This week on Inside Appalachia, a pair of former miners found love shoveling coal and shaped a life making wooden spoons. We learn about treenware. Also, NASCAR Hall of Famer Leonard Wood shares stories, and a bit of advice. And, group bike rides are a way to socialize and get outside. But here in Appalachia, newcomers are met with steep hills.
This week, a pair of former miners found love shoveling coal and shaped a life making wooden spoons. We learn about treenware.
Also, NASCAR Hall of Famer Leonard Wood shares stories, and a bit of advice.
And, group bike rides are a way to socialize and get outside. But here in Appalachia, newcomers are met with steep hills.
Stan and Sue Jennings turned a conversation about a passion into a business.
Photo Credit: Zack Gray/Allegheny Treenware
For 30 years, Sue and Stan Jennings have run Allegheny Treenware, a West Virginia company that makes wooden kitchen utensils. But they started off as a couple of coal miners. And when they weren’t underground, they talked about what else they could be doing.
Folkways Reporter Capri Cafaro visited the Jennings.
Hanging Out With NASCAR Legend Leonard Wood
Straight from the source at The Wood Brothers Racing Museum.
Photo Credit: Mason Adams/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Stock car racing’s roots run deep in Appalachia. Some of NASCAR’s early stars came straight from the lawless moonshine runners of the 1920s and 1930s, but NASCAR’s oldest continuous racing team had nothing to do with moonshine.
Mason Adams visited with Leonard Wood at The Wood Brothers Racing Museum in Virginia for stories and wisdom.
Exploring Morgantown On The Back Of A Bicycle
The ad-hoc Morgantown Social Rides aim to get cyclists onto the streets to explore the city in a new way.
Photo Credit: Chris Schulz/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
With spring, lots of folks are heading out to the woods or the rivers, but one group in Morgantown, West Virginia is taking to the streets – on their bicycles.
WVPB’s Chris Schulz grabbed his helmet and tagged along to explore his city in a new way.
Sovereignty At The Museum Of The Cherokee People
BPR’s Lilly Knoepp (left) spoke with Museum of the Cherokee People Director of Education Dakota Brown and Director of Collections Evan Mathis at the Appalachian Studies Conference on Friday March 8, 2024 at Western Carolina University.
BPR Senior Regional Reporter Lilly Knoepp spoke with Brown as part of a panel at the Appalachian Studies Association conference in March and sent us an excerpt.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by The Dirty River Boys, Charlie McCoy, John Blissard, Sierra Ferrell, and John Inghram.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. We had help this week from folkways editors Nicole Musgrave and Mallory Noe Payne.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
This week, we’re joined by Lilly Knoepp, regional reporter at Blue Ridge Public Radio in Western North Carolina. Boom and bust cycles for coal, timber and textiles are nothing new to Appalachia. Today, we’re seeing another industry struggle – local journalism. Some newspapers have scaled back or disappeared entirely, but journalism isn’t dying. Journalists are adapting and some are reinventing what they do.
This week, we’re joined by Lilly Knoepp, regional reporter at Blue Ridge Public Radio in Western North Carolina.
Boom and bust cycles for coal, timber and textiles are nothing new to Appalachia. Today, we’re seeing another industry struggle – local journalism.
Some newspapers have scaled back or disappeared entirely, but journalism isn’t dying. Journalists are adapting and some are reinventing what they do.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
Preserving The Cherokee Language
Newspapers Unionize And The Roanoke Rambler Rises
New News Startups In Appalachia
Preserving The Cherokee Language
Local journalists tell local stories that big news media ignore, like the struggle of places like the Kituwah Academy to uphold its mission.
Courtesy
The Kituwah Academy is a Cherokee immersion school in Western North Carolina. During the COVID pandemic, they tried to continue teaching students the language without being in the classroom with them.
Knoepp spoke with teachers at the school, including Irene Smoker-Jackson whose mother was one of the last people in the Cherokee Snowbird community who only spoke Cherokee.
Henri Gendreau, founder of the Roanoke Rambler, interviews Angelo Colavita, founder and owner of War on Books in Roanoke.
Courtesy
Local Media Unionizes And The Rise Of The Roanoke Rambler
Appalachia is sometimes thought of as a news desert but Western North Carolina has a lot of newspapers. There’s lots of coverage, but still gaps and a need to get more stories from the western counties to the rest of North Carolina.
Meanwhile, like in other parts of the country, some workers at media companies in North Carolina and Virginia have unionized. It has also led to new media outlets like The Roanoke Rambler, started by a former Roanoke Times reporter.
Mason Adams spoke with Alicia Petska of the Timesland Guild, a union formed at the Roanoke Times in Virginia.
New News Startups In Appalachia
The Asheville Blade and Scalawag are recent additions to the regional media community.
The Asheville Blade is a leftist local news co-op, that takes an adversarial stance toward covering local government, including the police. The startup has been at the center of conversations about journalist’s rights and made national news after two Asheville Blade journalists were arrested on Christmas Day in 2021.
Scalawag is an independent media organization based out in the south whose work often includes Appalachia interests. Their approach to journalism is to disrupt the narratives of the South.
Mason Adams spoke with Blade founder, David Forbes.
Lilly Knoepp talked with Scalawag publisher, Cierra Hinton.
Blue Ride Public Radio’s Lilly Knoepp joined host, Mason Adams, as a guest for this episode.
Courtesy
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Jesse Milnes, Appalachian Road Show, Paul Loomis and Chris Knight.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Our co-host this week is Lilly Knoepp from Blue Ridge Public Radio.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina and is now the first member of the tribe to write a novel.
Her book, “Even As We Breathe,” looks at a peculiar piece of history, when foreign diplomats from the World War II Axis Powers were held prisoner at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina in the summer of 1942.
Clapsaddle spoke with Eric Douglas to discuss the book and talk about why it is important for her to examine her own history.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: Tell me about “Even As We Breathe.”
Clapsaddle: So “Even As We Breathe” is set in the summer of 1942 at the Grove Park Inn, a resort hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. That summer they held Axis diplomats as prisoners of war. In the novel, my protagonist, Cowney, leaves Cherokee, North Carolina to travel to Asheville to work at the Grove Park Inn that summer as a member of the grounds crew.
He’s accompanied by another young Cherokee woman named Essie, who goes to work there as well. While he’s at the resort, he is accused of being involved in the disappearance of a diplomat’s daughter and has to prove his innocence.
Douglas: This is an interesting bit of history. Is that commonly known in the area?
Terri Clark/Terri Clark
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Clapsaddle: It is not commonly known as far as I can tell. It’s been covered very little in the media. I actually came across the story a few years ago, just as a paragraph in an Asheville Citizen-Times article. The Grove Park Inn has a book out on its history, and it covers this time period very minimally, because there are few records.
Douglas: Why did you decide to combine this little bit of history with Cherokee history and bring those two cultures together?
Clapsaddle: I tend to think about how things are connected in general. And so I had that bit of information about the history of the Grove Park Inn. And also in my background history, I knew that Indian reservations were used for Japanese internment out west. I always found that topic interesting as well that these are the places that we put America’s First People and the people that we consider to be potential enemy citizens and potential enemies of our country. The irony of that was really strong for me.
So, I wanted to just turn up the volume on that and take a member of a tribe and place them in this setting, where there are already issues of identity and fear of the “other.”
Douglas: You’re a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, what’s that like going back into your own personal history?
Clapsaddle: I look at it two different ways. There are the superficial changes that we have made as a place, as Cherokee, North Carolina. There are the changes we’ve made as a people as well, and how we exercise our sovereignty and things like that. So, it’s kind of taking that layer of the superficial changes off the table, and really looking at what our community values have been for centuries. I think that hasn’t changed all that much. And that was really a focus.
So when I think about the historical research of place to write this work of fiction, I spent a lot of time actually looking at photographs from the time period and seeing how the landscape has changed. That tells you a lot about how the community has changed if the landscape has changed. And what that means for interactions between people. How long did it take for a neighbor to get to a neighbor’s house compared to today? How long did it take for someone from Cherokee to get to Asheville compared to what it does today? That changes a lot of things. It changes a lot of social dynamics as well.
Douglas: What’s the reaction been from the tribe to the book?
Clapsaddle: I have been really fortunate to have a lot of support from my community. I’ve said this before to people, but what was most important to me is not the online reviews that will come out about the book, but can I go into the grocery store and not hide from people or people be happy to talk to me about the book. I’ve had those experiences and it’s really been reaffirming for me that people who don’t traditionally follow all the new books that are out, and they’re not voracious readers of fiction, have picked it up and they’ve read it and they want to talk about it. It’s been a really positive, positive experience so far for me.
“Even As We Breathe” is set in Asheville, North Carolina in 1942 during World War II. The novel is available through the University Press of Kentucky.
This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have been making baskets for centuries. While it is an old artform, basket makers are resilient — adapting to changes not only in their craft, but their traditions too.
From imagining new designs to dealing with hard-to-come-by materials, basket makers are dedicated to keeping their craft alive. In a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, Rachel Greene spoke with two women in Cherokee, North Carolina, doing just that.
A Natural Talent
Some artists hone their skills in classrooms. Others, like Betty Maney, are practically born into their art. She is a small woman, with a kind, round face and short grey hair. She is a renowned weaver of white oak and river cane baskets, and a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.
Like many other Cherokee basket makers, she learned her art by watching her mother, shadowing her as she gathered her materials. “When mom went out to cut her tree down, we went with her. We were with her in everything she did.”
“One day my mom says, ‘You need to start making baskets, because if you don’t start making and learning how to weave baskets, it’s gonna die out.'”-Betty Maney
Maney and her siblings were also there when their mom cut the tree into thin, pliable splints. She remembers her mom would lay a scrap of blue jean fabric on her lap and whittle the splints down until they were smooth and ready to be dyed and woven.
Maney, who works out of her home studio in Cherokee, North Carolina, started making baskets in the mid-1990s. Her mom, Geraldine Walkingstick, was a well-known basket maker and encouraged Maney to pick up basketry, too.
“One day my mom says, ‘You need to start making baskets, because if you don’t start making and learning how to weave baskets, it’s gonna die out.’”
Weaving also allowed Maney to make extra money for her family. She got her start with white oak, her mom’s signature material. She was a natural. Years of watching her mom taught Maney nearly everything she needed to know.
“Looking back, I realized it’s amazing how I already knew,” she says.
Keeping A Legacy Alive
According to research conducted by scholar Sarah H. Hill for the book, Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry, by the 1930s ethnographers identified and named nearly two dozen basket patterns traditionally woven by the Eastern Band of Cherokee. The patterns are geometrical and can be somewhat abstract. The flowing water pattern, for example, is made of intersecting splints that zig-zag up the side of a basket. Many are dyed with plants, like walnut or butternut bark, to create color contrast.
Credit Rachel Greene
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Betty Maney holds one of her signature white oak baskets, dyed with butternut bark. She keeps bundles of white oak splints on hand year-round.
Maney relies on that contrast to create her distinct and precise patterns. She likes symmetry, and uses different colored splints to repeat certain elements like vertical lines or “bands” that encircle the basket.
“What I like to do is put a band around the bottom, and as I weave up I put a separation in there by repeating a specific design with some colors,” Maney says. “Then I will repeat the bottom design on the top, so it’s real distinctive when you look at it.”
The baskets are usually oval or vase-shaped, sometimes with lids, sometimes with handles.
For Maney, the patterns are a continuation of her mother’s legacy. “My mom’s designs that she used in her baskets live through me and my sister. To us, that’s keeping her work alive.”
Maney finds ways to put her own spin on what she learned from her mom, too. “I call what I do contemporary cultural art. Because it’s always an improvement. You’re always coming up with something different, you’re always making things your own.”
Credit Rachel Greene
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Maney uses graph paper to sketch out patterns for weaving baskets and beads. She often uses similar patterns in both mediums and has recently begun using computer programs to manipulate her patterns.
Cherokee baskets are unique — they cannot be made just anywhere. Many of the materials used, like river cane or bloodroot, are native to the southeastern United States.
“It’s just something that’s important to the Cherokee, to our culture. It identifies who we are, what we do and why it’s important to us. That was our way of life. That’s how we survived,” Maney says.
She started making baskets during a craft revival in the 1990s. By then, baskets were mostly sold in craft stores to tourists or entered in competitions. In the past, though, Maney says they were mostly utilitarian.
“When I was little, we still needed them for fish baskets, and the small square ones were used as a sieve in the hominy making process to rinse the ash out of the hominy. And then the handle baskets were used for gathering and storage.”
“The resources — the natural resources — became scarce, and that was largely due to private landowners and development. Like the river cane that grows along the cornfields, the farmers were just plowing it up and burning it.”- Betty Maney
Coping With Scarcity
The tourism industry started growing in Cherokee after the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway was completed in 1936. Although baskets were still used in everyday life, basket makers also began selling them to tourists during the busy summer months.
Credit Rachel Greene
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A woman demonstrates basket making, likely at the Cherokee Indian Fair circa 1920s–1930s. From the Charles A. Farrell Photo Collection, PhC.9, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, NC
Basket making plays an important role in Cherokee’s economy, but pressure from tourism and increased land development have made it more difficult to find basket making materials in the wild.
“The resources — the natural resources — became scarce, and that was largely due to private landowners and development. Like the river cane that grows along the cornfields, the farmers were just plowing it up and burning it,” Maney says.
She is not the only artist to feel the effects of this scarcity. Faye Junaluska is a basketmaker with 40 years experience who has also had trouble sourcing her materials. She comes from a long line of basket makers.
“There’s my great grandma, my grandma, my mother and me. So, I’m a fourth generation myself,” Junaluska says.
Credit Rachel Greene
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Faye Junaluska stands in front of photos of her mother, Emma Squirrel Taylor on display at the Qualla Arts & Crafts Cooperative.
Like Maney, Junakuska learned the art from her mother, Emma Squirrel Taylor, whose work was displayed in the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
Both Maney and Junaluska work with white oak, which is harvested as a sapling, when it does not have many knots or branches. It takes a skilled hand to determine if a white oak tree is suitable for a basket — you do not know if a tree is usable until you cut it down and look inside. But it can be hard to find in Cherokee.
River cane can also be tough to find. The bamboo species is native to southern Appalachia and grows in large patches called cane breaks. It is also used to make dart guns, a Cherokee weapon, and floor mats. Junaluska does not remember a time when the river cane grew nearby.
“I never heard my mother talk about going out and gathering cane, or the women going out and gathering cane here somewhere.”
Junaluska and her mother had to find new ways to get their materials instead. This usually meant going outside Cherokee, or bartering with other artisans. Junaluska still does that today, trading out materials she gathered or a basket she made for a white oak tree.
Maney has also found ways to cope with scarcity. She uses bloodroot — tiny white flowers that only bloom in early spring — to dye her basket splints a vibrant red. To get that color, though, the petals need to be fresh. Maney and her family have a special way of preserving it.
“We have learned to clean it really, really good, wash all the dirt off, put it in freezer bags and we can freeze it, and it’s still fresh.”
Now, once a year, Maney and other basketmakers go all the way to Kentucky to gather river cane through a connection made by RTCAR.
A Community Effort
Finding ways to cope with scarcity is crucial for the survival of basket making. It also relies on strong communities and people who work to keep the tradition alive.
“Because you’ve got so many community members, family members involved in the process, from identifying and gathering, harvesting, it passes on that knowledge to them. That way it stays alive,” Maney says.
Credit Rachel Greene
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Two Cherokee women display basket making techniques and materials, circa 1950. From the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
There have been many times that a basket making technique nearly went extinct, but each time the Cherokee community saved it by teaching and ushering in new generations of basket makers. Maney was one of these novices once, but now she finds herself on the other side of the exchange.
“When somebody asks me how to make a basket, I’m happy to share.”
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a collaboration with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
