Issue 2:2 | Fiction | Ellesa Clay High

Diversity in Appalachia: The Lessons

That Mountains Teach

Ellesa Clay High

Mountains demand diversity. Their many angled paths and the views they afford challenge our perceptions of who we are, where we’re going, and what we really need. A mountain manipulates distance without moving—the crow flies ahead of us toward a horizon chained out of our reach. Conversely, a ridge can compress a continent into a few thousand feet, a lesson plants have learned well. What thrives in the hollow cannot survive on the cliff. Rhododendron and fern, poplar and hemlock, alpine sod and red spruce—their message is clear: Diversify or die.

The indigenous people of these mountains and the settlers who later homesteaded here had to approach life diversely to survive. Because they listened to these ridges, mountaineers generally became known for their ingenuity and practicality, generosity and fierceness, and stubborn closeness to the land. They did not know they farmed over vast coal seams, or that the trees they felled to build their cabins and to clear their fields were part of the greatest hardwood forest on earth. They did know how to live independently, yet in at least temporary harmony with their surroundings.

An old timer, born in the 1880s, once told me from his nursing home bed, “I was a jack-of-all-trades, and good at nothing.” Then he laughed, the kind of comfortable chuckle one hears less and less these days. Years later, I still hold his century-old ability to laugh at himself as a precious thing, but I also realize a bitter truth. We have eroded into a culture that denigrates the generalist and downright discourages the generalist’s diversity if viewpoint, one that might too persistently question bureaucracy or the status quo.

Mountains teach different lessons, including that loss of diversity usually is imposed from outside forces, not inner ones. Stereotyping, by its very definition, destroys diversity by separating, simplifying, and fixing perception—little wonder that it’s a weapon of choice when one group wrests power from another. As part of their disenfranchisement, American Indians were stereotyped and given tribal names they did not know: for example, Delaware for Lenape, Sioux for Lakota, and Navajo for Dine. Likewise, mountain people were labeled “Appalachian,” a term they hadn’t heard, by outsiders who had their own agenda for the region. Thus, Appalachians became something “other”—barbaric, childlike, too ignorant or innocent to develop themselves and their resources—in other words, acceptable targets for both missionaries and the “multinational corporations” of the time.

To me, it is revealing that American Indians today sometimes refer to Appalachia as the “paleface reservation,” Even now, to be branded with the Appalachian stereotype is to be denied the ethnic, historic, and spiritual diversity of our region. It partially explains this fact: Although rich natural resources remain here, we continue to suffer from some of the worst poverty, highest unemployment, and deadliest pollution in the country. Appalachian people have learned the hard way about the dangers of single-market economies and the catastrophic costs of treating the earth as a commodity. Diversity in every sense is a casualty when sovereignty on an elemental level has been stripped away. Mountains teach us that.

They can teach us more. Their ancient faces have not yet all been removed, and their valleys still embrace us. As we begin this new millennium, our most vital actions should include listening, remembering, and then diversifying. To thrive, we will have to widen our sense of community well beyond accepting all races of humanity. Our communities will have to include our global relatives—the four-leggeds as well as the two-leggeds. They must include members of the stone people and the winged nation, neighbors to the standing people or trees, who after being clear-cut from these ridges a century ago, once again have reached “harvestable” size.

We will have to ask what we, as a species, are willing to give away, as we expect other species on the planet to give to us.

For a thousand years or more, the Native eastern woodland peoples envisioned the future this way: children as yet unborn, but whose faces already were coming from within the earth. When we can understand and honor that concept—literally and symbolically—then perhaps a future will open in which we can survive. . .