On Sunday morning in Sandy Level, Virginia, about an hour southeast of Roanoke, upbeat gospel music blares from speakers as cars pull past the sign that advertisesthe drive-in church. Churchgoers tune into 87.9 FM and honk their horns in greeting.
This isn’t a usual weekend, but Sandy Level Baptist Church is no stranger to unconventional forms of worship. Every summer Sunday, from May until September, the clergy holds “boat church”: Pastor Kendell Smith ministers to a floating congregation from a dock on a nearby lake. When Virginia went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, the pastor didn’t skip a beat; the next Sunday, the drive-in service was up and running.
As Wythe County hunkers down with the rest of the country to ride out the coronavirus pandemic and hopefully slow its progress, many can’t help but remember: we’ve been here before.
It was 70 years ago, but people still talk about it. The local museum has an exhibit dedicated to it. In the summer of 1950, 20-month-old John Seccafico, the son of a local minor league baseball player, came down with polio.
The crippling illness swept through Wythe County like no other place in the nation, earning the town the infamous honor of having the highest number of polio cases per capita in the country. By the epidemic’s end later that summer, the Wytheville area reported 189 cases of the virus and 17 deaths, or almost 10%, twice the national average. Most victims were children.
Nikki King was 17 years old when she left the mountain hollow where she was raised by her grandparents and sneaked off to the University of Kentucky under cover of darkness. It was 2009, and the advice of her late grandmother Sue King echoed in her head as she drove: Leave. Go to college. And do not let anybody from the bigger, wider world think they’re better than you.
Sue died of a heart attack in 2000, when Nikki was 9. The opioid epidemic had already begun to infiltrate eastern Kentucky by then, and in Nikki’s mind the drug problem turned into a drug crisis shortly after Sue’s death, when her family went from sleeping with the screen door unlocked to buying new doors—without glass panes, which could be knocked out by burglars. Around that time, Nikki went to a birthday party where her friend’s mom stumbled and smashed the cake into the kitchen counter. Nikki later found her passed out on the toilet, surrounded by vomit and pill bottles.
Carolyn Vigil was lying in bed next to her husband when she first saw the meme. It noted West Virginia had no reported cases of coronavirus, and jokingly pleaded for its people to hang on.
She remembers it so well because it's the day her husband James began to feel sick in their Shepherdstown home in the West Virginia panhandle.
Her husband was sick from Covid-19. But her "coronavirus-free" state wasn't set up to test him.
He would become the state's Patient #1. They didn't know it then, of course, nor did anyone else. But in the following days they felt like that they were the only people in the state who wanted to find out. From medical professionals who simply had no information to health administrators in the same boat, all the way up to the President saying the state was doing a good job for having no cases.
In a narrow shadow of land between two steep mountainsides in West Virginia, residents of a town called Minden are dying. Not in that existential “we’re all dying a little bit every day” way, but in the blotchy-lesions-and-tumor-riddled-organs-that-eventually-stop-working way.
The 250 residents are all that’s left of a community that peaked at about 1,200 in 1970, and they think they know what’s picking them off one by one, in a relentless, who’s-next roulette. They can’t avoid it in their homes. Or in their backyards. Or on the grounds of the abandoned factory where kids ride their dirt bikes. Locals have taken to calling Minden’s main road “Death Valley Drive.”
There is a tradition in Appalachia of observing “Old Christmas” on January 6. Folklore suggests that animals speak in the middle of the night on Old Christmas.
But it turns out, you don’t have to wait till January 6 to hear goats singing to Christmas carols.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. –While driving recently, Jill Hicks saw what she thought was a domestic kitten dart across the road.
“I pulled over on the side of the road, got out, got it,” she said. “It did run a little bit, but not fast and not far, and it crouched down. I picked it up, put it in the car with me. It climbed all over me.”
After consulting with neighbors, Hicks realized what she rescued was actually a baby bobcat.
Out-of-work Kentucky miners who are blocking a coal train to demand unpaid wages from their bankrupt former coal employer on Tuesday took a big step closer to returning to work — and getting at least some of the money they are owed.
A federal bankruptcy judge on Tuesday signaled approval of Tennessee-based Kopper Glo’s purchase of Black Mountain and Lone Mountain mines in Harlan County as part of bankruptcy sales of Blackjewel’s mining operations in four states.
CHARLESTON, W. Va. — They started their day sipping coffee at 4:30 a.m. in a darkened Harlan parking lot, coal mining helmets tucked under their arms.
By dawn, more than 40 laid-off Kentucky coal miners — who spent the week blocking a Blackjewel coal train in a protest gone viral — were singing "You’ll never leave Harlan alive" as their bus snaked through four hours of Appalachian mountain roads.
The Harlan County miners piled out in front of a Charleston federal court wearing “Pay the Miners First” T-shirts, aiming to press a judge overseeing coal producer Blackjewel’s bankruptcy to grant millions in owed wages after the company’s July 1 collapse sent paychecks bouncing.
CUMBERLAND, Ky. – Protesting Kentucky coal miners will enter their fourth day blocking a coal train from leaving a bankrupt Harlan County mine on Thursday, demanding weeks of back pay on the same day their former employer’s assets are set to go up for auction.
Images of frustrated coal miners playing cornhole on the railroad tracks helped draw national attention to the July 1 bankruptcy of mining company Blackjewel, which came without warning and sparked financial turmoil when paychecks bounced.
Word about the art exhibit spread across the campus of Mary Baldwin University almost as soon as the show opened at the Staunton, Va., school. It was Nov. 5, just a day before the divisive midterm elections. Senior Tanisha Parson remembers hearing about the controversial use of Confederate monuments, which were incorporated as silhouettes into dozens of art pieces, before she even reached the doors of the Lyda B. Hunt Gallery. Still, she was not prepared for what she saw.
If anyone deserves a cultural revival, it's the Cherokee. Invaded by settlers, infected with unknown illnesses, swindled through broken treaties, forced from their native mountains, and marched halfway across the continent —many of them barefoot during one of the most brutal winters on record—it's a wonder the tribe exists at all.
But it's still standing. In fact, it's three tribes—the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina's mountains and two Cherokee tribes in Oklahoma. Living on a portion of the Cherokee's historic homeland, The Eastern Band is experiencing a bit of a renaissance. Today, tourists flock to their reservation, deep within the mountains. They're drawn by outdoor adventure, demonstrations of traditional Cherokee life, a giant casino, and the legend of Appalachia’s earliest remaining people.
The casino alone generates nearly $400 million with the games from https://www.slotsbaby.com, making this tribe a commercial force in the region. But even as the Cherokee find their economic footing, they face a new challenge—their traditional language is dying. Few people, mostly elders, speak it fluently, and, now, a new generation is rushing to save it.
In this guest post, writer and communications consultant Cyndy Falgout explores one effort to revive Cherokee, the language. Her piece was originally published by the College of Arts & Sciences at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Walk past Ben Frey's University of North Carolina classroom on any given Friday afternoon and you’ll likely hear sounds of an endangered language wafting through the halls.
“Siyo.” (Hello.)
“Osigwotsu?” (How are you?)
“Osigwo.” (I am fine.)
“Ihina?” (And you?)
“Osda!” (Great!)
It’s “AniKahwi,” Cherokee Coffee Hour, for students interested in learning to speak Cherokee.
Frey, an American studies assistant professor, started the coffee hour in 2013 after returning to UNC-Chapel Hill as a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow for Faculty Diversity. It is one of many ways he is working to revitalize the Cherokee language.
Indigenous people have spoken Cherokee in North Carolina for 11,000 years. Now, only 238 people — 1.4 percent of the 17,000 citizens of Eastern Band of Cherokees — speak the tribe’s Kituwah dialect. Most of them are 65 and older.
Preserving a culture’s language is important for many reasons, Frey said. Unique knowledge and traditions held by these cultures can offer solutions for today’s pressing challenges, from environmental sustainability to health care. Connecting to one’s heritage helps individuals and communities understand who they are.
Fortunately, Frey’s research on how language use declines — or shifts — offers a path forward to revive this endangered language.
A PERSONAL JOURNEY
Frey’s Cherokee language education began while he was a German and linguistics major at Carolina in the early 2000s. A citizen of the Eastern Band, Frey grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Cherokee was not taught at home.
His grandmother was among the Cherokee youth removed from their homes, placed in boarding schools and punished for speaking the language by a U.S. government bent on eradicating native cultures. While she and Frey’s great-grandmother spoke Cherokee to each other when they didn’t want the children to understand, they did not pass on the language.
Frey discovered he had a talent for languages while learning German in high school and pursued it at Carolina. During the summer of his sophomore year, he decided to put his acquisition skills to work learning his ancestral tongue in Cherokee, North Carolina, from cousins who oversaw the tribe’s language program.
Frey continued improving his Cherokee fluency while completing his degree at UNC-Chapel Hill and, later, during a year-long Cherokee master/apprentice program at Western Carolina University and while earning master’s and doctoral degrees in German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was his doctoral research in language shifts that provided insights that would inform his work to revitalize the Cherokee language.
Frey’s research compared the way language shifted in two very different settings: the German-speaking communities of eastern Wisconsin and the Cherokee-speaking communities of western North Carolina.
Both communities experienced cultural discrimination that curbed use of their native language. Frey expected to find that the use of Cherokee had declined to a greater extent than German because of the government’s eradication effort. To his surprise, Frey found that use of German in the Wisconsin communities declined more.
The reason for both shifts: the evolution of social network structures away from native languages due to industrialization, urbanization and tourism. Across the country during the 1800s and 1900s, enclaves of non-English-language speakers shifted their language to English out of necessity.
“Understanding the mechanics of how a language shift happens gives you a window into how it might go the other way,” Frey said. “So, if we’ve broken down social networks in order to shift a traditional language to English, presumably a way to shift back is to build them up.”
CREATING SOCIAL STRUCTURES
It should be as easy for students to learn Cherokee as it is to learn Spanish or German, Frey said. Students in his Cherokee classes learn by listening, reading, writing, using conversation tools and doing exercises. But language is also about social interactions and context. Helping restore those interactions within the Cherokee community in North Carolina is key.
“We went to a restaurant in Yellow Hill, the governmental seat of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the menu was in English and Spanish,” Frey said. “We need it in Cherokee.”
Frey and UNC linguistics colleague Misha Becker have received a grant to encourage local businesses in the Cherokee area to conduct business in their native language. The two have distributed window decals and sandwich boards that announce, “We support the Cherokee language,” and phrase cards customers can use to conduct business in Cherokee.
Starting the process with local businesspeople provides a platform for expanding use of Cherokee across the community, but reviving a language requires much more.
“Think about all the things you interact with that are in English — novels, music, radio, art, entertainment, social media memes, YouTube videos,” Frey said. “All of those things are necessary for people to experience in Cherokee, too.”
Frey has teamed with Carolina music scholar Mark Katz, director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, to bring hip hop artist Joshua Rowsey to Cherokee to encourage music making among students at the Cherokee immersion school.
This spring, Frey plans to bring UNC-Chapel Hill students to the Second Annual Undergraduate Cherokee Language Symposium at Western Carolina University to interact with college students from across the country who are also learning Cherokee.
Frey’s revitalization efforts have found fertile ground in students like sophomore Brooklyn Brown. A native of the Birdtown community of Cherokee and a first descendant of the Eastern Band, Brown wants to help her community bring the language back.
“The Cherokee language could be gone in a few decades,” Brown says. “We need all the support we can get to change that. I hope to be a part of the fight to save Cherokee and be able to pass this on to generations.”
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