Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Session 3.13 (Ethnicity and Race) Digging, Dancing, Dynamite, and Diversity: Warren Wilson College Professors Engage Western North Carolina’s Multicultural Past
Session Abstract or Summary
Appalachia’s cultural diversity has fed its people’s creative expressions, influencing everything from material culture and dance traditions to work songs and burial practices. In this spirit, four Warren Wilson College professors will discuss their community engaged scholarship exploring various themes and topics: an archeological dig that is yielding insight about engagements between Native Americans and Spanish conquistadors who lived in the area surrounding the sixteenth century Fort San Juan; musical exchanges between black and white Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that shaped regional dance traditions and prompted the emergence of a ballad about the dangerous construction of railroad tunnels; and an ongoing effort to nurture public memories about slavery and the Jim Crow South through a community service project to restore and document an African American graveyard. Calling attention to the exciting intersection of research, pedagogy, performance, service-learning, and public scholarship, these four papers will engage the audience in a discussion about the vital role Appalachian studies can play in local, national, and international discussions about North America’s multicultural past.
Presentation #1 Title
Cherokee Diplomats and the Diplomacy of Survival
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
The role of Cherokee diplomacy during the American Federal period is well known. The heroic efforts made on behalf of the Cherokees by men such as John Ross to prevent the Removal helped to define the tribe in the 19th century. In the 18th century, Cherokee chiefs routinely negotiated first with representatives of the colonial governments and later with the Americans. Today these events are even played out by historical recreations at Colonial Williamsburg. Less well known is the fact that Cherokees were already engaged in diplomatic efforts with the Spanish in the 16th century, especially when Cherokee representatives met with the Spaniard Juan Pardo at Joara and other Native towns during Pardo’s expeditions of 1566-1567. This paper describes the archaeological investigations of the Native town of Joara and the Spanish Fort San Juan, located in Burke County, North Carolina. Fort San Juan was built in 1567 and destroyed in 1568, making it the earliest European settlement in the interior of the United States. Pardo built and garrisoned six forts from the coast of South Carolina into the mountains of eastern Tennessee, all of which were destroyed by May 1568. This marked the end of Spanish colonial aspirations in the Appalachian region but it marked the beginning of a new age of the diplomacy of survival for the Cherokees and other Appalachian tribes.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
- David G. Moore received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He served as the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology’s Western Office archaeologist for 18 years before becoming a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Warren Wilson College in 2000. Dr. Moore has directed the archaeological investigations at the Berry site since 1986.
Presentation #2 Title
“A Mixed Multitude of All Classes and Complexions”: Diversity and Dance in Appalachia
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
- The traditional music and dances of Appalachia have often been portrayed as survivals of an ancient and unchanged Anglo-Celtic heritage that came to the southern mountains with the early settlers from the British Isles. Since the time of the earliest settlement, however, the population of the southern backcountry has included a diverse mix of Europeans, African Americans, and indigenous Native Americans – “a mixed multitude of all classes and complexions.” Consequently, the square dances, step dances, and other forms of Appalachian dance that developed and became known throughout the region during the nineteenth century, like the music, are a hybrid blend of earlier European, African, and Native American forms. These traditions also incorporated elements of popular nineteenth-century social dances, and they are not, as Cecil Sharp and others claimed, pure survivals of old English folk traditions. In the early twentieth century, these Appalachian traditions became commonly perceived as white European-American culture and heritage, and the contributions of African Americans and Native Americans were overlooked and forgotten. These Southern folk music and dance traditions, however, not only have diverse roots, but in earlier times, they were once shared across racial lines.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
- Philip A. Jamison is a nationally-known old-time musician, flatfoot dancer, and square dance caller, who teaches Appalachian music and dance, as well as mathematics, at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He has done extensive research in the area of Appalachian dance, and his forthcoming book, Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian Dance, will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2015.
Presentation #3 Title
Landscape, Song, and the Tragic Story of the Swannanoa Tunnel in Western North Carolina
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
- In western North Carolina, the Eastern Continental Divide runs along the Swannanoa Gap, and below this historically important passage over the Blue Ridge Mountains lies the Swannanoa Tunnel, the longest of six railroad tunnels that link Asheville with the lowlands and provide access to Appalachia's abundant natural resources. If one were to only read about the 1879 completion of the Swannanoa Tunnel in mountain newspapers such as The Watchman, this state-financed engineering feat was “a very great triumph” nothing short of miraculous. Digging deeper, official records document the exclusive use of African American convict laborers at the cost of 30¢ per convict per day. This crucial detail—the use of convict labor—suggests the feat proved less than worthy of The Watchman’s triumphalist rhetoric. Expanding the universe of primary source materials to the music performed by convict laborers, one learns from the hammer song “Swannanoa Tunnel” that the tunneling work was downright tragic, since uncounted numbers of convicts died because the tunnel “all caved in” on at least one occasion. If one follows this song through its history of documentation and appearance on modern recordings, the story grows obscured by its refashioning as a folk song collected by Cecil Sharp and sung by folk and bluegrass performers. This paper offers a multi-layered analysis of how different sources invite different readings of the Swannanoa Tunnel as a landscape that ultimately fuses the histories of industrialization, racial oppression, and musical expression in Appalachia.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
- Kevin Kehrberg holds a Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Kentucky and has presented papers nationally and internationally. He is revising his dissertation on Albert E. Brumley, a twentieth-century gospel music composer who wrote “I'll Fly Away” and other American gospel classics, into a book. He is also active as a professional musician in both jazz and traditional music. Kevin currently serves as Chair of the Department of Music at Warren Wilson College.
Presentation #4 Title
Work, Service, Academics, and Gravestones: Building Community and Cultivating Memory through the South Asheville Cemetery
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
- The difference between history and commemoration conveys the complex politics of memory, and a lack of historical commemoration sometimes conveys a willful cultural amnesia about the past. John Inscoe’s histories of western North Carolina have thoroughly disproven the “myth of racial innocence” that is often associated with southern Appalachia, but much work remains for those who wish to promote public commemorations of slavery in Appalachia. This paper provides an overview of an ongoing effort to maintain, publicize, and protect the South Asheville Cemetery, the oldest public African American cemetery in western North Carolina. Containing approximately one hundred headstones that identify by name the people who are buried in the cemetery, the South Asheville Cemetery is actually the final resting place for nearly two thousand people—many of them slaves. Community members, academics, students, and descendants of those in the graveyard are working together to cultivate the memory of African American history in Appalachia through community action, and this overview of this effort will focus on the recent use of Warren Wilson College’s unique set of resources—students, a service program, an administration supportive of experiential education, work crews, draft horses, GIS labs, and a faculty committed to community engaged scholarship—to improve the cemetery as a sacred landscape and a respectful site of remembrance and commemoration.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
- Jeffrey A. Keith earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Kentucky, and serves as a Professor of Global Studies at Warren Wilson College. Keith has published on a variety of topics, including media depictions of Saigon during the Vietnam War, the life of Kentucky’s last African American old-time fiddler, and the musical diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry during his nineteenth-century Japan Expedition. He is currently working on an oral history of Appalshop.
- Ronald D Eller served fifteen years as the Director of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center and thirty years as a Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kentucky. Eller earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published more than sixty articles and reports, but is most well known for Miners, Millhands and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South and Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945.
Cherokee Diplomats and the Diplomacy of Survival
The role of Cherokee diplomacy during the American Federal period is well known. The heroic efforts made on behalf of the Cherokees by men such as John Ross to prevent the Removal helped to define the tribe in the 19th century. In the 18th century, Cherokee chiefs routinely negotiated first with representatives of the colonial governments and later with the Americans. Today these events are even played out by historical recreations at Colonial Williamsburg. Less well known is the fact that Cherokees were already engaged in diplomatic efforts with the Spanish in the 16th century, especially when Cherokee representatives met with the Spaniard Juan Pardo at Joara and other Native towns during Pardo’s expeditions of 1566-1567. This paper describes the archaeological investigations of the Native town of Joara and the Spanish Fort San Juan, located in Burke County, North Carolina. Fort San Juan was built in 1567 and destroyed in 1568, making it the earliest European settlement in the interior of the United States. Pardo built and garrisoned six forts from the coast of South Carolina into the mountains of eastern Tennessee, all of which were destroyed by May 1568. This marked the end of Spanish colonial aspirations in the Appalachian region but it marked the beginning of a new age of the diplomacy of survival for the Cherokees and other Appalachian tribes.
