No Man Is An Island

As a teacher, a parent, or as a tribal member, my conversations with others sometimes boil down to key word searches.

“That thing. You know. Not a period. Not a comma.”

“Mom. Hungry. Cereal.”

“Some battle. On an island. Down the road. Cherokees.”

Now, I am not complaining. 

In all honesty, my husband would accuse me of speaking like this quite often. 

For many of us, fragments of images or threadbare associations are exactly how we create memory. Even brain research tells us that we learn by forming connections to what we already know. 

So when well-meaning non-Cherokee friends ask me if I am aware of an historical site or story, I feel some compulsion to fill in the blanks for them. I do it for my students and children already. 

However, I also recognize it as a burden many do not often bear. No one is asking white Americans to recall, on the spot, every battle, every story ever told in the English language on American soil. 

That would be impossible, right? 

Try adding ten thousand years plus to the cache of possible answers. At 35, I am no sage story-keeper of Cherokee culture and history, but that does not stop many from asking me to act as such at times. 

I imagine many from Appalachia can empathize. 

Following PBS or ABC documentaries over the past several decades, this once isolated region has been thrust under the microscope, even becoming a sideshow oddity at times, to the nation as whole. 

How did you live? How do you live? Why? Why? Why? 

It can get downright uncomfortable to be labeled a spokesperson for your culture. However, there is a beauty in this responsibility. Whether representing a Cherokee perspective or an Appalachian perspective, I have often found an initial annoyance subsiding and replaced by an appreciation for a prolonged connection to place and people.

It happened again this winter. 

Over the course of a few weeks, three friends separately inquired about, or at times simply shared, a story of a Cherokee battle in Bryson City, North Carolina, on a small island. 

Dates were fuzzy. No one remembered between whom the battle took place or for what purpose or where the island was, exactly. There were no recollections of historical markers. 

I have lived here my entire life and have never heard such a story. 

Then, within weeks of each other, three non-Cherokee seemed far more in the know than I. 

It didn’t bother me that they had asked me for more details. I was frustrated that I had none to give. I was even more irritated that one friend had garnered several pieces of information from a children’s book he had browsed at a book fair. 

How could it be that a Minnesota author knew more about our region than even Google could provide?

There was, according to the picture book, a Cherokee battle against another tribe in the mid to late 1700s in which the Cherokee met this tribe on what is now a tiny river island and eventually forced them back over the mountain via Deep Creek. I refuse to name the other tribe because further research indicates inaccuracies.

This became known — by whom, I am unsure — as the Battle of Iron Foot, also a name I have never heard. A quick search linked it to either the Dwarf King of Erebor in Tolkien’s The Hobbit or a friend of the outlaw Jesse James named Ralph Clark, for whom the island was supposedly named though many years later. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that neither theory is accurate. 

More likely, the latter holds some merit. 

Another friend attested to a reference of this battle in the Swain County Heritage Museum. It’s a lovely place to visit, by the way. 

This knowledge gave me hope that the story has some virtue, though it is tenuously intertwined with dubious stories of conjuring and first-hand accounts.

What we must all do as temporary spokespeople for our cultures is largely about filtering. The facts are easy. 

Does description of time and place seem accurate? Do the names sound linguistically authentic? Have I heard this story before from another source? 

A decent online search engine can usually do much of this work for us. 

The real challenge, the real contribution we can make comes in the connection. Do these actions make sense? Are they in line with our values? What challenges may have caused this reaction? Why does no one, or everyone, speak of this today? What is the motive behind the story? Does it evoke stereotypical images? 

To answer these questions, we must step away from the computer. We must hear and tell stories. We must physically go to the site and see its relation to other culturally significant sites. 

I wanted desperately to find the full story of the island battle quickly. I wanted my friends to retell it without any unanswered questions. I wanted the children’s book to be an encyclopedia of facts. I wanted the Internet to provide pages of matching sites based on a keyword search. 

It did not happen.

It didn’t happen because it was no one else’s responsibility, but my own, to piece together the answers. It didn’t happen because I had not visited the museum and read the words for myself. It didn’t happen because I didn’t make the short drive to Cherokee to speak with a Cherokee historian or even pick up the phone.

Most importantly, I did not visit the island. I needed to step away from the island in my kitchen, where I was likely pouring cereal for my sons, and stand on the island of the story.

Learning occurs when our brain makes connections to previous knowledge. Connections require interactions. They require us to identify ourselves with the new — new places, new people, and new ideas.

We’re not cultural envoys of knowledge because we are members of certain tribes or receive mail at a certain zip code. 

We become spokespeople, temporary or otherwise, because people want to learn, and to do this they want to connect through us. 

It is not a one-way relationship, and that is why there is benefit to being the spokesperson, the envoy, the teacher. 

This tiny island, named for a battle, or a fantastical dwarf, or an island hermit, reminded me that stories are not a re-telling of facts. 

They are invitations to explore, to filter, to reimagine what we thought to be true. Most importantly, they are an opportunity to connect ourselves with everyone and everything else that shares with us our curious humanity.