Traces of Our Past: Erasure and Renewal
Written by Grayson Shelor, Lead Teacher Naturalist and Librarian
In the fall of 2022, Tremont began a project to take a close look at our staff library, with an eye to updating the collection, locating outdated information, and contextualizing one-dimensional worldviews. We envisioned a richer, more relevant catalog, with a greater number of works authored by Cherokee leaders, female scientists and educators, and people of color. But it is difficult to know what one doesn’t know, and where to begin filling deficits. We turned to our community for advice, recommendations, and later, donations, to help our team recognize our blindspots and broaden our perspectives.
And you, our community, answered in spades! Over the first year of our library wishlist program, 40 unique titles were gifted to the Tremont collection by former staff, Tremont partner teachers, program participants, fellow librarians, and supporters far and wide. Some new books joined old favorites on the shelves. Some didn’t make it to the shelves before starting arguments over who got to read them first.
One that I was particularly excited to read was Lauret Savoy’s Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. In Trace, Dr. Savoy explores the juxtaposition of geologic history–through which the physical history of our earth is etched in bedrock–with the movement of human cultures across a ceaselessly changing, complex, contested national landscape. Trace details the stories of discovery and dispossession, map making, renaming, and the tales we tell of the past, all interwoven with memoir as Savoy undertakes a journey to trace her own multiracial family’s travels across the land. In contrast to the enduring history of the landscape, each remnant unearthed of the human story feels like a triumph against the tide of erasure.
Obscuring what came before remains a legacy of our nation’s settling. As early European cartographers ‘discovered’ the American interior, they entered into a paradoxical arrangement of name attribution and theft. “To become oriented, to find their way and fill their maps, venturers from Europe needed native peoples’ knowledge of the land. Maps and names would then obscure that knowledge from its context, as Indigenous people themselves were removed from the land” (p. 76). And such cleavage of knowledge from context continues.
Within our American landscape, Savoy writes, “embedded systems and norms […] continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using nature, as well as human beings.” (p. 42) Early proponents of Great Smoky Mountains National Park valued the idea of ‘taming’ an uncivilized and hostile frontier to such an extent that they “feared a loss of ‘Americaness’ if city dwellers and immigrants” lacked opportunities to relive the settler experience. (Young, p. 173). Tourist sites like Cades Cove were curated to emphasize their primitive technologies and isolation from the luxuries of industrialized society. And yet, in enshrining this dominant story of the past, with its fixation on subduing the wild forest, much of the richness and texture of a dynamic place is lost. In fact, the origin of the place once called Tsiyahi (Place of the Otter), and now Cades Cove, is thought to honor the wife of a Cherokee leader– or a leader himself– who certainly would have viewed his environment without the lens of opposition to a living, sustaining ecosystem.
Naming and renaming are persistent motifs throughout Trace, always redolent of power-laden negotiations over territory, ownership, and inhabitance. And so it seemed fitting that I was reading Savoy’s work when the news came through that the National Park Service had officially restored the Cherokee naming of Kuwohi to the peak formerly known as Clingman’s Dome. In Cherokee syllabary, the name is ᎫᏬᎯ, which translates to “Mulberry place.” (NPS press release, 2024)
The name change was the result of a successful multi-year campaign led by Cherokee leaders Lavita Hill and Mary Crowe, with the support of Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Principal Chief Michell Hicks. It recognizes, among other things, that Tennessee’s highest peak’s rich ecological and cultural significance predates the national park. It also calls into question the reverence of the peaks’ prior namesake, Thomas Lanier Clingman, a North Carolina secession advocate and Confederate general.
From Kuwohi, on a clear day a visitor can see 100 miles, into several adjoining states, all of them Cherokee homeland. And yet, until recently, there were no references there to the Cherokee legacy or continued reverence for this sacred mountain. Once you become aware of it, the silence echoes eerily. Savoy writes of a childhood wrestling with her own sense of alienation and un-belonging as one legacy of her ancestors’ discrimination and dispossession– the spaces forbidden to them, the borders closed, and the silent wounds left in the wake of such absences. Still, she looks to the land for healing.
For if the health of the land is its capacity for self-renewal, then the health of the human family could, in part, be an intergenerational capacity for locating itself within many inheritances: as citizens of the land, of nations even within a nation, and of earth. (p. 47)
At Kuwohi, the restoration of a name does feel like a renewal – a return to balance. A place name derived from ecological relationship instead of a contrived claim to ownership or superlatives returns a new kind of orientation. There are many stories left to unearth and reclaim, both at Kuwohi and throughout our Smoky Mountains. And yet, the unknowns and silenced tales, too, have their lessons for us. Perhaps they restore us to our proper and original state: as learners and listeners from the earth and the communities – ecological and human – to which we belong.
Want to contribute to the Tremont library? Purchase a book off our wishlist.
Cover image by Acroterion
