On Trails (27 page)

From the time they have grown waist-high, Penan children are traditionally taken on long journeys through the jungle to learn the land. Even just one generation ago, Penan parents would pull their children out of school for weeks or even months at a time to teach them the old stories and skills. But in recent years, Penan children have become too busy with schoolwork to memorize, preserve, and pass down this ancestral knowledge. Talking with Bujang, I came to realize that the most pernicious threat to their culture might not be the logging companies themselves (which can be fought by blocking roads and “spiking” trees); it's the slow but unceasing creep of the loggers' worldview.

Bujang worried over this cultural erosion one afternoon, as we sat around his dinner table, eating stubby blackened bananas. His sons were sprawled on the floor, playing with a skittery baby macaque and a lazy, bug-eyed pangolin they had taken as pets. Bujang said that while his sons were decent hunters, they lacked the instinctive directional sense that allowed him to walk for miles through dense, pathless brush without getting lost—a skill that only comes from a lifetime spent in the jungle. He worried that his grandsons and
great-grandsons would surely only be weaker, less knowledgeable, and more dependent on the state for their survival.

We who live in industrialized societies sometimes tacitly assume that all hunter-gatherers will inevitably want to “graduate” to practicing agriculture and global capitalism, but as Bujang and many other indigenous families prove, the so-called modern world is not humankind's manifest destiny. Some hunter-gatherer societies, like the Cheyenne, chose to abandon a lifestyle of sedentary farming and return to hunting and gathering. Many others, like the Bujangs, chose to adopt certain elements of Western modernity but not others: they hunt bush pig with a shotgun, but kill birds with blow darts. The path of humanity is ever branching. All roads need not lead to Times Square.

However, as I learned from the Bujangs, the path of modern consumer capitalism—with its endless (and endlessly advertised) comforts and conveniences, its wondrous medicine and magical technology—constantly beckons to hunting-and-gathering societies. Once Western capitalism begins to encroach on their land from all sides, life for hunter-gatherers becomes increasingly difficult—their land base shrinks, government interference increases, traditions fray, local knowledge dissipates, and the pressure to assimilate mounts. Under these conditions, converting to a sedentary Western lifestyle begins to look like the path of least resistance.

When an indigenous community assimilates into the dominant culture, either by force, by desire, or from fears of being “left behind” (a threat the Malaysian government frequently wields), there is a concomitant loss of those threads that hold together culture: language, lore, religious practice, familial obligations, and relationship to place. At its core, the problem facing indigenous communities is mnemonic; the culture, long stored in the collective memory and encoded in the land, is gradually forgotten.

Modern Cherokees hold many of these same concerns, but they
have their own way of fighting the erosion. Unlike the Bujangs, or traditional Navajos like Bessie and Harry Begay—who have retained much of their culture by living far from civilization, shunning most technology, and never learning English—the Cherokees have tried to chart a middle path between assimilation and traditionalism. Virtually from the beginning of the imperial invasion, many Cherokees were quick to learn the English language, utilize modern technology, and adopt European modes of farming and trade, all while fighting to maintain their heritage.

That fight continues to this day. Since language is vital to preserving culture, in recent years the Cherokee—like many other tribes—have founded a slew of language-immersion schools, which help children become fluent in their native language, even if their parents can't speak it. I paid a visit to one such school, the Kituwah Academy in North Carolina. The school was run by a man named Gilliam Jackson. Out of roughly fourteen thousand Eastern Band Cherokees, Jackson was one of only a few hundred left who still spoke the Cherokee language fluently.

At Kituwah, every activity—classes, games, meals, songs—was conducted in Cherokee. Over the entryway to the school hung a printed banner:
ENGLISH STOPS HERE
. In one classroom sat a pile of colorful wooden alphabet blocks, such as one might find in any preschool, only, instead of the Latin alphabet, they were printed with odd-looking characters that resembled something dreamed up by Tolkien. This, Jackson explained, was the Cherokee alphabet (properly known as the “Cherokee syllabary”). Most fluent Cherokee speakers cannot read or write it, but these children were learning to do both.

The written language of the Cherokee was devised in the early nineteenth century by a Cherokee blacksmith who went by the name of Sequoyah, also known as George Gist. Unable to speak English, Sequoyah marveled at the efficiency of written language, which al
lowed white people to converse across great distances and, most crucially, to fix knowledge so that it would not erode over time. In the oral tradition, knowledge was a mercurial thing, changing shape as it changed hands. As reported in
The
Missionary Herald
in 1828, Sequoyah believed that, “if he could make things fast on paper, it would be like catching a wild animal and taming it.”

Seeing the benefits of such a technology, he set about devising his own code. He began by assigning individual symbols to common words. First he used elaborate hieroglyphs, which, being tedious to draw and memorize, he later replaced with more basic symbols. But with his list of words piling up into the thousands, even those symbols soon proved too difficult to remember. Finally, after much experimentation, he broke the language down to eighty-six spoken syllables, with a different character assigned to each. It took him twelve years to find a workable system.

Once the system was complete, he taught it to his six-year-old daughter, who came to read it fluently. Together, they demonstrated the new system for their neighbors: Sequoyah would ask someone to tell him a secret, he would mark it down on a piece of paper, and then he would ask another person to carry the paper to his daughter, who was out of earshot. Reading from the scrap of paper, the little girl would call out the sentence just as it had been told to her father, shocking many of those present.

Sequoyah's new syllabary caught on. It was soon being used to record sacred songs and curing formulas. By 1828, a new bilingual newspaper called the
Cherokee Phoenix
was published in an altered form of the syllabary. In the 1980s, the first Cherokee typewriter was invented, and attempts were later made to convert computer keyboards into Cherokee. But, due to mechanical and cost constraints, typing in Sequoyan remained cumbersome until 2009, when a developer released an application for electronic tablets like the iPad that allowed people to easily type in Cherokee.

Jackson said the children at his school had picked up typing in Cherokee on the tablets with remarkable ease. “We have really gotten way into technology,” he said. “All these kids around here, they can text, they can do iPads, they can do computers, you name it. They're way more advanced than I am. But in terms of being able to identify plants and medicines and foods in the woods, they've lost that connection.”

As Jackson was learning, the cultural institutions that European cultures have long relied on to perpetuate knowledge—namely, enormous and intricately organized corpora of texts—cannot properly preserve a form of knowledge that is orally transmitted and terrestrially encoded. Indigenous cultures need both language and land to survive.

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People fighting to preserve indigenous cultures tend to fall into one of two camps. Some believe that technology (being malleable and agnostic) will continue to evolve to better perpetuate elements of indigenous culture, like the Cherokee keyboard, and to situate traditional knowledge in the landscape (using digital maps). Others, like Jackson, counter that without time spent learning directly from the land, no amount of technology would halt the cultural erosion.

Somewhat ironically, given his general aversion to technology, Lamar Marshall had ultimately been converted by the techno-­evangelists. In response to the loss of land-based learning, he has begun importing over a thousand miles of trails into digital maps—along with the stories, wild foods, and medicine to be found along those trails—so they could one day be accessed by future generations of Cherokees.

The day after our trip up to Big Stamp, Marshall met me at the Wild South office to show me an early mock-up of the program. Using Google Earth, he had charted a shortcut trail that connected the Raven Fork Trail to the Soco Creek Trail. The satellite images were from the present day, so occasionally, as the yellow path wended
through the green mountains, the gray specter of an asphalt parking lot would appear. The anachronisms had initially jarred Marshall, and he considered using Photoshop to clone trees in over the modern scars, but he ultimately decided against it. The program, he reasoned, should represent the world as it currently is—or rather, as it can be
walked.

Into these digital landscapes, here and there Marshall had inserted images that the ancient Cherokee would have found alongside the trail: ginseng leaves, elk, bison, a trail marker tree, intersections with old trading paths. On one hill, called Rattlesnake Mountain, lurked a crude rendering of Uktena, the horned serpent of Cherokee myth.

As it was told to James Mooney, the monster Uktena was known to hide in dark, lonesome passes over the Great Smoky Mountains. One day a local medicine man named Aganunitsi went hunting for the great serpent, hoping to collect the diamond that was embedded in its forehead. He walked south through the Cherokee lands, encountering mythic snakes, frogs, and lizards, before he finally reached the top of Gahuti Mountain, where he found the Uktena sleeping. The medicine man retreated to the bottom of the mountain and made a great circle of pinecones. Inside the circle he dug a deep circular trench, and within that, he left an island on which he could stand. Then the medicine man lit the pinecones on fire, crept back up to the serpent, and shot an arrow through its heart. The snake awoke in a fury and lunged after the medicine man. The man was prepared; he ran down the hill and leaped inside the circle of flames. The snake raced down behind him, spraying venom, but the poison evaporated in the blaze. While the man waited safely inside his ring of fire, the injured serpent roiled in agony, flattening trees. Its black blood poured down the slope, filling up the circular trench. The medicine man waited on his little island until finally the beast fell limp. After waiting seven days, he visited the site where
the serpent lay, and though its flesh and bones had been pecked to dust by birds, one thing remained: a luminous diamond. With that jewel, the medicine man soon became the most powerful man in the tribe.

Encoded within the story of Uktena—which I have greatly abridged here—is an enormous amount of information, both empirical and mythic, all spun into a taut narrative thread. Even on the page, the story hums. One can only imagine how much more vivid it would have seemed if one had heard it while standing on the mountainside, looking out over the treeless expanses swept bare by the serpent's tail and the lake filled with its black blood.

Marshall's program was a small but meaningful attempt to resituate the story in its rightful place. However, it still lacked the immediacy of terra firma. Marshall knew this, so he hoped to one day build an application that incorporated augmented reality technology with stories and maps, so that children could stand on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain while watching the tale of the Uktena unfold through virtual-reality goggles, or visit the sacred Kituwah mound and see a digital rendering of the site as it once was, four centuries earlier, aglow with the light of the sacred fire.

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Walking creates trails. Trails, in turn, shape landscapes. And, over time, landscapes come to serve as archives of communal knowledge and symbolic meaning. In this sense, the various cultures I have so far crudely lumped together under terms like
Native
and
indigenous
could perhaps be better described as “trail-walking cultures.” This classification would make modern Westerners, by extension, a “road-driving culture.” The colonization of the New World would not have been possible if Europeans could not harness domesticated animals and drive in vehicles like wagons and, later, trains and automobiles. Today, machines allow us to move radically faster—often along the very
same trails Native Americans once used. But in doing so, we have lost the elemental bond between foot and earth.
III

The Blackfoot Indians of North America are an archetypal example of a trail-walking culture. According to their creation stories, the world was shaped by a quasi-divine figure named Napi, or Old Man, as he walked north through Blackfoot country. In the process, he formed rivers, planted deposits of red clay, gave birth to animals. He created plants to feed the animals. Then he created humans to hunt the animals and harvest the plants. He showed humans how to dig up edible roots, how to gather medicinal herbs, how to hunt with a bow and arrow, how to drive buffalo over a cliff, how to use a stone maul, how to build a fire, how to create a stone kettle, how to cook meat. As people moved from place to place in the landscape, performing rituals, telling stories, and singing songs at sacred sites, they reenacted the travels of Napi. “Significantly,” wrote Gerald Oetelaar, “the total landscape is necessary to tell the entire story, to complete the annual ritual cycle, to establish the social and ideological continuity of the group, and to ensure the renewal of resources.”

“What you've got to realize is that the landscape is their archive,” Oetelaar explained to me. “Those places remain alive only as long as people visit them, remember the names, remember the stories, remember the rituals, remember the songs.”