Words & Wanderings #13, Talking Leaves

I recently spent several wonderful but rainy days in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There are likely other roads into the park, but from my experience, there are two main entrances to the 33-mile Newfound Gap Road, each with a wonderful Visitor’s Center – and these two bookends could not be more different. One is Gatlinburg, Tennessee. You exit the beautiful mountains and are abruptly plopped into a madhouse of mayhem, a tourist trap crawling with masses of people who appear to be having fun, but the place is my worst nightmare. I much prefer the other end of the road – Cherokee, North Carolina.

This town also offers lodging, restaurants, ice cream shops, and cultural experiences, but it’s quiet, peaceful, low key. There are no crowds. Parking is easy. I can breathe. The park’s roughly 522,427 acres across Tennessee and North Carolina are federally owned, but they border the Qualla Boundary, a sovereign, tribally owned 57,000-acre territory belonging to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The national park is deeply intertwined with Cherokee heritage. It encompasses their original ancestral homeland. Thousands of indigenous people utilized these rugged mountains for centuries prior to the forced relocations of the 1830s. I love that much the signage within the park is also written in the Cherokee language.

It is in the town of Cherokee that I discovered a wonderful bookstore, Talking Leaves. Owner Cory Blankenship, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian Tribe, says his grandmother was an avid reader and the shop was opened in 1995 by his grandfather.

The shop is small but the shelves are full of books about and/or written by Cherokees and other indigenous peoples, including a vast range of topics – language/genealogy, history, biographies, women’s studies, tribal law, nature/travel, spirituality and wisdom, arts/crafts, fiction and children’s books.

Two of my favorite picture books were on the shelves – Old Turtle by Douglas Wood and Bud Finds Her Gift, by Robin Kimmerer (author of Braiding Sweetgrass).

While at Talking Leaves, I purchased this book, 1666, a tragic yet inspiring tale, based on a true story, of two tribal women in Colonial Virginia who were kidnapped and shipped to Barbados as slaves, and their incredible escape. It’s hard to read at times. But this is American history.

My heart breaks, and I feel a sense of genetic shame, for the plight of Native American Indians, today and across the centuries, since white man “discovered” this land. I’m so sorry. For all of it. So I try to promote an inkling of awareness through my writing. Pittance.