It seems that this year has seen more than its share of elders from the Western North Carolina community passing over to the other side. Some of these elders have been the keepers of long-standing traditions — teachers, storytellers and scribes who keep the rest of us connected with the past as a way to more fluidly and gently migrate into the future.

On Nov. 22 (Thanksgiving Day), Tom Underwood, 81, one of the stewards of our cultural and environmental cultures here in the mountains of Western North Carolina, left us, leaving behind a legacy almost incomprehensible to those of us of humbler destiny.

Born in Mississippi in 1920, Underwood moved with his family to the Qualla Boundary when he was 7. He went on to graduate from Western Carolina University; he helped build Fontana Dam; guided hunters and fishermen; cruised timber; managed the Cherokee drama “Unto These Hills;” directed the Cherokee Museum; was president of the Cherokee Historical Association; was editor and publisher of Cherokee Publications; owned Medicine Man Crafts shop in Cherokee; dealt in traditional Cherokee art; and was a teacher, storyteller, patron and friend to probably hundreds of people throughout the region and across the country. Last but not least, he was an avid conservationist, environmentalist, lover of nature and a first-class fisherman.

On Sunday, Dec. 9, on the “Island” located on the Oconaluftee River in Cherokee, a memorial service was held in his honor. Two hundred or more of Tom’s friends, family, and colleagues — Cherokee and non-Cherokee alike — filled the upper end of the island to pay respects and share memories of this unique man: Tom Mills and William Shelton, two of his closest fishing buddies; Dr. David Nash, who was given his first job by Tom Underwood; documentarian of Cherokee culture and history Ron Rule; longtime friends and business associates Kay and Ed Sharpe; traditionalist and Cherokee musician Eddie Bushyhead .... and many many more took their turn to eulogize, praise and tell candid stories about their dear friend while choking back their tears.

One member of the Cherokee community quoted Emerson: “A friend is a masterpiece of nature,” he said. “Tom was a masterpiece. Tom knew so much about our Cherokee culture and shared it with so many.”

Ed Sharpe’s most vivid memory of Underwood, as he put it, “was Tom holding a piece of Cherokee artwork which a local craftsman had just brought him, and tears just rolling down his cheeks.” Kay Sharpe remembers Tom counting the praying mantis cocoons in back of the Medicine Man Crafts shop, and proudly announcing to everyone the grand total of nests he had found that year — such was his love of nature and the natural world.

I met Underwood 20 years ago while spending time over in the Big Cove community with an elderly Cherokee man whose life story I was helping him collect into an as-told-to book for possible publication. I had taken my old friend into town to do some shopping and stopped off at the Medicine Man, where Tom noticed me admiring a collection of the work of internationally acclaimed stone carver John Wilnoty. Tom introduced himself, and what followed that introduction was a fascinating hour or more of listening to a man who could speak eloquently and fluently of art history, cultural anthropology, and local politics, while all the while lapsing in and out of wonderfully true stories which he told in both mountain dialect and a broken “ChEnglish” as he called it.

The 60-year-old Underwood I met in 1981 was full of Cherokee history and rich in experience. Humble and unassuming, deliberate and knowing, Underwood was an open book on a life that was as informative and interesting as it was impressive. In the following 20 years, Underwood became my guide into the world of Cherokee art, local politics and history.

“Tom Underwood loved this place,” as one of the attendees at the Memorial Service said on Sunday, “and this place loved Tom.”

I’ve always felt that it’s only respectful and proper to let a person or a People speak in their own behalf, be the source of their legacy. What follows is part of an interview I conducted with Tom Underwood some 15 years ago. Despite its age, this conversation could have just as easily taken place less than a month ago — such were his almost prophetic perceptions and perspective, so informed were his visions for the turn of the century and what we are facing, now, (in terms of the environment and development, for example). All this was couched in wonderfully personal stories illuminating a time almost forgotten, yet not all that far removed.

Thomas Crowe: Those of us who know you but haven’t lived in amongst the Cherokee community as you have, would like, I think, to know more about your life and your ideas concerning how the so-called “old days” were in comparison with how things are today. Could you talk to us a little about the Cherokee you’ve seen during your lifetime?

Underwood: I was raised down in Birdtown. And my nearest neighbor was a man by the name of John Walkingstick, who was an old medicine man and a very fine Christian man, too. He believed a great deal in the old ways and the old tradition and the old culture, and he incorporated all this into his Christian beliefs. And so, actually he was a fine blend of the best of both.

I learned a great deal of my early information from my talks with him. I learned things that I would not have otherwise, because he considered me also as a member of his family. We had a close relationship, and I played with his boys, who were actually grandsons of his. One of his sons had died at a fairly early age, and he had taken those children and raised them. These two boys were my constant companions when I was growin’ up. Old John had an old blowgun that was over a hundred years old and had been in the family for three generations. And we played with that blowgun and learned how to hunt with it, and we hunted rabbits and birds. He also told me about the old practices of training the medicine men from childhood, and how they were taken out into the mountains and shown the herb culture. The culture was spread out into, oh, four or five different classes; because some of the shaman or medicine men, as we loosely call them, were actually more closely associated with the priesthood than with the medicine fraternities. ‘Medicine Man’ has a connotation that isn’t completely correct in identifying these people that administered to the cultural needs of the people.

But he was the one who told me how they went into the mountains in the fall of the year and gathered the herbs and stayed, and were trained to recognize the herbs and to learn about their medicinal and spiritual significance. In other words, they were taught how to become a part of whatever surrounded them. All this is a very difficult thing to put into words, into English.

Quite often, those who were selected were taken as children and raised by the medicine men and taught all their lives the old customs and traditions. One time I asked ole John if he was going to train his grandsons to be medicine men. His response to my question was “no, their temperments, their thinking and their way of being was not suited to the kind of things that a medicine man did, you see.”

John also prepared medicine for me when I was sick and administered to me. I never knew a finer man!

TC: How would those days compare with the way we live here in the mountains of Western North Carolina today?

TU: As far as modern times and the people that are living here today — of course a great deal of the culture is gone. And there are many reasons for that: the way we live, the density of the population, the effects of television and modern educational methods, and many other things.

However, there is still some interest in the old culture and the old beliefs, because so many people don’t have any idea of what the old beliefs were. So, a lot of the young people think that they’re getting into something new, when it’s actually they’re re-discovering the old. The Indians have a kind of in-joke for all the New Age stuff that’s going on. They say, “This isn’t the new age, you white people got it all backward. This is the ‘Old Age’ — it’s been going on for a long, long time!”

The old Cherokee believe that all living things have souls, and none any less than man. They considered man the highest of living things, but they considered all living things to have a sacredness and a soul. And that all living things should be treated with that sort of consideration. If it was necessary to take the life of a living thing, then it was also necessary to ask for the forgiveness for the taking of that life.

So, we have some people here, in Cherokee, now, who are deeply interested in absorbing and preserving all they can of the knowledge of the old culture.

TC: Can you give us some examples, some specific insight into your work with the Cherokee Museum, the Cherokee Historical Association and the preservation of the old culture? I’d love to hear any stories you might be willing to share with us about artists, elders, and medicine people, for example.

TU: Well, going back to my early life again, my father had the only car in the community, so he was a kind of Cherokee taxi for many years. He took people to the doctor, or wherever they needed to go. Where people had emergencies and had to go somewhere, he was called on to help, which he did, graciously.

One time, and I will never forget it, he was called to go find somebody that lived out at the upper end of Adams Creek. And so I went along with him. We went up to old man Bert Partridge’s log cabin (this house has now been restored and sits over here in Cherokee and is the home of the Save the Children Federation). Bert was an old medicine man and his house sat up on a knoll with the road runnin’ to the side of it up on a hill, at the middle upper end of Adams Creek. There was a big patch of woods to the left side of the road up on the mountain above the house.

We went up to see if we could locate where this person was that my father was looking for. We stopped at Bert’s house, and there were several people hanging around there that we didn’t know. So, my father asked them where this person was, that it was an emergency and he needed to find him. They pointed up on the hill, where we could hear some singing. We got out of the car and took the trail about 300 yards until we could see the glow of a fire. In an area that had been cleared out about 30 or 40 feet in diameter, there in the center of it was a fire. Around by the fire, there was a person wrapped up in a blanket. There was some sort of ritual, ceremony being conducted, and there were about 20 or 30 people involved. What it was, was a Bogger Dance. And they all had their Bogger masks. I never will forget it.

For a young boy it was really a scary lookin’ thing! They were all dancing around in this clearing and the old medicine man was workin’ over the person laying down in the center of the circle. And, all the while, the rest of the people were dancing. The dancers had masks made from all different kinds of things. One man, I remember very distinctly, had a hornet’s nest with holes cut out in the top of it to look through. And another man had an old scary face made out of wood, and they all had blankets and skins and all kinds of things around them. You couldn’t tell at all who they were. They were all doing this chanting and this ritual around the person wrapped up in the blankets and laying in the center of the circle.

Well, as soon as they noticed that my father and I were there, everybody stopped. And my dad told somebody his business and the man he was seeking stepped out of the circle. They never started back up, or at least we never saw any more of it. But this Bogger Dance is something that left a big impression on me, and I’ll not forget it for the rest of my life. I’ve never seen a Bogger Dance since then, and I don’t know of any white person that ever saw it the first time. So, the Bogger Dances were still being done when I was a little boy. Even though you didn’t ever hear about them, they were going on.

Now, there were other dances such as the friendship dances and the beaver dances that were all done in the community, then. In fact, the friendship dances were practiced down in the school yard in front of where we lived. When I was growing up, I participated in some of these. Old man Bert Partridge or John Walkingstick were the principal ones that either beat the drums or did the chanting for these dances. Later on, when I was director of the museum, I secured Bert Partridge’s chantbook, where he had written down in Cherokee the different chants. I don’t know where those papers are now. I’m sure they’re probably still there in some of the records or papers at the Museum.

TC: I love these old stories. So, how would you say that those days compare with life in Cherokee today?

TU: You know, in the old culture, in the old beliefs (and I’d have to say that I am of the same opinion, embrace the same beliefs) that all living things are sacred. Have their own souls. Have their own way of communicating. Have their own system of behavior. That was what the old religion encompassed. And, of course, the old people believed that for every sickness there was an antidote for it — if you just knew what it was. It was the task of the priest or the medicine man, as we call them now, to find a way to treat illnesses and afflictions. But it was thought that at the beginning of time man had no afflictions. And this pretty much parallels the trespass idea in the Bible.

Today, the majority of the people here in Cherokee are conservative people. By “conservative,” I mean they don’t waste things. They don’t waste meat. They don’t waste much of anything. When you think about it, when this country was discovered, the Indians were living here and living WITH nature. And in only 250 years, we have desecrated the land, we have used a major part of the timber, we have used up the mineral resources to a great extent, and we have polluted the air. And I don’t think that this is such a great record! On top of that, we’ve also endangered the whole human species, in fact, the whole Earth! Perhaps the worst of all this is our delving into the use of atomic materials for power, weapons, etc.

So, I’m pretty skeptical about the whole thing. We’ve populated the planet with too many people. Populations run by madmen. Not that there aren’t some fairly enlightened leaders, but by and large the leaders and the majority of the Earth’s population are NOT enlightened. We send all the so-called “problem people” to jail. In jail they only get worse. We send them to psychoanalysts, and they only get worse. It just seems like for a great many criminals there’s just no help. It just seems like a vicious circle. Kindness doesn’t seem to work in this kind of world. Cruelty is no answer, either. So what are we to do?

TC: My take on this dilemma is that if the environment itself is out of balance, out of sorts, then no matter what you do to “de-criminalize” or “rehabilitate” someone, if they’re placed back in an unstable and unbalanced environmental situation, ultimately they’ve got no chance of ever becoming truly whole. Someone once told me, “You are a product of where you live.” If this is true, then in a polluted, overpopulated world, what chance do any of us have at achieving harmony and sustainability within and without?

TU: As far as I’m concerned, I think it’s getting late. Later than we think, perhaps. But, when you consider the idea of eternity, when you consider the notion of infinty — the Universe, and beyond — our problems are minuscule. However, they are not minuscule from our perspective.

Where is all this going to lead? Where are we going to be 10 generations from now? I’m still worried about what things will be like 10 YEARS from now! Polluted water — what are we going to drink? Polluted air  what are we going to breathe? And then, overpopulation — as the Cherokee say: “Instead of being crowded off this sky-rock, we’re going to be crowded off this Earth!”

So, what are we going to do? Let’s hope that the younger generation, our young people, will wake up and see the direction our society is heading and will be able to conceive of new strategies and will take the kinds of proper action necessary to turn things around. Change things for the better. These kids need to see the stupidity of war. They need to see and understand the truth about big business. They need to be attuned to the necessity of the preservation of the natural world. The future for generations to come and of the planet is up to them. They will have to make a difference. Let’s hope they can save this ole sky-rock!

TC: Having said that, and in the spirit of a kind of “healing” that needs to take place in the human community in order to put things back into a state of balance, overall, what about the Cherokee in particular? Since the first East-West Reunion, I’ve been wondering about the long-term affects of the Removal. How deep, do you think, is the scar of that experience, the genetic memory of that pain? Can such a wound ever, really, be healed? And, in that sense, can the People truly move forward toward achieving a psychological and cultural balance?

TU: Well, this is my own private opinion, but most of the people I know, I think, accept the fact of the Removal. They accept the fact of what happened in the past. But they are not living in the past and are doing their best to make the best of the world that they live in today, without malice and without hatred toward the individuals that now inhabit their world. I think most of the people in this community realize that, for instance, I — Tom Underwood — had nothing to do with the Removal. And although the Removal wound is a deep one, it is not a wound that is open and festering. It is merely a part of their ongoing history. A part of their past. And those of us, here, like folks everywhere who have endured pain and hardship, continue to look forward, as we all must do, and live on.

(Thomas Crowe is a poet, writer and editor who lives in the Tuckasegee community of Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com)

 

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