How the Natchez Found Refuge in the Mountains

 [Published February 1, 2018 in Smoky Mountain Living magazine.  One of the under-appreciated chapters of Southern Appalachia heritage and history is the presence of native people other than the Cherokee.]

Eight hundred years ago, across the southeastern region of North America, the great Mississippian civilization flourished. Artisans crafted stone and metal into objects of sublime beauty. Farmers grew vast fields of corn on the river bottomlands. Laborers raised up enormous flat-topped mounds, some as tall as 100 feet and with enough space at the top to accommodate a modern-day football field. On those mounds dwelt an elite caste of priests who ruled over their people in peace and war.

When Europeans arrived in the 1500s, the Mississippian world was already dwindling away. One likely cause was climate change:  the Little Ice Age began in the 1300s and continued through the 1700s. With cooler temperatures, crop yields suffered, upsetting every other aspect of life in the once-mighty Mississippian societies. 

Art was neglected. Fields went fallow. Vast plazas and mounds were deserted. Priests lost their power and prestige.

More than all the other descendants of the Mississippians, the Natchez kept the old traditions alive, well into the 18th century. The homeland of the Natchez was the lower Mississippi River Valley, where they observed an ancient caste system with a demigod called the Great Sun as their paramount leader.

The Spanish and the French colonizing the Gulf Coast targeted the Natchez for enslavement in the early 1700s, and for many years the Natchez skirmished with the French. The Great Sun died in 1728, and soon thereafter an uprising by the Natchez ended with their crushing defeat.

Driven from their homeland, remnant bands of survivors sought aid from the Creek, the Catawba and the Cherokee. One Natchez group settled among the Overhill Cherokee near the confluence of the Little Tennessee and Tellico rivers. Eventually, their village was called Natchey Town, and a nearby stream still bears the name Notchy Creek. 

Around 1740, the Natchez on the Little Tennessee crossed the mountains to the Hiwassee, near a Cherokee village and mound in Peachtree Valley, east of present-day Murphy, North Carolina. Cornelius Doherty, the first white trader among the Cherokees on the Hiwassee, encouraged them to take in the Natchez, explaining that even though they were small in number, their alliance would strengthen the Cherokee. The Natchez settled on the northern bank of the river directly across from a granite petroglyph depicting a horned serpent. The Cherokee name for the site was Gwalgahi, meaning “Frog Place.”ActiveCampaign

While the Cherokees welcomed their new neighbors, they did regard them as “a race of wizards and conjurers.” Known throughout the Southeast for their wealth of ritual knowledge, the Natchez were unrivalled as dance leaders. The sights and sounds of their ceremonial dances in the Peachtree Valley must have been unlike anything witnessed before or since in the southern mountains.  They preserved their unique culture by discouraging marriage outside the tribe, speaking their own language and holding their own councils.

The Natchez settlement on the Hiwassee continued until 1820, when the American Baptist Foreign Mission Board acquired the land for a mission, school and farm. To make way for the mission, the Natchez moved five miles southeast where they joined Cherokees residing on Brasstown Creek.

Though the Natchez integrated more fully into Cherokee society, they never completely abandoned their heritage. A woman named Alkini, of full Natchez blood, lived among the Cherokee until her death in 1895. She was remembered for speaking with a drawling tone that was distinctly Natchez.

Ties between the Natchez and the Cherokee extended beyond their living in close proximity. The renowned Cherokee statesman of the 18th century, Attakullakulla, lived for a while in Natchey Town on the Little Tennessee. He married Nionne Ollie, who was born Natchez, taken captive as a child, and adopted into the Cherokee tribe. Their son, Dragging Canoe (1738-1792) became a war chief of the Chickamauga Cherokee. His fiery defiance was the extreme opposite of his father’s cool diplomacy.

After the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals ceded a large tract of Cherokee land, and 65 years before the Trail of Tears, this offspring of a Natchez-born mother anticipated the future struggles of the Cherokee and the shared fate of the Natchez in their midst:

“We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains. Now that hope is gone. They have passed the mountains, and have settled upon Cherokee land. When that is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other land of the Cherokees, and the remnant of the people, once so great and formidable, will be compelled to seek refuge in some distant wilderness. Should we not therefore run all risks, and incur all consequences, rather than submit to further loss of our country? Such treaties may be alright for men who are too old to hunt or fight. As for me, I have my young warriors about me. We will hold our land.”

Neighbors on the Mountain

One evening last week, I stepped out my back door and noticed the leaves of a wild grape vine.   I stopped to take a closer look at various galls and damage to the leaves, where insects had been feeding.  

I turned over one leaf and noticed a tiny spider, Spintharus flavidus. 

Hello!

Their face-like abdomens are only about the size of a SESAME SEED, hence a bit of blur in the image. These beauties have the ability to adjust the color of their silk to enhance the effectiveness of their webs.  Given their diminutive size, it's a miracle I even saw them. 

The view out my window, some might assume, is a simple still life.  But, no, it is a busy thriving complicated community, a place of life-and-death dramas and colorful characters, like Spintharus flavidus.

From Arachnids of North Carolina

Spintharus are typically found in leaf litter or the undersides of leaves in low vegetation where they construct small and difficult to observe webs. These webs are simplified ‘H-webs’ (Levi, 1963a; Agnarsson, 2004) where the spider is in the middle facing down towards the gluey droplets at the base of the web. Agnarsson et al., 2018. From there, Spintharus monitors a pair of lines, and awaits potential prey's blundering into and becoming trapped by them.

"Longing for Freedom is a Mental Disorder" - Pt. I

 [From November 6, 2016 - Anticipating the Drapetomania Pandemic.]

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
- Theodore Dalrymple

“By now we are even unsure whether we have the right to talk about the events of our own lives.” 
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Despite the focus of the past few posts here, my recent ruminations have been framed in a much broader historical context than a single election cycle.  We probably overestimate the impact of electing one candidate over another.  Elections reveal culture as much or more than they change culture.  And so, the story to tell will not come to an end (or begin anew) after next Tuesday.

The dystopian present and future we face will not be averted by electing the “right” candidate.  Nevertheless, political theater does shed light on the deep dysfunction of our society and the threats that do exist.

So, I need to revisit HRC’s “basket of deplorables” quip, (for hopefully the last time): 

…what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that…. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

As revealed here a couple of days ago, it is almost certain that the Clinton speechwriters lifted the laundry list of deplorables from an enlightening article by James Simpson writing for Accuracy in Media, “Reds Exploiting Blacks – The Roots of the Black Lives Matter Movement.”

There is plenty of unfortunate name-calling across the political spectrum.  Rather than engaging in a legitimate debate over issues, it seems easier to discredit those who disagree.  From the Left, we’ve heard the endless repetition of "hate-filled," “bigot,” “racist,” or fill-in-the-blank “-ophobe” applied to anyone advocating an alternate approach to current problems. Hence, voicing concerns about the potential for terrorist infiltrators among Syrian refugees earns one the label “Islamophobic.”

As Stephen Paul Foster explains:

The strategy here is to turn all potential opposition on the right into Klansmen or Nazis, stereotyped creatures of low intelligence and primitive animosities.  People like this, of course, have no place on the political spectrum other than the far fringes where they can be alternately ridiculed or ignored, or perhaps even, punished….  

Foster goes on to suggest there is something more repressive to the “phobic” designations than mere insults:

This proliferation of “phobias” is by design of the left yet another way to marginalize people who disagree with them.  Phobias are a kind of mental illness, and hence irrational. Irrational people cannot be taken seriously except as threats to themselves or those around them.  

If you object to unrestricted immigration from the various hellholes across the world, you are a “xenophobe”.  

If you have a traditional view of marriage, you are a “homophobe”.  

If you think bringing a lot of young Muslim males into the country from places like Syria and Somalia is not a good idea you are “Islamophobic.”  

You do not argue, debate or reason with phobic people. You ignore them, or, if necessary, repress them.  They “thankfully” as Hillary said are “not America”, that is that social-political part of America where people get to compete in making their case for their beliefs and their way of life. 

By being “sick” in this intended psychiatric-phobic sense, a person loses the respect and consideration for his wishes and opinions and potentially even the legal protection of his freedom and property.  Refuse to sell a wedding cake to gay couple and see what happens. Don't want your daughters to share bathrooms and shower with guys who like to think they are girls?  This is just the beginning. 

In other words, "Basket of Deplorables" is more or less equivalent to "Looney Bin."

Of course, pathologizing dissent is not without precedent in American history.  But it is looking more and more like the old Soviet approach to political repression.  Sasha Shapiro, writing in Vestnik: TheJournal of Russian and Asian Studies, recounts that era:

  

The Marxist-Leninist understanding of consciousness allowed Soviet psychiatry to adopt the view that a healthy citizen was one who lived according to Soviet society's expectations and norms. Thus, if human consciousness is the affirmation and manifestation of social life (as Marx proposed) and simultaneously the reflection and creation of the objective world (as Lenin argued), then a political dissident is someone who rejects his objective social world and displays an incoherent understanding of his environment. Anti-Soviet behavior such as protesting Soviet laws and customs, attempting to travel abroad, or participating in human rights protests was taken to be symptomatic of mental illness….

Under Leonid Brezhnev's administration after 1964, psychiatry was harnessed as a tool for censorship to suppress dissent. Official records show that 20,000 citizens were hospitalized for political reasons, mainly on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, and dissemination of fabrications with an aim to defame the Soviet political and social system. Most historians and scholars agree that this number is an underestimate on account of unreleased documentation.

Many of these hospitalizations happened quietly and quickly without attracting media attention and were justified by psychiatrists and high-level political officials in the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). In these cases, officials from the Ministry of Health were given direct orders from regional officials from the City Soviet to target certain individuals who had been marked by the KGB for certain anti-Soviet behavior.

Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, after examining 200 such cases, developed a classification of the victims of Soviet psychiatric abuse. They were categorized as:

1. advocates of human rights or democratization;
2. nationalists;
3. would-be emigrants;
4. religious believers;
5. citizens inconvenient to the authorities.

In his 1970 open letter to the public entitled, This Is How We Live, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote: 

The incarceration of free thinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder, it is a variation of the gas chamber, even more cruel; the torture of the people being killed is more malicious and more prolonged. Like the gas chambers, these crimes will never be forgotten and those involved in them will be condemned for all time during their life and after their death.

At this point, I have about forty pages of notes to distill into a discussion of the current pseudo-science of psychiatry and its manipulation for political purposes in the United States. This has been a problem of no small concern to individuals on both the political right and left.  Suffice it to say that, in the near future, a cunning political operative can avoid the discomfort of attempting to outlaw “homophobia” or “Islamophobia” or “you name it” by having those “conditions” treated as “psychological disorders requiring treatment.” 

And even when powers-that-be stop short of incarcerating "free-thinking healthy people in madhouses" we've seen plenty of other more nuanced measures to pressure and inhibit and silence individuals - to strip them of their freedom, little by little.

And here is what I find most objectionable about political correctness, just how insidious and coercive it has become throughout our society.  Again, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?”

Our increasingly Orwellian society will be addressed in future posts.  The PC police are not the only agents of rampant dehumanization, but their role in that process is undeniable.  

For now, it might be helpful to revisit a chapter from early American history demonstrating the misuse of psychology for political ends. When I first encountered “drapetomania” I thought I had stumbled upon some clever satire.  But no, this really happened.  David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum, tells the story:

In May, 1851, Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright, a Louisiana physician, published a paper entitled, "Report On The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities Of The Negro race." The paper appeared in The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, a reputable scholarly publication. Cartwright claimed to have discovered two new diseases peculiar to Blacks that he believed justified enslavement as a therapeutic necessity for the slaves and as a medical and moral responsibility for their White masters. He claimed that Blacks who fled slavery suffered from drapetomania. In his words:

"Drapetomania is from draptise. A runaway slave is mania mad or crazy. It is unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptoms be absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers. In noticing a disease that, therefore, is hitherto classed among the long list of maladies that man is subject to, it was necessary to have a new term to express it. The cause in most cases that induces the Negro to run away from service is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation, and much more curable as a general rule. With the advantages of proper medical advice strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented, although the slaves are located on the borders of a free state within a stone's throw of abolitionists."

It was common in the 1840s and 1850s for proslavery advocates to claim that Blacks benefited from being enslaved to Whites. For Cartwright, and other proslavery defenders, any Black slave who tried to escape must be "crazy." The "uncontrollable urge" to run away was a symptom of the mental disorder. Later, Cartwright would argue that drapetomania could be prevented by "beating the devil out of them." Amputation of the toes was also suggested.

Cartwright also described another mental disorder, Dysaethesia Aethiopica, to explain the apparent lack of work ethic exhibited by many slaves. The diagnosable symptoms included disobedience, insolence, and refusing to work -- and physical lesions. What treatment did Cartwright suggest? "Put the patient to some hard kind of work in the open air and sunshine," under the watchful eye of a White man.

Parallels to today’s plantation of Political Correctness should be obvious to any thinking person. 

The War on Beauty

 Brilliant analysis from Julia James Davis.  Fabulous channel.