HEALING HISTORICAL TRAUMA: THE CHEROKEE REMOVAL
9 to Noon in the Town Center 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.