Decolonizing Georgia

This story map is an attempt to decolonize Georgia and its erasure of the Native people who used to inhabit it and the tens of thousands of Natives who still inhabit it today. Because of the complicated history of Indian removal in Georgia and the diaspora of Natives living in Georgia currently, the scope of this story map will primarily be that of the Cherokee nations (in particular the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina). Though these layers of colonization are hard to untangle, I attempt to outline them below. With each layer, I will showcase some of the ways it has contributed to Native erasure, but also how Natives and others are fighting towards decolonization.

Georgia's sharp and natural borders are not as clear cut as they may seem. From its rigid western border along the Chattahoochee to its wavy and ragged eastern border along the Savannah, what its borders conceal is a piece of people's homeland which extended well beyond the modern borders of this state. This is evident not only in the names of the land and the history of the state, but more importantly in the contemporary belief of those same living people.

Even looking a road map of Georgia, its intertwining roads cover the fact that the land used to belong to others, as these modern roads take dominance over the roads, paths, rivers, and mountains that used to lead its original stewards. This requires us to ask two questions:

Who used to be here?

Who is here now yet still ignored?

One of the most common places to find institutionalized erasure is through an educational curriculum, which often instills many of these ideas of non-existent people (whether implicit or explicit). Looking at Georgia's  8th grade curriculum standards , where Georgia Studies is specifically covered, there is ample evidence of the "disappearing Native" myth.

The first standard, SS8H1, covered in this curriculum already erases the concept of pre-contact Natives: "Evaluate the impact of European exploration and settlement on American Indians in Georgia." That is, the standard only wishes students to view Natives through a European-contact lens, as opposed to a sovereign people whose history extends beyond this contact. The Native nations of the Cherokee and the Creek are only talked about briefly until SS8H4, "Explain significant factors that affected westward expansion in Georgia between 1789 and 1840," where removal is discussed. After this point, Natives are not mentioned, and thus it seems this curriculum views Natives as a footnote in the early history of Georgia, despite the  Cherokee nation's website  view that "Cherokee people have existed since time immemorial" and that their "oral history extends back through the millennia," and despite intense Native attempts to fight against removal.

Fortunately, there are attempts by the Cherokee Nation to change the warped curriculum to be more focused on the contemporary state and resilience of the Cherokee Nation. In fact, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian, in particular their new program,  Native Knowledge 360 , the Cherokee Nation has developed a lesson known as  The Trail of Tears: A Story of Cherokee Removal . This lesson challenges the simplicity and brevity of most school curricula concerning the Cherokee removal from Georgia, and makes the presence of the Cherokee Nation and its people today a major part of the lesson.

Notably, the emphasis on contemporary times and "today" is the most significant difference from most curricula that discusses Natives in Georgia and in the US. These standards do not view Natives as historical relics to be prized for their "unique primitive culture," but instead enables Native sovereignty in its wording of resilience and self-government.

While this story map is focusing on Georgia, it will go beyond its borders to not constrain the much wider history and existence of the Cherokee people. While from a Euro-centric perspective, the existence of the Cherokee people has little importance before European contact, archaeologists are able to date the sacred Kituwah site, “considered by all three of the federally recognized Cherokee tribes as the place of origin for the Cherokee people,” back nearly 10,000 years. According to Cherokee stories, “Kituwah Mound was the center of the village,” as this was known as the “Cherokee Mother Town.” The mound used to be about 15 to 20 feet tall, “and one of the places of the ‘eternal flame.’ In Cherokee culture, the tribal ‘keepers of medicine’ would keep fires burning in the council houses on top of the mounds, symbolizing the presence of the Creator and the life of the town.”

Unfortunately, after almost 200 years of farming, the mound has now decreased to a height of 5 feet. However, in 1996, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians purchased the Kituwah village site, totaling more than 300 acres of land, and “their first major land purchase in more than a century.” Despite this success in retrieving their sacred site, this was not the end of Cherokee’s struggle for the site.

In December 2009, Duke Energy began clearing a site which overlooked the Kituwah Mound site. According to All Things Cherokee, "They were planning on building a $52 million dollar electrical substation on the site, but had not consulted with tribal leaders or locals about the impact that such development would have on the sacred historical site." Tribal leaders from all the Cherokee nation tribes, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians as well as the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band spoke out against the pending substation, and the the situation quickly grew in media notoriety. Finally in early August of 2010, Duke Energy  announced  that they would no longer continue on working at the site near the Kituwah mound and would move elsewhere. As All Things Cherokee put it, "The announcement marks a major victory for tribal community rights, cultural preservation, and grassroots political movements."

Before the massive modern interstate and road network developed by settlers, Natives had their own roads to connect cities for trade and movement. In particular, the roads of the Cherokee in northern Georgia reveal the existence of road networks that are not only extensive, but move in harmony with the land and the animals who also walk upon it.

In 2008, Mountain Stewards and Wild South, and the Southeastern Anthropological Institute partnered together to start the  Indian Trails Project , as part of of their Indian Cultural Heritage program "to produce a map of the roads and trails system of the Cherokee Nation prior to 1838." This project would serve "to benefit the Eastern Band Cherokee Indians by identifying and making known the many modern roads in and around the Smoky Mountains and North Carolina as having Native American origin."

What was considered "impassable mountains" by many explorers and colonists in the Appalachian region was in fact a series of trails that complemented the land. However, around the 1600s,  buffalo migration trails  were "used interchangeably by man and beast." The Cherokee would use these trails for hunting and traveling, and the buffalo would keep "the trails free from undergrowth...and followed expedient geographical routes which included shallow river fords and low mountain gaps."

While the discovery of these roads and trails allows the Cherokee people, in particular the Eastern Band of Cherokee, to follow the paths taken by their ancestors and now-gone buffalo, it is equally important to emphasize that the descendants of those roads are not historic. It raises a necessary issue about the language used for the preservation of historic roads and trails as being of historical importance without any contemporary importance, thereby should remain untouched (or at least no more touched then they already are) However, as Andrea Smith quotes Native activist Marie Wilson, a Gitksan Wet'suwet'en tribal councilor, in her book The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, "

"...the environmentalists want these beautiful places kept in a state of perfection: to not touch it, rather to keep it pure. So that we can leave our jobs and for two weeks we can venture into the wilderness and enjoy this ship in a bottle. In a way this is like denying that life is happening constantly in these wild places, that change is always occurring. Human life must be there too. Humans have requirements and they are going to have to use some of the life in these places."

Thus, as humans are part of the balance of nature, these Native roads and trails continue to reveal how Natives are acutely aware of that fact; and, in denying the relevance of these roads' and trails' descendants, perpetuates the idea that the Cherokee people are not here. But, just as their road networks have persevered through time, so have they.

The effects of settler-colonialism and the period of "Indian Removal" of the early 19th century not only uprooted Cherokees from their homeland, it also attacked the historical memory and oral traditions that connected them to their land. As Brill de Ramirez writes her article, "Before the South Became the South: Pre-Colonial and Colonial Geographies of Contact in Robert J. Conley's Cherokee Historical Novels," about Cherokee writer Robert J. Conley, "Conley invites his readers into the remembered history of the indigenous peoples of our lands by offering us remembered Cherokee (hi)stories for the listener-readers' conversive engagement that makes those stories meaningful to us."

Though stories are powerful in defining a cultural history and people, the language used for storytelling is inseparable from the same culture, place, and histories it utters. As Brill de Ramirez quotes Geary Hobson, "Since most Oklahoma tribes .. . are emigrant nations, much of the literature is intensely imbued with concerns for homeland, both the 'new' home of Oklahoma and the earlier location of each tribe before removal." She then points to Sophia Lehmann, who "explains that language can play a crucial role in the process of human interconnectedness to various geographies of place," especially considering "Disparate diasporic communities are...faced with the shared struggle of articulating a cultural identity in which history and home reside in language, . . . and in which language itself must be recreated so as to bespeak the specificity of cultural experience."

The idea of "Southern Culture" and its romanticization increased with in conjunction with the removal of Natives from its geography, highlighted by the drastic geographical distance from Natives' homelands as depicted above. Brill de Ramirez further points out that "The very concept and construction of the South is shown as an aberrant and dysfunctional displacement that was and is at the expense of millions of indigenous peoples' lives."

With the help of recontextualizing the south through Conley's Native lens, it becomes clear that his works allow "active listener-readers to hear new and ancient (hi)stories that reorient the geography of the South through an indigenous reconceptualization that powerfully re-indigenizes those lands through conversive story and language," thus dismantling the erasure of memory that has occurred through the Cherokee's removal from their land.

"I remember the words of Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. 'They love to hear the old language, he said, 'it's true.' 'But,' he said, with fingers on his lips, 'You don't have to speak it here.' 'If you speak it here,' he said, patting his chest, 'They will hear you.'" - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Within the lesson guide of Cherokee removal mentioned at the beginning of this story map, the end focuses on the contemporary presence of the Cherokee people as a flourishing nation: "Cherokee people have remained strong throughout time. They have suffered, but they have also persevered. Their identity as Cherokee has kept them strong and proud." In face of all these attempts to be erased, the Cherokee people cannot be, and "By leveraging a strong workforce, an innovative spirit, and the fairness and respect that are fundamentally Cherokee, they have experienced tremendous growth and flourished as a people." Through language immersion camps and revitalization efforts, the Cherokee continually work to preserve their culture and history, all while simultaneously dismantling the settler-colonialism that sought to assimilate them.

Moreover, the Cherokee people have also sought to establish their visual sovereignty and self-determination, as is clear in the creation of  Osiyo TV  by Jennifer Loren (Cherokee) and Jeremy Charles (Cherokee) in 2014. This program, known fully by the title, Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People, "is an Emmy-winning, documentary-style program featuring the people, places, history and culture of the Cherokee Nation."

Though the effects of centuries of erasure and assimilation on Native peoples in the US continue to disrupt the growth and development of Native identity and culture, it has by no means stalled it. This also means that, as non-Natives benefiting from the effects of settler-colonialism in Georgia, it is also our work to take part in dismantling these systems by increasing awareness of its presence in contemporary society, not just in history.