can fly as long as you want.” So he began to sail. And he sailed until he was about ready to crush into the soft mud. And he started flapping those wings to get altitude. And when the wings were down they made the mountains. When they came back up they made the valleys and the mountains and the valleys and the mountains. And so if you think about it, all of that was made in the early times. And the Cherokees appreciated the fire and the mountains and the valleys and the waters from that day forward. So we must keep our roots in our minds so that we don’t go too far the wrong way.