by Robert Moor
There are myriad reasons—historical, cultural, and economic—why the Anglo-American sense of place diverged so radically from that of the Cherokee. However, Belt believed that a crucial, often overlooked difference lay in the very structure of the respective languages. The Cherokee language differs from English in key ways. Cherokee has seven cardinal directions that continually situate speakers in space: north, south, east, west, up, down, and (hardest of all for us outsiders to grasp) here. The structure of Cherokee grammar—in which the subject of a sentence comes after the direct object—also serves to subtly decenter the speaker. “In the English language it’s I think this, I think that; I want this, I want that. It’s as if we’re in the center of the world and the world is around us,” Belt said. “In our language, everything is here and we’re some place around it. Which means that we’re just a part of it, as opposed to being in the center of it.” Moreover, Belt noticed, the Cherokee word order was better suited to a wild environment. As he pointed out, when a bear is sneaking up on your friend, it helps for the sequence of words coming out of your mouth to be “bear . . . I . . . see” rather than “I . . . see . . . a . . . bear.”
Belt’s upbringing made him acutely aware of the ties between geography and language. As a boy, he spoke only Cherokee; he didn’t learn English until he was seven years old. Back then he spent his afternoons playing war games with his friends in the prairies of Oklahoma. In his mind, however, he always fantasized that he was in a land of mountain slopes, soaring trees, and murmuring brooks. When he moved to North Carolina, at the age of forty, he was shocked to realize that this was the landscape he had always been imagining. A friend of his, who grew up not far from where he did, recounted a similar experience. She showed him a picture she’d drawn when she was five or six. The terrain of the background was verdurous, mountainous, utterly unlike anything she’d ever seen in Oklahoma. The same landscape appeared in the background of all her drawings, she said.
“It wasn’t until she came here that she realized what she was drawing,” Belt said. “She was drawing these mountains.”
This sense of deep geographic memory may seem mystical, he said, but it isn’t—or at least, isn’t entirely—because the landscape is “encoded” directly into the language. Cherokee diction and syntax are mountainous. The language has several fine-grained descriptors for different types of hills. Suffixes can be appended to nouns to indicate whether an object is uphill or downhill from the speaker. (If there is a river nearby, objects can also be described as upstream or downstream.) In the flatlands of Oklahoma, this mode of description seemed odd to Belt, until he came to the mountains of North Carolina, and then it made perfect sense.
Barbara Duncan, a folklorist who has spent decades recording Cherokee myths and legends, told me that she had noticed a curious difference between the eastern and western halves of the Cherokee nation. The stories of the eastern Cherokee, those who avoided the Removal, are often more geographically rooted than those of the western Cherokee, she said. She cited an ancient folktale about a race between a turtle and a rabbit, in which the clever turtle fools the cocky rabbit by positioning his brethren on top of a series of peaks, so that every time the rabbit crested one mountain, he was shocked to find the turtle ahead on the next. The recollections of eastern Cherokees mentioned that the story occurred on what is today called Mount Mitchell, whereas those of western Cherokees typically do not specify a location. “And if you go to Mount Mitchell, you can see the land formation that is described in the story,” Duncan said. “You can tell the story without ever going to Mount Mitchell, it’s still an entertaining story. But when you go up on top of that mountain and you see that landform, you’re like ‘Oh, this is what they’re describing.’ It’s amazing.”
“Almost every prominent rock and mountain, every deep bend in the river, in the old Cherokee country has its accompanying legend,” noted the ethnographer James Mooney. “It may be a little story that can be told in a paragraph, to account for some natural feature, or it may be one chapter of a myth that has its sequel in a mountain a hundred miles away.” This phenomenon, Mooney wrote, extended well beyond the Cherokee. In the storytelling traditions of virtually every indigenous culture, stories don’t unfold abstractly, like Little Red Riding Hood skipping through unnamed woods; they take place. The stories of the Inuit, for example, always specify a real setting where the story (often, a depiction of a journey) unfolds; many stories even include details about the direction of the prevailing wind.
In his landmark study of the Western Apache, Wisdom Sits in Places, the linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso limned the many ways that land and language help construct indigenous cultures. First, places were named, often in intricate visual detail (“Water Flows Inward Under a Cottonwood Tree,” “White Rocks Lie Above in a Compact Cluster”). Once named, those places became what Basso called “mnemonic pegs” to which stories—creation myths, morality tales, ancestral history—were attached and group identities were formed.
Apaches view the past as a well-worn trail (‘intin), once traveled by their ancestors, and still being traveled today. “Beyond the memories of living persons, this path is no longer visible,” wrote Basso. “For this reason, the past must be constructed—which is to say, imagined—with the aid of historical materials.” Apaches relate this process of re-creation to how one can reconstruct a person’s movements from scattered footprints. Time frames grow vague, and characters are often reduced to archetypes, but the essential elements—the settings, the lessons, the flora and fauna—remain highly specific. (“Long ago, right there at that place, there were two beautiful girls . . .” begins a typical story.) Basso notes: “What matters most to Apaches is where events occurred, not when, and what they serve to reveal about the development and character of Apache social life.”
In a delightful twist, Basso’s work also provided a mirror view of just how strange the prevalent mode of Euro-American storytelling is. Upon hearing European stories read aloud to them, many Apaches told Basso they found them as inert as the paper on which they were written. By comparison, Apache oral narratives were vivid, fluid; they shifted subtly with each telling, in accordance with the whims of the speaker and the disposition of the listener. Apache stories may not have been strictly accurate by academic standards, but they were wise, witty, and most important, they worked. To teach someone a lesson, Apache elders would often tell that person a story about a specific place. For example, a careless boy might be told the story of the canyon where a girl took a shortcut against her mother’s instructions and ended up getting bitten by a snake. That way, every time the careless boy passed by or even heard mention of that canyon, he would be reminded of the lesson. It was, therefore, no exaggeration when Apaches said that a place “stalks” them, or that the land “makes the people live right.”
In Apache culture, places do not exist in isolation. Rather, as in nearly all indigenous cultures, places are linked together in a spatial and conceptual matrix, flowing one to the next. On one occasion, Basso noticed an old Apache cowboy talking quietly to himself. When Basso listened carefully, he learned that the old man was reciting the names of places, one after another—“a long list, punctuated only by spurts of tobacco juice, that went on for nearly ten minutes.”
Basso asked him what he was doing, and the old cowboy replied that he “talked names” all the time.
“Why?” Basso asked.
“I like to,” the old cowboy replied. “I ride that way in my mind.”
Anthropologists have a term for this practice of place-listing: topogeny. It is storytelling at its most spare, rendering a narrative down to a string of dense linguistic packets, like seeds, which flower in the mind. It has been observed in locations as far-flung as Alaska, Papua New Guinea, Vancouver Island, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The list of names serves to pull the mind across the landscape—from mnemonic peg to mnemonic peg, from story to story—fol
lowing a geographic line. According to the anthropologist Thomas Maschio, the Rauto tribe of Papua New Guinea could recite hundreds of place names in a row. “To remember the names of these sites, elders said that they ‘had to walk’ along the various paths,” Maschio wrote. “As I sat with the elders in the men’s ceremonial house, the sequence of place names was recited to me as if the elders were taking part in a journey or imaginary walk through the many paths of the land. Elders would name a place, tell me its history, and then say that they would now ‘walk on to the next place.’ ”
Topogeny is not simply the listing of names; it is the summoning, in the mind’s eye, of a mental landscape constructed of lines. This notion struck me one day the following summer, when I went on a hike with Lamar Marshall alongside Brush Creek, near the old Cherokee town of Alijoy, an hour’s drive from Asheville. From time to time along our walk, he paused to gather plants the Cherokees living there would have found useful: a fragrant pinch of spicebush, a handful of fibrous bear grass, a bright yellow knot of medicinal goldenseal root. On the banks of the creek, he spotted a beaver slide, and showed me how he would have once set a trap there.
Though he moved fluidly through the thick switch cane, Marshall was having trouble catching his breath. He told me he spent too much time inside, staring at old maps and documents. His passion for research was beginning to border on obsession.
“My wife is on me about it right now,” he said. “We’re in the middle of one of the greatest places in America: an inordinate amount of trails, scenic beauty, rivers. And how many times have I fished this year? Only once. I’ve only been in my canoe for four hours. Every year I say, ‘This year is going to be different. I’m gonna fish, I’m gonna hike, I’m gonna backpack, I’m gonna camp.’ And then the year gets gone, and it’s like, ‘I just turned sixty-six!’ ”
But all that time spent inside studying old maps and stories seems to have only strengthened his connection to the land, oddly enough. In the six short years since he moved to North Carolina, his knowledge of the history and geography of the region had grown truly encyclopedic. The most striking thing, I noticed, was how he spoke about history: his recollections were almost always structured spatially, rather than chronologically. For him, as for that Apache cowboy and those Rauto elders, the land was furnished with hundreds of mnemonic pegs.
“People are amazed because I can draw a map of all of western North Carolina,” he said. “I can draw all the watersheds. I can put in probably close to sixty Cherokee towns. And it’s not like I’ve got a list in my mind, I’ve memorized A, B, C, D. No, I’m visualizing the trail going up over Rabun Gap, down into the upper branches of the Tennessee River . . . My mind just flows over the mountains, down the valleys, along the trails, through the thickets . . .”
He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, seeing something I could not.
“There’s: Estatoe Old Town,
Kewoche Town,
Tessentee Town . . .
Skeena Town,
Echoy Town,
Tassee Town . . .
Nikwasi.
Cartoogechaye.
Nowee.
Watauga.
Ayoree.
Cowee.
Usarla.
Cowitchee.
Alijoy.
Alarka . . .”
Marshall had brought me out to Brush Creek that morning so we could look at a stretch of previously undiscovered wagon road that was part of the Trail of Tears. He was fighting to gain federal protection for it as a historic place—its was a dark history, but an instructive one nonetheless. It was rare to find an undeveloped stretch of the Trail of Tears. Much of the rest had already been assimilated into the modern road network.
The Trail of Tears was far from a unitary trail. What we call the “trail” was in fact a spider-veined array of paths along which tribes were transported, including a number of river routes. In 1987, President Reagan designated certain stretches of that network a National Historic Trail, to memorialize the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Removal. Every year, some one hundred thousand motorcyclists ride one of its legs—now a series of highways—west from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Waterloo, Alabama, in solidarity with the removed tribes.
We got out of the car and crossed a swinging bridge across Brush Creek, then we walked down a gravel road until we reached a tributary, where we tiptoed over a log with wooden footholds nailed to it. (“Redneck Bridge,” Marshall chuckled.) On the other side of the creek ran the forgotten stretch of the Trail of Tears. It was flooded with dark water. Otherwise, it was remarkably well preserved. The passage of countless wagons had cut a wide, muddy runway. Before it had been a wagon road, it too would have been a Cherokee footpath.
“You can follow this for miles,” Marshall said, looking off at where it disappeared into the trees.
Standing there, the cruel irony of not just the Trail of Tears, but all Native trails, hit home. Over the course of thousands of years, Native Americans devised a beautifully functional network of paths, not knowing that those same trails would later be used by a foreign empire in its slow invasion. Along their trails flowed surveyors, missionaries, farmers, and soldiers, as well as diseases, technology, and ideology. Then, when a critical mass of foreigners had moved into tribal lands, it was along those trails that Native families were hauled from their home. We tend to think of colonialism as an unstoppable wave, or a platoon of tanks moving smoothly across the plains, when in fact it is more like the trickle of an ever-multiplying virus through an arterial network.
From the very beginning, Europeans exploited Native wisdom, Native kindness, and Native infrastructure. Across the continent, many of the easiest mountain passes were discovered only when Native American guides led white men there. Henry Schoolcraft located the source of the Mississippi due only to the guidance of an Ojibwa chief. Following his Native guides across Baja California, an explorer named James Ohio Pattie slept on the edge of their blankets at night so they could not sneak off without waking him. (If they had escaped, he wrote, “we should all undoubtedly have perished.”)
One of history’s most striking examples of how Europeans relied on local wisdom was provided by a rather mysterious figure named John Lederer. Almost nothing is known about Lederer prior to his arrival in Jamestown in the 1660s, save the fact that he was a doctor from Hamburg. Though he spoke little English, he did speak fluent German, French, Italian, and Latin (the language in which he later recorded his travels). Obstinate and ambitious, he was prone to amassing huge debts and bitter enemies. It is unclear how such a figure convinced the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, to appoint him to search for a passage through the Appalachian Mountains to the West. But by March 1669, perhaps less than a year or two after arriving in the New World, he had already embarked on his first expedition. He hired three Native American guides to lead him. The trip was arduous—along the way, he was almost swallowed by quicksand and feared his horses would be devoured by wolves—but five days later, his party reached the foothills of the “Apalataean mountains.” When Lederer first glimpsed the famous range, he could not decide whether they were mountains or clouds, until his guides fell to their knees in prostration and howled out a phrase meaning “God is nigh.” (Or so he claimed.) Reaching the range, he attempted to ride up to the top of the mountains on his horse, but the horse balked. Lederer’s guides were clearly also unfamiliar with the region, because they next attempted to scale the mountain on foot, without the aid of a trail, and soon became entangled in brush and brambles. The route was so steep in places that, when Lederer looked down, his head swam. Though they had set out at first light, it was nightfall again before Lederer and his companions finally summited. They camped amid the dark boulders. He awoke high on the mountain the following dawn and looked west, expecting to find the sparkling waters of the Indian Ocean. Instead, there was only a wall of yet taller mountains.
Hoping to find some passage through the range, he wandered among those snowy peaks for six days, drinking from springs where the water tasted faintly of aluminum, his hands and feet growing numb in the thick, chill air, before he gave up and returned home.
On a second expedition in May 1670, Lederer planned a more ambitious assault, leaving with five Native American guides and twenty Englishmen under the command of one Major William Harris. Lederer had wised up during his previous expedition. The most important lesson he had learned was that one could not navigate the mountains without the help of local tribes, who knew the easiest routes through the mountains. He took care to bring along a store of trade goods to win their confidence: sturdy cloth, sharp-edged tools, dazzling trinkets, and strong liquor. He had also learned how to travel in comfort over the strange continent. At night, instead of sleeping on a bedroll, he slept in a hammock, which was “more cool and pleasant than any bed whatsoever.” He fed himself by hunting for deer, turkeys, pigeons, partridges, and pheasants; when he was nearing mountains where game would be scarce, he prepared a pile of smoked meat in advance. Instead of biscuits, he brought along dried corn meal (“i.e. Indian wheat”), which he seasoned with a pinch of salt. The Englishmen laughed at his odd food, until their biscuits turned moldy in the humid air. Then they tried to beg Lederer’s corn meal from him, but—“being determined to go upon further discoveries”—he refused to share.
Two days after setting out, the party reached a village marked by a pyramid of stones. They asked the villagers for directions to the mountains. An old man obliged to describe the route for them, drawing a map in the dirt with his staff. He depicted two paths that meandered through the mountains, one north and the other south. However, Lederer’s companions, slighting the old man’s advice, decided to strike their own course, following their compasses due west. Reluctantly, Lederer tagged along. For the next nine days, the party exhausted their horses by riding over rough terrain and scaling craggy cliffs. Lederer compared their progress to that of a land crab, which, crawling up and over every plant in its path rather than circumventing them, covers less than two feet of ground after a day’s hard labor. The expedition finally reached a river flowing north, which Major Harris (perhaps willfully) mistook to be an arm of the fabled “lake of Canada.” Having found this important landmark, Harris decided the party should return to Jamestown. Lederer disagreed, and an argument ensued. Harris’s men, starved and exhausted, threatened Lederer with violence, but he staved them off with a letter from the governor granting him permission to push forward. Harris and his men turned back, leaving Lederer with a gun and a single guide, a Susquehannock named Jackzetavon. Harris returned to the colony and, according to Lederer, began to “report strange things in his own praise and my disparagement, presuming I would never appear to disprove him.”