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HEALING HISTORICAL TRAUMA:
THE CHEROKEE REMOVAL
9 to Noon in the Town Center Legacy Room (Auditorium)
The forced removal of the majority of the Cherokee
Nation from its ancestral homeland in Western North Carolina, Northern
Georgia and Eastern Tennessee, ordered by President Andrew Jackson in
partial response to demands by whites to gain access to gold-rich
Cherokee lands in the 1830’s, inflicted deep cultural wounds among the
Cherokee that still bleed today.
In an effort to enhance understanding and a spirit of
reconciliation consistent with its theme of The Beloved Community, the
2008 Carolina Mountains Literary Festival will explore ways to heal the
historical trauma resulting from the Removal. A panel consisting
of spokespersons for the Cherokee, a distinguished historian of the
Nation and a noted Jackson biographer will explore the sensitive issues
surrounding the event that displaced the original inhabitants of our
region, opening it for settlement by many of our own ancestors.
Panel participants include Dr. Barbara Duncan,
education director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee and
author of numerous books on Cherokee culture; Myrtle Driver, a member
of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and translator of Charles Frazier’s
Thirteen Moons from English into Cherokee;
Troy Wayne Poteete, a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and a
justice of its Supreme Court; and John Buchanan, author of Jackson’s
Way, a biography of Andrew Jackson’s early years as a frontier
lawyer, ally of the Cherokee in the Creek Wars and advocate of Manifest
destiny who later, as president, yielded to political pressures from
whites to displace his former friends, earning the Cherokees’ lasting
enmity.
The
panel will be moderated by Yancey County historical novelist Charles F.
Price, whose ancestors were among the earliest whites to settle on
Cherokee lands after the Removal.
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