I was born in Mt. Airy, North Carolina, at the northern edge of the North Carolina section of the Blue Ridge Parkway and center of the Southern section of the Appalachian Mountains. It is home to the largest open-pit granite mine in the world.

The story of the Appalachians is: "the only constant is change." The Appalachian Mountains are some of the oldest mountains on earth, formed hundreds of millions of years ago in successive waves of continental plate overlap and folding from the east, thinning of plates, lava flow and volcanic activity. Add to this a fracturing of continental crusts leaving such features as the original Lake Ocoee, a seawater-filled basin with ages of deposited thick sediments which eventually became the bedrock of the Blueridge Mountains, full of all its mineral deposits. The mountains you see today are much shorter than they once were, worn down by water over milennia.

**One parallel between Mt. Airy and Alaska, geologically speaking, is the timeless concern for the environment once rich mineral/oil deposits have been discovered. Following is either uncontrolled extraction or careful development considering environmental consequences.**

In the landscape prior to formation of the Blueridge Mountains, minerals arrived from vents in the earth creating underwater "black chimneys" out of which flowed rich copper deposits . Mining and smelting to extract copper in the mid-1800's emitted dangerous acidic toxins, including sulphuric dioxides, which caused acid rain, causing 23,000 acres to become barren. This affected inhabitants of a once-rich farmland. Not until 1900 did environmental lawsuits bring about action which led to converting the toxins into sulphuric acid to make fertilizer. Restoration of the killed forests didn't happen until the 1930's, and it wasn't until the 1970's before trees were replanted. A now-lush forest is the result. People suffered and still today suffer from the results of mining in the area.

***In Alaska the riches include gold, silver, oil and natural gas. The battles over the Alaska Pipeline, the oil line, offshore drilling, and possible development in ANWR all mirror the battles fought in North Carolina in the Appalachians. Geologists help find and identify mineral-rich areas, then change can accelerate dramatically, affecting the lives of subsistence people who have depended on the land for hundreds of years, or in the case of Alaska thousands of years.***

***Another geological parallel shows 1) the Appalachians having been formed from an ancient sea following the breaking up of a world continent and subsequent re-meeting of land masses, followed by plate subduction, overlapping, and folding; and 2) Alaska's forming from subduction of the Pacific plate under the N. American plate, causing for example the Fairweather Mountains to rise yearly. Both happen in long-term geologic time.***

***Where the Appalachians were created out of the seas, Alaska and its extended seasonal ice masses are morphing back into the sea, as land and ice form are now giving way to year-round ocean surrounding land mass due to global warming. The difference is that the Appalachians morphed over millions of years, while on the coast of Alaska it is happening in a matter of decades, in our own time.***

Essential Question: How are landscapes formed and how, in turn, are cultures shaped by their landscapes?

Just as the Appalachian Mountains have evolved over millions of years, slowly in geological time, so the Cherokee people say they have lived in the area forever. Evidence points to more than 11,00 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. Interesting -- did they possibly come through ice-free corridors of the far north, leaving Yupik, Inupiak, or Inuit relatives in Alaska and Canada?

The Cherokee were subsistence – hunting and fishing, as well as farming people (corn, beans, squash). By 8000 B.C they covered the Appalachians. Over time, the people developed towns, politics, agriculture, pottery, archery. They had democracy, written language (Sequoya), and literacy.

“This was life that realized harmony with nature, sustainability, personal freedom, and balance between work, play, and praise. The land furnished all: food in abundance; materials for shelter, clothing and utensils; visual grandeur still vivid today, and herbs to treat every known illness – until the Europeans came.” (http://www.cherokee-nc.com/index.php?page=56)

After over 200 years of wars with other tribes backed by either the French or the British, and endless broken treaties causing great land loss to new European immigrants from England, Scotland, and Germany, the horrible “Trail of Tears” forced the Cherokees towards Oklahoma. Almost half of them died of exposure, disease, and loss of home. Those who live in North Carolina today are descendants of those who managed to hide and stay and those who managed to return to North Carolina. Today they live in a sovereign nation of 100 square miles, in touch with their past and living a good life.

The European inhabitants from the 1700s kept a tight society similar to the one they left in Europe. In the Appalachians this society was able to absorb many other people coming to the factories and mines, and to farm the harsh mountain land. Literacy and worldly knowledge were late in coming to the society. Then with television and extensive road building into the mountains around the 1970s, new ideas have brought about a certain crumbling of old world culture in the area, filled instead with government welfare. Along the Blueridge Parkway, old ways are “performed” every day of tourist season.

Did Something Similar to This Happen in Alaska to Indigenous People?

***Is there a parallel to loss of indigenous people in Alaska to Russian, European and American illnesses and society’s demands for change, not recognizing subsistence nor connection to the land? And of the same erosion of village life caused by war (Sitka 1802-4, Angoon 1950s), religious oppression and education, economic society, jobs away from the villages; of television and video cultures entering the lives of Indigenous people? I think of traditional dances during tourist season of Tlingit dances throughout S.E. and in Anchorage; of summer fishing camps along the Yukon for tourists to stop and watch in central Alaska.***

Cultures Shaped by their Landscapes:

The harsh rocky mountainous hidden landscape of the North Carolina Appalachians cradled and protected those Native Americans who managed to escape the European/Americans who drove all they could away. The European immigrants likewise protected their old cultural world from the rest of American changing society until this last few decades -- sort of a hidden past culture within the mountains. Both Native and non-native are industrious, close to the land, tough people. Both peoples are shaped and protected by the rough hidden aspect of the landscape which cradles them still. They have have had to deal with close industrialization, factories and capitalism, and today feeling respect for their old culture mostly appreciated by those who come to pay to see it from afar.