On Trails (25 page)

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.

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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—following 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 . . .”

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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.