Jim Glanville
The Appalachian Studies Association recently held its 40th annual conference on the Virginia Tech Campus from March 9-12 and attracted 1,200 attendees. This edition of the annual conference took “Extreme Appalachia!” as its theme.
The conference organizers defined “extreme” as the “impassioned commitment people have to the region, the land, and Appalachian ways of life.” With the added emphasis that the “word ‘extreme’ also captures the vibrancy and commitment to place of so many mountain folks, as well as their resistance to social and economic and political forces.”
Along with a program of academic sessions, the conference featured community organizing workshops, diversity awareness workshops, and field trips to environmentally impressive and historically significant New River Valley locations.
The ballroom of Squires Student Center served as an exhibit hall during the conference. Poster sessions were held there, along with a display of items up for silent auction. Typical exhibitors were university presses displaying copies of their books, museums such as the West Virginia Mine Wars museum, and environmentally active groups such as those opposing strip mining and pipelines.
There were eleven academic sessions consisting of a total of 209 listed academic programs. Most programs had three or four presenters addressing a common theme. Other programs involved film showings, field trips led by experts, Appalachian literary readings, and so on.
This columnist participated as a member of a four-member panel with the theme “Extreme Early Appalachia.” His co-panelists were Anna Kiefer of Lord Fairfax Community College, Sarah McCartney of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Jaime Mize of the University of North Georgia at Gainesville.
Kiefer spoke about the early German immigrants in Appalachia; McCartney spoke about the Botetourt Resolves of 1775; and Mize spoke about the changing gender roles of northern Georgia Indians in the early 1800s.
This columnist’s presentation was a many-century sketch of the American Indian Yuchi people. They are arguably the first Appalachians we can name.
This columnist’s presentation was a many-century sketch of the American Indian Yuchi people. They are arguably the first Appalachians we can name.
The American Indian history of Appalachia is relatively poorly known and the region has long taken a back seat in American archeology. Academic interest in the sixteenth-century Spanish period of Appalachian history has only emerged in recent decades.
Oral tradition tells that the Yuchi Indian people originated at Cahokia on the Mississippi River near present-day St. Louis, were in western Tennessee by the fourteen century, and in eastern Tennessee by the fifteenth. The Spanish De Soto expedition encountered the Yuchis in Southwest Virginia in 1541, as did the Pardo expedition in 1567.
The Yuchis left a fabulous archeological record in the Middle Appalachian region. In Virginia, this record remains even today undocumented by professional archeologists.
English speakers first encountered the Yuchi people during trading explorations in the late seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century the Yuchi were heavily involved in the English-driven Indian slave trade. In 1714, the Yuchi lost out to larger tribes in the slave trade competition and suffered wide dispersal across the Southeast, with remnants remaining in Appalachia.
Indian removal in 1838-39 took most Yuchis to Oklahoma as dependents of the Creek Nation. Nonetheless, despite removal, remnant Yuchi settlements remained in Appalachia and in east Tennessee where they became the leaders of a post-removal coalescent Indian movement. Documentary evidence of the leadership role taken by the Yuchis of Appalachia in 1857 comes in the form of an inter-tribal roll written down in Carter County, Tennessee, and retained to the present day by the Remnant Yuchi Nation of Kingsport.
The Virginia Tech American Indian student organization will hold Tech’s first powwow from noon to 6:00 pm on Saturday April 1 on the Graduate Life Center lawn opposite Squires Student Center and Newman Library. This powwow follows up on the recent Virginia Tribal Summit hosted by the Virginia Tech President’s Office and held for the purpose of reinvigorating partnerships between the university and the commonwealth’s eleven recognized tribes.
Unfortunately, the Yuchi are not a commonwealth-recognized tribe.
Jim Glanville is a retired chemist living in Blacksburg. He has been publishing and lecturing for more than a decade about the history of Southwest Virginia.
