New Echota and The Vann House

Day Five:

I am sitting in our Dayton, TN hotel exhausted.  We started the day at 7am, eating, packing, and heading out to New Echota Historic Site.  We arrived there right after they opened.  I got teary eyed before we went in.  It makes me wonder about my emotional self, though I was well aware of what we would learn today.

Middle class Cherokee family homestead

The morning was lovely, and I was glad to get started before the heat set in.  We did a self guided walking tour of many reconstructed and original period dwellings and meeting houses in what was once the capital of the Cherokee Nation.  To think that the Cherokee were forced to leave their lands makes me think of nothing less than the holocaust.  They lived in log homes and had farms.

Inside a middle class Cherokee home... it was one large room

Another view of the same room

They had their own newspaper and printing press, printing things in both English and Cherokee.  They worked with a three house government.

The rack holding the typeface used to print The Cherokee Phoenix and other printed materials in both the Cherokee language and English

Looking at the different homes was inspiring, especially the kitchens.  From the wealthy to the common, the simplicity felt serene.  I want to go home and work on our cabin.  Clean it out totally.

Lower class Cherokee home - one small room consisting of one bed, 2 gourd bowls, a grinding log for meal, one deer skin, and a gourd ladle

Kitchen in the lower class dwelling

My favorite kitchen of the day in the Worcester House at New Echota

The cooking hearth and baking oven of the same kitchen

I am beyond hurt at how a people so established and native inhabitants of a land could be so disregarded as the sacrilege that happened with The Trail of Tears.  What many don’t know is that all this disrespect to the native people and their land began with presidents like Thomas Jefferson ( a much beloved man in our country and known as a fighter for equality) who wanted to make the Indian indebted to the U.S. so they could take their land from them and move them west.  People only think of Andrew Jackson, a man of the people, hater of the native peoples, and a president who disregarded the laws of his own nation.  They did this to a people so bent on preserving their heritage – their right to be separate but equal.  A people who, on the white man’s terms proved their civility and capacity to exist as a nation.  It’s unreal what the average American doesn’t know about that situation.

Meeting House at New Echota - where the council held meetings

Inside the Meeting House

Courthouse at New Echota

The Vann Tavern - New Echota

Inside the Vann Tavern - the counter and mercantile area of the largest room

I’m finding it hard to even write about what we saw and learned today.  It was so extensive.  After New Echota, we went to The Vann House, which was a four story European style home built by a prominent Cherokee business man – James Vann.

The Vann House

He had a plantation and around 70 slaves on his land at a time, and up to 110.

View from the third floor of The Vann House

What was outstanding was that even the wealthy Cherokee who had adpoted many of the white man’s ways were moved to Indian Territory by force.  Their money nor their “civilized” accomplishments could make them exempt from the land hungry white man.  Joseph Vann (son of James Vann and the inheritor of his estate) and his family were burnt out of their home.

The root/wine cellar - where all "cold" food items were stored

The woman's bedroom

There was a spinning wheel and/or loom in every dwelling from the middle class up.

A little girl's room - very few "toys" - I loved it, so simple and pure as was the boy's room

The dining room

When we left New Echota the walking tour ended with two quotes by Cherokee government members Elias Boudinot and John Ridge.  I copied them into a notebook.  In essence, they said that the Cherokee removed from the land God gave them would cease to exist – be blended with the white man.  That is essentially what Thomas Jefferson had promised the native peoples whom would give in to the wishes of the American government – they would blend with the white man.  And there I stood – Cherokee blood in the veins of a white woman.  A dichotomy in the flesh.

Solemn and gloomy is the thought that all the Indian Nations who once occupied America are nearly gone.  In the lapse of half a century, Cherokee blood, if not destroyed, will wind its course in the being of fair complexions, who will read that their ancestors, under the stars of adversity and curses of their enemies became a civilized nation.

– John Ridge, February 27, 1826

The time will come when few remanants of our once happy and improving Nation will be viewed by posterity with curious and gazing interest as relics of a brave and noble race… perhaps, only here and there a solitary being, walking, ‘as a ghost over the ashes of his fathers’ to remind a stranger that such a race once existed.

– Elias Boudinot, Nov. 21, 1836

I thought about Arizona and her place in this history.  What was she aware of?  I know she knew much of what I learned, but I wonder how she perceived it.  She lived in both Indian Territory and New Echota.  The guide at The Vann House said it was hard to believe that Arizona’s family went to Indian Territory and actually came back.  It makes me think more of her father and who he was.  Why he was what he was.

On the way to Dayton, we gradually entered into tiny rolling hills.  Both John and I couldn’t help but think of Arizona’s walk – over 80 miles from Georgia to Tennessee.  So young and strong.

After such a saturated and fun day we are all tired.  John is working on the van.  There is a hole in the radiator.  The girls are being wild with that tired irritability.  It feels good just to be.

Deladis in a smokehouse at New Echota - orbs or dust particles... you decide 🙂

Kelli B. Haywood has received professional development funding through the Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supported by state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Finding Arizona

My great great grandmother was Arizona Webb Walker.  She was a Cherokee whose grandmother was one of the group who escaped the Trail of Tears and hid out to later create the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina.  Arizona’s father was of Caucasian and Cherokee decent and from what we know of him very cruel to his wife and children.  Their family traveled between Indian Territory in Oklahoma to New Echota, Georgia and Walden’s Ridge in Dayton, Tennessee several times.  Arizona’s mother disappeared leaving her older children with their father.  Arizona eventually escaped her father and walked the mountain ridge lines with a badly healed broken leg from New Echota, GA to be with her family in Tennessee.  She was a young girl – alone.  She married in Tennessee and she and her husband moved to Hazard, Kentucky for mining work in the early 1900s.

It is no small thing that I know this story.  I grew up thinking that everyone had met most of their great grandparents.  I thought it was common for people to know which country their European ancestors immigrated from.  I thought it usual that most people’s family members hung onto things like copies of their ancestors’ names on documents like the Mullay or Dawes Rolls.  Until I talked with friends who had no idea where they came from, I didn’t know exactly how fortunate I was to know so well my own heritage.  I owe this all to my paternal grandmother Ida Lee Stacy Hansel, who with friends and cousins has spent years researching and documenting our family history.  She spent hours with her grandchildren in the evenings and throughout the day telling us the stories as many times as we wanted to hear them.  I was so proud of my heritage that I would walk with my head up no matter how I was tormented in my school days.  I knew from where I came.  I knew the strength, wisdom, and faith of my people.

Ida and Matt Horn her uncle... about age 30

The more I learn about Arizona, the more I have wanted to tell her story to the world.  Her picture hangs in my living room and I stop and look at it several times a day.  She leans on a garden hoe to support her bad leg, but is tall and lovely.  There is so much raw strength and assurance in her eyes.  Her hair loosely braided and hanging down her back.  I see her in me.

I have decided to write her story as a work of fiction.  I received a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council to do some preliminary research for the historical background of the novel.  They have worked with me as a mother and provided a way for my family to go with me as well.  Starting at the end of the week, we will be taking a trip to New Echota, Georgia and Dayton, Tennesee to retrace my great great grandmother’s steps in her journey to Kentucky.  I will be researching the time in which she lived and the area’s visual appeal in order to create accurate settings.  I’m very excited about this journey.

This journey has come about at the perfect time in my life.  I fully believe in God’s timing for things, though I’m not the most patient person in waiting for it.  I’m not spoiled, but I remind myself of Veruca Salt in the “I want it NOW!” sense.  Our life is coming together in a beautiful way.  As a mother, I feel like I could do so much better in my relationship with my girls.  I do feel like our move back to the mountains was the best thing we could do for them, but I know I need to connect more with female members of my family.  I need to learn from them the critical pieces of womanhood that I have tended to miss in my upbringing.  I need to learn so I can pass them on.  My grandmothers were irreplaceable in giving me any confidence that I had in my appearance and my intellect.  I have a beautiful Aunt Sharon who taught me that common sense should be listened to, and a strong will can work both for and against you.  I have a strong female presence in my life, but it is imperative for me to learn how to foster a strong and healthy mother/daughter bond.  Because I didn’t feel comfortable in my ability to raise a girl properly, I didn’t think God would make me raise one.  I should have known better.  He’s given me two. 🙂

Also, I’m at a point in my life where I need to find who I want to be and what to bring forth from myself in the next ten years.  I’m 30 1/2 years old.  I’m not a kid anymore, but I have so much more to learn.  It is my firm belief that we must know and understand our past in order to bring about a better future.  I have so much to learn from Arizona’s life.  I think fictionalizing the missing pieces will help me bond with her beyond stories being told.  I will have to become a part of her in order to do her justice in my writing.  I am looking forward to that eventhough I know that some of those places will be dark.  The light that pours from her eyes is so much more.

This isn’t simply a vacation or a research project.  It is a chance for my little family to reconnect.  We haven’t been anywhere aside from work related things since before the girls were born.  This is our chance to be fully present for each other.  My grandfather has never seen Ivy.  He will get to see her for the first time when we stop by their house on our way to Georgia.  I will get to show the girls where they started.  Teach them that they come from a people to whom this country rightfully belongs.  A strong people who lived with the earth and used it as the Creator asked us to do – as stewards.  A people who perservered through hardships, created a way to keep records when others were trying to destroy their heritage, and to this day is not afraid to break new ground.  This is a quest for re-creation.  From the past will be brought forth a new life.