Davy Arch

Partial Transcript: When going to water to wash your face in the morning and do your morning prayers, as you approach the water you have reverence for the water. The movement of the water is significant in the ceremony because as you catch the water to wash and cleanse yourself – you catch it four times, going with the water downstream. That way you release what you need to get rid of back into that flowing water. The last three times that you wash your face, your hands, you catch the water going against the water, and you’re bringing that sustaining life of that life-giving water back to you, and you wash your face and cleanse yourself and let everything go with the water.
The number seven is sacred in the Cherokee culture and applies to almost any kind of ritualistic behavior, like going to water in the morning. And you don’t necessarily have to go to water just in the morning. You can go to water anytime and get rid of problems or ask for something anytime. So there’s many, many ways to use water and cleanse and ask for things. And here we’re fortunate to have some of the clearest water in the world.

Partial Transcript: If you grow up in an environment where you don’t have an extended family and where you’re not eating meals together, and where you’re not sharing information about daily life, and the activities that you’ve experienced during that day, you begin to disconnect with your family and with your heritage, with the customs that have brought you to this point in life as a culture, and it doesn’t take long – it doesn’t even take one generation. It only takes a few years and I saw it happen in my family with my younger siblings. We had moved into a modern house by the time they were born, and so they never had to do the daily chores; they never had to share their room with other people; they never … We ate at the dining table for meals, but we didn’t sit around after the meals and share stories, and we didn’t communicate the same way. We were watching television; we were listening to the radio; we were getting in the car and leaving and going to and from band practice and ball practice and all the other social activities that took up the time we spent when I was young sitting around listening to the elders talk about their life experiences, and inevitably someone would tie in a traditional story that would show a lesson either on how to keep that thing from happening again or how to prepare for it and be better equipped the next time you got into a situation. So, you lose a lot in just casual contact – information that you would have a hard time getting if you would just sit down and ask people questions about how to do this or that. And it’s inevitable that you would pull things from the past and about people that have come and gone in your life and their influence. Once you disconnect from that family of telling stories and passing on their experiences, then it all becomes a “ME” world. And you begin to focus on what I want and what I need instead of what the family needs or what I should do to give back instead of take. So the attitude really changes.

Partial Transcript: In my experience growing up, I heard stories that you don’t hear any longer. And it’s because they’re not relevant to modern life. And as a result, we’re starting to hear stereotypical stories; stories that are shared among other tribes, and a lot of times they’re basically the same story line, so each tribe would have their own influence on that story. And so we’re sharing those stories instead of listening to the stories about how to manage our medicine, about how to manage our resources and nature, and why we do things. Why the animals have different attributes, and why the plants grow in different places? These stories – I call them the Origin Stories – about why things are and why they’re used for specific reasons. Those are the stories that are fading, and those are the stories that we’re losing. The modern Cherokee is losing – we’re still connected to the past through our language and through the arts and through the place where we live here. We lived here for so long, you know, for thousands of years. We’re connected in that sense to our past and to our ancestry, but to be able to view our surroundings in this land where the Creator has placed us in same light as our ancestors viewed it in so that we can protect it and advance it on into the future is something that I’m very concerned with, but at the same time I’m very optimistic about the young people taking up the task of really perpetuating a lot of this culture. I see a lot of pride today in our young people because it’s all right to be a Cherokee today. You know, we’re not ostracized like we once were because of racial prejudice. The world’s become a small place, and people realize that we’re all different. You know, we as a People understand that there’s so few of us that if we don’t do something now that it will be gone. And so our young people have taken up the task to really work as hard as I can. I’ve seen really young kids speaking the language, and playing traditional games, and eating traditional food. Nowadays we’re having to teach formal classes to teach this information because it’s not being passed on at home through casual contact with the extended family. So we’re bringing in the elders and making film and creating books and resource material that young people can pick up and use. We’re living in the digital age now, so most young people can access this information digitally. The language, the arts, Without hearing and understanding the traditional stories - the understanding being the lesson that they teach on how to manage our resources: our medicine, our animals (well, not OUR animals but the animals around us). In the past life changed completely from summer to winter and because of that we understood how the animals raised their young, how the plants reproduced. And if you over harvest a resource that it would be gone in the future, so we had rules of thumb that we used when we gathered plants for food or medicine. If we went fishing or went hunting, we never took everything; we only took what we needed. And then if there wasn’t enough resource there, we continued looking until we found enough to know that there’d always be some left. That’s something a lot of young people don’t understand. They want it all. They want the whole candy bar. They don’t want just a bite. And it’s hard to convince them that you won’t have any candy if you eat it all at one time. (laughs)

Partial Transcript: Here on Tribal lands, we’re fortunate to have the Great Smokey Mountains National Park border us on the northern boundary. So along that side of the traveled boundary, we’ll always have those resources available. Not to harvest, but to go and use as a library basically and an archive of the resources that we once had on our land. But the resources on our land are being depleted at an extraordinary rate – mostly for housing. We’ve doubled in population in my lifetime, and today’s there’s about 16,000 of us. And most of those are young people who are newly married and looking for housing. And again, in the past 2 or 3 generations would all live in the same house. Now the young people want their own house; they don’t want the influence of their parents and grandparents on their children, and they’re suffering because of it. You know, we’ve learned to educate our children with the television and electronics, so we’re not even spending time with our own children talking and telling them what they’re looking at basically. You don’t see children playing in the yard like you used to. When I was growing up you were out of the house. If it was raining, you got to come on the porch. If you were inside and the adults were talking, you didn’t talk. You know, you had respect and you learned much, much more. It was really fortunate to understand that if I just sat and was quiet and would listen, that they’d let me hang out and listen to what they were talking about. So I was really blessed by being on that edge of the transition from the old culture of the late 19th –early 20th century into the late 20th to early 21st century. Most Cherokees are living in that life today. Like I said, I’m pretty optimistic because of the influence our young people are gonna have on the future. And now we’re able to use technology to access the distant past where at one time you had to sit and listen to an elder. You didn’t have the, you know, resources we have today so that you can pull this information up to gain it and have it shared with friends at the push of a button.

Partial Transcript: I think our resilience of the people gives me more hope than anything. The Cherokee were put here by the Creator for a purpose. We’ve been through all kinds of adversity in our history and I mean some REALLY abstract situations with things like removal and the epidemics, and we’ve survived all of that! Now we’re just experiencing a new epidemic with modern life and the tear-away from the old, traditional ways. But I think we’ll continue to evolve and we’ll continue to be a strong force and recognize people – not just American Indians, but we’re Cherokee. We’re the same as the Western Cherokee – they call us the Eastern and Western, but the same medicine they use I use. I’m blood related to the people in Oklahoma and I don’t see us as separate people. So we’re still a strong nation in that sense. We have learned to be capitalist politicians. It didn’t take us long to catch on to capitalism once the Europeans hit the shore. But that’s been good and bad for us. Right now it has proven to be a godsend for us that we’ve been able to manipulate our resources and take advantage of a situation that has caused us to profit so that we can really cause the standard of living for our senior citizens and our student body to be raised to that different level where we struggled for years and years and had to depend on the government. Today we’re becoming a lot more self-reliant. So our strength is growing again. And I believe we’ll be a strong nation on into the future. And the Creator’s got a purpose for us. And I believe as long as He wants us here, we’ll be here. We have legends about that! They go back to the beginning of time or to the creation of our first fire at Kituwah, which is our mother town. And we believe that is the center of the universe. The ashes are still intact in that fireplace. The prophets claimed that we would lose that land and gain it back. I mean it gives me chills to think that that prophecy has come true in my lifetime. But they said that if we ever lose that property, and those ashes are ever disturbed, that it’ll be the end of us. So today we’re focused on preserving that property as a sacred place, and we’re beginning to realize that these sacred places have a dramatic influence on our young people and impact how we’ll be able to perpetuate our culture into the future.

Partial Transcript: You know, in looking to the past to guide us into the future, the most pertinent stories are the most simple a lot of times. And these are sometimes the oldest stories: the Creation stories, and stories about protecting what’s here and what we have and has been made available to us by the Creator. And the same stories are world-wide; the really old cultures all over the world tell the same stories about the world being covered with water; how we came from the same place; how everything came from the same place; and how we could communicate with everything else. If we listen to our surroundings, it will tell us what it needs, and it will provide for us. There’s always something to eat here; there’s always clean water; there’s always fresh air. And if we protect that, it’ll protect us. And if we listen to our old stories and be observant and be respectful of being a human being living in a place where we’re not supposed to dominate; we’re supposed to live in harmony and in balance with these. And if we strive for that end, we’ll perpetuate everything on into the future and it will sustain itself.

Partial Transcript: You know, in looking toward the future, I can’t be anything but optimistic. I’ve been blessed all my life, and I see people all around me who have been blessed and are paying it forward, and it just keeps piling up on them. Everything they give away comes back ten-fold. I think our tribe is a good example of that. We help everyone around us, and I think because of that we’ll continue to survive.