Prologue
(sound of gentle waves on a lake)
Ariel Lavery: Don’t you just love the sound small waves make on a lakefront beach?
Austin Carter: I’m all about the sound waves make on any kind of beach, but yes, lakes are very nice. I assume this was recorded from Tellico Reservoir?
Ariel Lavery: Yeah…
Austin Carter: But first maybe we kinda need to remind people where we’re at.
(sound of waves fades out)
Ariel Lavery: Oh…okay. Listener, i f you haven’t yet heard Part 1 through 3 of this series, please go back and listen so you know all about why we’re here.
So, my whole family came along on this trip because I had a nursing baby. I couldn’t go off and leave for a week. My husband and older daughter came for child and moral support.
Austin Carter: (laugh)
Ariel Lavery: And I ended up having to bring both my daughters with me when I went to tour the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and interview Charlie Rhodarmor, the director of the museum. The museum itself is pretty cool and has an incredibly thorough history of Sequoyah.
(sound of Ariel chatting with Charley from a distance)
Ariel Lavery: Push that button that's lit up.
Charley Rotarmer: Now step back so you can see everything.
Ariel Lavery: Let’s come put our feet on here.
(sound of drums and music begins)
Male narrator voice: It was around 1776 in what would become known as the Little Tennessee River Valley…
Ariel Lavery: They have a couple of these amazing shadow theater displays.
Male Narrator Voice: … a child was born. Sequoyah. He would become a hero….
(production fades out)
Ariel Lavery: The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum was a TVA-sponsored project.
Charley Rotarmer: Well, TVA hired a company. They came up with 38 concepts. And, uh, one of those concepts was to build the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and tell Sequoyah’s story.
Austin Carter: But didn’t they cover the sacred sites of Tanasi and Chota with the lake? It seems a little off that they would build a museum also.
Ariel Lavery: Right?! TVA DID help get this museum going, among other things. But that was not before they flooded the original sites. The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is one of the attractions that exists around the Tellico Reservoir that commemorates the Cherokees that used to live in the valley. About 40 minutes up the road, where it really feels like you’re in the mountains, are the memorial sites for Chota and Tanasi.
Gene Branson: You know, you can, you can stand there and close your eyes and you can almost feel what these, the children, were doing and the adults. You can't get any more important than these sites here.
Ariel Lavery: There’s also a grave site for Oconestota.
Charley Rotarmer: And Oconestota was the Cherokee that led the siege against Fort Loudoun. And he was the only Cherokee identified during the archeological digs. And… that's another story. (laughs)
Ariel Lavery: But THAT IS part of the story we’re going to hear today.
Jeff Chapman: There was an enormous amount of money. It was a huge project with the largest archaeological projects in the country at that time.
(theme music swell)
Ariel Lavery: This is The Story of Tanasi. This is the story about the epic battle to save the Little T. Today we’ll trace the last leg of the fight to save the river. This time the farmers looked to the Cherokees to do what they themselves couldn’t. But along the way, some of the Cherokees revive their connection to their sacred history. In Part Four of our series: Together in Protest, Together in Death.
Austin Carter: On Middle of Everywhere, sharing big stories from the small places we call home. I’m Austin Carter.
Ariel Lavery: And I’m Ariel Lavery.
(theme music ends)
Part 4:
Scene 1: The Eastern Band
Zyg Plater: And so I was fishing, and I was wading, it's a fairly, it was a fairly shallow river. Cool, clear, highly oxygenated. And I was standing on an underwater log and there was another one and I went out on that, and my friend said “I’m on one, too, do you see what it is?” It was a v-shaped set up of logs in the base of the river. And it was a shallow river. So the women and children would beat at the wide end with sticks and the fish would run down to the narrow end. I was on a Cherokee fish trap!
Ariel Lavery: This is Zyg again, our protagonist and champion for the river.
Austin Carter: Out discovering the remnants of the Cherokees on the Little Tennessee!
Ariel Lavery: Yep! Now I was actually given Zyg’s contact information from a tribal member, who was one of the very first people I talked to for this story as he was one of the Cherokees involved in the controversy.
Bob Blankenship: This is Bob Blankenship. My Cherokee name is Ooganasti and translated that means sweet thing.
Ariel Lavery: Bob is an older member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee at 85.
Bob Blankenship: Now I was born and raised back in what's called the Big Cove community. So we raised farm crops, raised cattle, some cows, hogs and milked our own milk cow. We had to do that before we went to school each morning and after we got home.
(twangy slide guitar music fades in)
Early in the morning, we'd get up about four o'clock light, the lantern and go to the barn. And then we'd have to go to school barefooted until we sold our tobacco crop. And it got pretty cold out there in that frosty grass chasing those mules and stuff. Yeah, I grew up in the most rural, poorest part of the reservation. You don't feel bad about being poor when you ain’t know nothin’ different. (laughs).
Ariel Lavery: And going to school on the reservation sounded like a real challenge.
(twangy slide guitar music fades out)
Bob Blankenship: The kids started school with me could not speak English. And had to learn English after they started school. I was the other way around. I spoke more English and very little Cherokee words. The whole community was in that school. They had a generator at the school so they did have some electricity there because I had the job of going out and cranking that thing every morning when I got to school.
Ariel Lavery: Bob’s young life in Big Cove was obviously sparse.
Bob Blankenship: We had one car in the community of Big Cove and that belonged to the mailman. Later on as one of the Indian medicine men, Amoneeta Sequoyah…
(light, sparkly music fades in)
Some lady – he treated a lot of people within Indian medicine – he treated one lady for cancer. And she gave him a Model T Ford.
Ariel Lavery: Amoneeta Seqouyah was a direct descendant of the famous Sequoyah who wrote the syllabary. And he practiced traditional Cherokee medicine in the community around the reservation, and elsewhere in the region.
(light, sparkly music fades out)
Bob Blankenship: My wife and I have been married 66 years. We got 17 grandkids, eight kids. There’s a lot of Blankenships here now on the roll. You have to be 1/16 Eastern Cherokee to be on the rolls here.
Ariel Lavery: A fact which brings me to our next fellow, who I interviewed at the museum.
Gene Branson: I lived in Knox County all my life. Never knew I was supposed to be enrolled. I'm chair of the board of the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, enrolled member of the Eastern Band and their tribal rep.
Ariel Lavery: Gene is a relatively new member of the Eastern Band.
(twangy slide guitar music fades in)
Genen Branson: Back in the day, early to mid-’60s, it wasn't as popular to be an Indian.
Ariel Lavery: Gene’s mother was thought to be the last generation that was 1/16 Cherokee. But Gene found proof that his grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee.
Gene Branson: but it still took me seven years. So I made numerous trips to Cherokee. And the last little piece of evidence was a book that was in a desk drawer in the enrollment office in Cherokee. And Colonel Bob Blankenship found it, the original onion skins.
Ariel Lavery: Once he was enrolled he quickly learned the way some people in the Eastern Band see and evaluate others, particularly outsiders.
Genen Branson: I found out that they could see through your chest and into your heart what you really mean. I like to think that I've a whole new gain a whole new respect for the Eastern Band, and how they operate. Colonel Bob asked me if I would serve on the board. And of course, that was the opportunity I was wanting. When I got all of our family members on the roll, I asked them to give back to the tribe in some way.
(twangy slide guitar music ends)
Scene 2: Gene and Bob’s Involvement
Ariel Lavery: Gene and Bob were both involved in the Tellico Project and the ensuing controversy, but not the way you might imagine.
Gene Branson: We were tasked with taking four by eight plats.
Ariel Lavery: Plats were paper records from the telephone company that Gene was working for.
Gene Branson: So we had to take a big wad of those platts and cover every road where the water was coming up. We had to ride every road, count every pole, every anchor, and the platts had the footage of the cable. So when they retire all that stuff in mass and take it out. It has something to do with ad valorem taxes or something like that. It's a benefit to them of course. They probably counted off their income tax for years because of that.
Ariel Lavery: And as Gene was doing this work he was also witness to the valley being stripped of everything.
(thoughtful acoustic guitar music fades in)
Gene Branson: We would have to ride through the bulldozers were taken out stumps and tearing down houses and burning houses…and see people move and other houses, loading trucks, cars, anything pickup trucks, big trucks. And you can see the sorrow in their eyes. They took out everything: stumps, trees, roads. (skoffs) They took it all out.
(thoughtful acoustic guitar music fades out)
Ariel Lavery: Bob, however, wasn’t a part of any of this early on. He was actually overseas when the dam project started, serving in Vietnam.
Bob Blankenship: And I came back here at the end of ‘66. By ‘72, I was a planner and planning for the tribe. It was after I was a planner I first became aware, really, around 19.. probably ‘74 and 5. Dr King is the one…
Ariel Lavery: Dr. Dwaine King was one of the most respected scholars of Cherokee history at this time.
Bob Blankenship: He's the one that took me over there to the Tellico Plains and started showing me these shot sites and got me interested in that over Hill area.
Ariel Lavery: I asked Bob how much he knew about that area before this.
Bob Blankenship: Not very much.
Scene 3: The Dig
Austin Carter: Huh. So neither Bob nor Gene were fighting this dam when the farmers were, in the sixties and early seventies. And Bob didn’t even know much about the history of the Cherokee in the valley?
Ariel Lavery: Yeah. It seems surprising right?
Austin Carter: Yeah.
Ariel Lavery: There are many surprises to the Cherokee side of the controversy. But to start, let’s get into how the excavations got started in the first place. You remember Gerald Schroedl? Our Cherokee archeological expert from the first episode?
Austin Carter: Sure.
Gerald Schroedl: You know, when I first went in ‘72, the first year I carried out fieldwork in telecom none of this existed. There was no controversies, there was no nothing. It was, it was all normal because the history of TVA was to do what? Build dams for flood control and recreation.
Ariel Lavery: Gerald was brought on because he specialized in Cherokee archeology. And he was working under another researcher in charge of the whole project.
Bob Blankenship: Well, that's where I first met Jeff, he's in bottom of a pit there at Ice House bottoms and me and Dwaine walked up to the pit.
Jeff Chapman: My name is Jeff Chapman. I'm the Director Emeritus of the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture. At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the last five years of the project, I was the principal investigator.
Ariel Lavery: We’ve talked before about how there were so many new laws coming out that the Tellico Project was having to deal with.
Austin Carter: Yeah.
Jeff Chapman: Under emerging laws, preservation laws, excavations were mandated. Salvage excavations, to learn about the the occupation in the valley.
Ariel Lavery: The National Historic Preservation Act, we mentioned before, was passed in 1966. This required that the TVA also had to put funding toward these digs in order to preserve the artifacts. And because the Tellico project and been facing injunction after injunction, the dig was allowed to go on and on.
Gerald Schroedl: Everybody thought Tellico would be over and done with very quickly. And this is why at the beginning, the only real work that was done was at Chota and, and that was pretty much it because everybody thought the whole valley was going to be flooded.
(thoughtful acoustic music fades in)
So as that drug on, then we went wait a minute, there's a whole ‘nother archaeological record here, going back 8 or 10,000 years.
Jeff Chapman: This stretched on year after year after year.
Ariel Lavery: And the TVA had acquired so much land for the project that there was a lot to be studied and preserved.
Jeff Chapman: There was an enormous amount of money. It was a huge project, one of the largest archaeological projects in the country at that time, and it generated enormous amounts of data that today still are very, very important for people doing research.
Ariel Lavery: But just like every other aspect of the Tellico Project, the politics surrounding the digs evolved as it went on.
Bob Blankenship: At first, I don't know how it happened, but I know that TVA was actually bringing in some Cherokee people over there to help in those excavations.
Jeff Chapman: At the very beginning of the project. There were several tribal members, young, young folks who came and helped excavate there in the valley. This was in the early ‘70s.
Austin Carter: Wait, so the Cherokees were helping exhume their ancestors’ graves?
Ariel Lavery: Yeah. Zyg and his group the Friends of the Earth knew that the sites were going to be flooded and he approached the tribe.
Bob Blankenship: They convinced us they were digging up our graves and so we joined that and the tribes had what they call the call them, of all things, The Bones Committee.
(thoughtful acoustic music fades out)
Ariel Lavery: But on the other side of things, the researchers worried about what might happen to the artifacts if they didn’t excavate and preserve them.
Gerald Shroedl: Our biggest worry was if we didn't excavate those burials, they would be looted, they would be destroyed.
Ariel Lavery: Remember, TVA had bought up all the land, and that’s left the archeological sites open and unprotected.
Gerald Schroedl: So we know that there were large numbers of burials at Toqua. And there were large numbers of burials that were destroyed by looters.
Ariel Lavery: Yet by the very nature of digging up the artifacts in order to preserve them, these sites were also being destroyed.
Jeff Chapman: That is the irony of the whole thing. It takes the destruction in order to generate the research.
Ariel Lavery: Do you happen to know why it took the Cherokee so long to get involved to get their voices in?
Jeff Chapman: It would be total speculation. If you look nationally, you've seen an increasing involvement engagement by indigenous peoples concerned about protecting their heritage in the like, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. This was just emerging, it was not a strong force. So I just think it was not really something on their radar screen.
Ariel Lavery: The times, they were a-changin’.
Gerald Schroedl: So Teleco was sort of caught at this interface of a huge and archeological thinking, environmental thinking, civil rights thinking, the role of government agencies, and on and on and on. So it was kind of caught in sort of the vortex there, all these things were happening.
Ariel Lavery: After the environmental impact statements, and then the snail d arter failed to end the project, the hope was that a Cherokee case might give a third bite of this apple. That’s when we come back.
Scene 4: The Rights of Religion
Ariel Lavery: When we left, the Cherokees had started taking issue with the desecration of their ancestral burials. Now, even though the Cherokees were latecomers to this fight, Bob had been working with Zyg during the lawsuit in the Supreme Court and was in Washington when the exemption was signed.
Bob Blankenship: We had pressured Jimmy Carter to veto that exemption from the Endangered Species Act, and the chairman of council Chief John Crow, and I, and Dr. King, were up there with the Friends of the Earth.
Zyg Plater: After the triangle killed the Supreme Court opinion, we prepared the Cherokee case.
Ariel Lavery: Zyg, of course, was not about to let a little exemption from Congress bring an end to his efforts.
Zyg Plater: Because the pork barrel had rescinded all the laws, they couldn't rescind the Constitution. Bob had always been saying, by the way, that the constitutional claim was something that TVA couldn't override. He said, “Use it, use it, put that in the complaint.” I said, “No, no, no, we're gonna hold that back.” The Supreme Court was not strong on Indian religious rights. So it wasn't a slam dunk. And we wanted, I wanted to keep it in my back pocket.
Ariel Lavery: The First Amendment guarantees a person’s right to the free exercise of religion. Plus, the Native American Religious Freedom Act was passed in ‘78.
Zyg Plater: And so the Cherokee religion was the basis of our case, the second time around.
Ariel Lavery: And for some reason, this was now the time when the press suddenly took notice. Zyg wrote about their press conference in his book.
(shimmering electronic music fades in)
Zyg Plater reading: A reporter in the front row reacts with a Yelp. It's Phil Shabecoff of The New York Times, a pioneer in covering environmental stories. “How can you say that?” he challenges? “How come it's only… “(fades out)
Voice actor: (fades in) …How come it's only now we hear all of this, about the farmer's land being taken for real estate development, about benefits getting so inflated about Cherokees? Why didn't you tell us this long ago? This is a story that the American people needed to hear!
Zyg Plater: God dammit, are you out of your mind? We've been trying to get your reporters to cover the story for almost three years. We distributed more than a dozen information packets at your press buildings. I personally put several of them in your inbox with photos and maps and explanations about how this dam’s an economic disaster, look, we handed you quotes. We handed you information from the God Committee decision. We set up press conferences with farmers and Cherokee tribal members, they came here to Washington. And none of you came. No one. And you blame us for not getting the story across?
(shimmering electronic music fades out)
Austin Carter: Wow. It’s interesting that the press would cover the constitutional argument so much more readily. I wonder if this was a sign of the times, or if it was just an easier story.
Ariel Lavery: Or maybe a bit of both?
Austin Carter: So as far as the first amendment argument, I know the graves were being destroyed, but how did the right to practice religion really figure into this?
Ariel Lavery: Well, the sacred sites of Chota and Tanasi were sacred not just because of their historical significance, but also because of their ecological uniqueness for the Cherokee. Medicine men had been gathering roots and herbs from the shores of the river. Bob had been treated with some of these medicines.
Bob Blankenship: I didn't know nothing about the medicine other than when I played Indian stick ball, he treated us with medicine. And he took us to the river before the game, and after the game, they’d feed you some darn terrible tasting stuff. I think it was that there root that grows along the river.
Austin Carter: Oh, ok. So if the sites where the medicine men got their medicine were flooded they wouldn’t be able to practice their religion anymore.
Ariel Lavery: Exactly.
(thoughtful acoustic music fades in)
Zyg Plater: But the Cherokees had also tried back in the early 60s.
Ariel Lavery: They had reached out to Justice Douglas which is why he came down to float the river and write the article back in ‘65.
Zyg Plater: And the IRS had had audits and gone and audited the Cherokee tribe. And they backed away, they were scared. I talked with a number of Cherokee, there were the old traditionals, who really cared. And the moderns, who often didn't know what was going on.
Bob Blankenship: All I knew was that one of our Indian medicine men had lived over there about five years, and that was Amoneeta Sequoyah.
Ariel Lavery: The kin to the original Sequoyah.
Zyg Plater: Ben Briggers was the attorney for the Cherokee at that time, and he was wonderful. He got Amoneeta and Lloyd Sequoia right away to say that they would do depositions. ‘’
(thoughtful acoustic music fades out)
Bob Blankenship: It showed me just how important it was as a part of our past to be preserved and protected. And I didn't know about all the different villages that were former villages that were put under the lake. But as we really got involved with the tribe and Friends of the Earth, we learned a whole lot that was presented to the court.
Ariel Lavery: Probably one of the greatest ironies of all this was that so many of the Cherokees who knew very little about their tribe’s history in the valley began to learn their own history as a result of this court case. Many Cherokees like Bob learned a lot about their history and religion when hearing Amoneeta’s deposition. This a voice actor reading some of it.
(thoughtful acoustic music fades in)
Voice actor reading Amoneeta’s deposition: I am Amoneeta Seqouyah. I am now 78 years old.
I am a full blooded Cherokee Indian. My great great great grandfather was Sequoyah, the Cherokee who invented writing for our people. I am a Cherokee Medicine Man as my father was a medicine man and my grandfather was a medicine man. I have gone to the Valley of the Cherokee on the Little Tennessee River all of my life. I lived in Chota for six years from 1945 until 1950. I still go back to Chota and to the River for my medicine. I usually go back three or four times a year to get medicine.
It is important that the medicine be gathered by a medicine man if it is to work a cure for the sick person. If these lands are flooded the medicine that comes from Chota will be ended because the strength and spiritual power of the Cherokee will be destroyed. I cannot live without practicing medicine because it is what I live for.
When a person dies and is put into the ground, his knowledge and beliefs are taken into the ground with him. If this land is flooded and these sacred places are destroyed, the knowledge and beliefs of my people who are in the ground will be destroyed.
If a body is dug up and taken out of the ground, this destroys what that person has taught us
All that a person knows has gone into the sacred ground where the body is buried.
That is what gives the land its strength.
Scene 5: River Day
Zyg Plater: As we were planning the Cherokee suit, we were thinking about how we would maintain morale, because it was looking so dark.
Ariel Lavery: Zyg was trying to keep the farmers’ spirits up.
Zyg Plater: I told them that there was virtually zero chance that Taylor was going to give an injunction. So we knew that TVA would have a go-ahead. And we could run to the circuit and try to get an injunction again. But it would take months and months.
Ariel Lavery: So Zyg, the bleeding-heart environmentalist, thought up an event idea that, to me, seems like a last hurrah for the river. He asked Bob to bring the Cherokees.
Zyg Plater: I told him that we're going to do a River Day. Could he please bring as many of the people from Cherokee as possible. And there were a lot of Cherokee there.
Bob Blankenship: And much of us from the tribe, went over there. And it was to be held at Chota site.
Ariel Lavery: Alfred and Carolyn attended.
Carolyn Ritchey: And so that day was full of singing. The lawyers were there. Zyg was there anybody that had fought it. That was the last public gathering of a big group of people. It’s the first time I’d ever been to Chota.
Zyg Plater: I drove down with a number of students from Michigan, who had helped on the brief, who were very, very deep into both the importance of the case, the merits of the case and the law of the case. We arrived, I think, late afternoon. (slow acoustic guitar and bird calls fade in) And as I recall, we didn't have tents. We just slept in sleeping bags out in the meadow. There was do on us in the night time. But it was really beautiful. I remember getting up in the morning before sunrise. And I went down to the river and was just standing there. And there was fog laying on the ri… do you know how, when there’s fog, sound travel a long distance? So I heard this splash and Yulululula, a yulalation. And I said to my… what’s that? Oh that’s a Cherokee going to water. And I heard it again, Yululululu… splash.
Carolyn Ritchey: It was October the 20th. Beautiful day, 1979.
Zyg Plater: and going to water in the morning, what was a ritual. And that really was a perfect way to start the day.
(slow acoustic guitar fades out)
Bob Blankenship: And as we came into town and came down the road we started seeing effigies of Indians hanging in the trees and tarpaper and tacks all over the road, giving people flat tires.
Zyg Plater: Somebody came in and said, I got two flat tires. Somebody put roofing nails out on the road. So we stopped people from driving in and we said, you know, park and walk. And then David Freeman, the chairman of TVA…
Ariel Lavery: Aubrey Wagner had retired the previous year.
Zyg Plater: …somehow we got a message to him. And he quickly sent out a truck with a big magnet that ran across the road and picked up all the nails. And he said, “We don't want our protesters to have flat tires.”
Ariel Lavery: So the Cherokees and other protesters were able to have safe passage to their sacred site one last time.
Carolyn Ritchey: And you could see that, you know, they were wrapped in their colorful blankets. And they had Amanita Sequoyah, who was kin to the real Sequoyah. And he did his magic to you know, put The Quietus on the whole thing. My eyes were wide that day. Alfred brought his boat, and Marianne and Sally and I can't swim a lick. But we got to float down a section of the river.
Zyg Plater: And then the flatbed truck arrived. And the band. And it was clear that the flatbed truck was going to be where everything happened because we would be up high and everybody in the crowd could see us and we were pretty sure since we… cars that started coming early in the morning that there was going to be a large group. It was rousing. We had a lot of fight in us. The Cherokee are giving us one more bite in that rotten apple. Alfred spoke beautifully.
Carolyn Ritchey: It was just a day to be together and and celebrate the river. And to hope that the Cherokee could do what we couldn’t.
Zyg Plater: I don't think we started until like, noon or one o'clock. But by that time, we needed something because people were just milling around. And so when the band starts playing…
Carolyn Ritchey: Gary Breedlove and friends, I think they're the ones that came up with the song…
Zyg Plater: and they teach the crowd to sing a damn the TVA and save the little T.
(sound of guitar music fades in)
Gary Breedlove and Friends singing:
The Little Tennessee flows in my dreams.
When I was young it was just a mountain stream.
Where the Cherokee lived and roamed across the land.
Now all they want to do is build another dam.
I say damn the TVA, and save the Little T.
Why can’t they see what that river means to me?
(studio recording fades out and live audio from River Day fades in)
Gary Breedlove and Friends singing: … does nobody care except the Cherokee. Damn the TVA and save the Little T.
Sam Ford (recording of news story): Today the Cherokee joined other opponents of the dam including environmentalists and farmers in a rally to stop Tellico.
Ariel Lavery: This time CBS was there.
Zyg Plater: And then this guy from the ATF, he came to me on the flatbed and I saw him. He had a badge on and I thought “No no, this is legal.” And he said “No it's not legal because there we've had a bomb threat. You have to clear the field.” I went to the mic “We've been told by the Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents that there's been a bomb threat and they want us to clear the field. Does anyone want to leave the field?” There was “No!” Right?
Carolyn Ritchey: So when the bomb threat went off, everybody's went on about their business. Nothing was gonna stand in our way of having a good time that day.
(fade out “Damn the TVA song)
Carolyn Ritchey: It was a good day but it was also a sad day because on the way home it was like you know, gosh, look what's gonna be lost. Another opportunity to see what's lost.
Scene 6: The Cherokees Lose, The River Dies
Ariel Lavery: A few weeks after River Day the Cherokee case was in Judge Taylor’s court.
Zyg Plater: And we were pretty sure that Taylor would say no. He issued an opinion saying, I dismiss this case, because you cannot have religious rights unless you own the land you're standing on, which is an outrageous... And it went up to the circuit…
Ariel Lavery: We’ve seen this pattern before.
Zyg Plater: …and the circuit basically said, that is not a valid legal argument. But then they invented this idea of centrality, that there was no evidence that the Little Tennessee River Valley was central to the Cherokee religion.
Austin Carter: Really? What about everything Amoneeta said?
Zyg Plater: When you say Chota was the Jerusalem of the Cherokees, you're saying that's the center of Cherokee religion. (foreboding music fades in) Amoneeta used to say, if this river is ever dammed it will be the death of the Cherokee religion.
Ariel Lavery: And even more…
Zyg Plater: Amoneeta Sequoia and Lloyd Sequoia. They said, We're going to be dead within a year if you destroy the heart of the Cherokee road, and they both were dead within 14 months.
(foreboding music fades out)
Ariel Lavery: After River Day, while the Cherokee case was going through the courts, the Ritchey family came face-to-face with their fate.
Carolyn Ritchey: November 11, 1979, on a Sunday, it was Veterans Day. And daddy was a U.S. Naval veteran, he had served in the South Pacific.
Ariel Lavery: Carolyn has written a book about growing up in the midst of losing her family’s farm. This is a bit from a draft.
(sad violin music starts)
Carolyn Ritchey: And now on this Veterans Day, he was being booted from the land he had so carefully and diligently farmed and nurtured. I had a difficult time (Carolyn starts to cry) absorbing this finality for the whole thing was a downright and dirty crying shame, and it was a disgrace. Sunday was the last night all six of us slept in our own beds, and the only home we’d ever known. At age 24 I struggled to cope with the reality of leaving not only the security of my home, but the farmland I loved so dearly. (Carolyn cries and can’t continue). I’m sorry.
Ariel Lavery: Carolyn wrote about the day her mother witnessed the demolition of their home and the closing of the gates.
Carolyn Ritchey: And in the area below the orchard, a massive hole was carved out of the ground and the mangled remains of our wooden structures were pushed, shoved and packed into that grave that would cradle the last existing evidence of any life at all… Our house was the last to be demolished in the 38,000-acre project… Thursday, mid-morning November 29, 1979. Quietly with no formal announcement or warning to anyone, least of all the Cherokee. TVA moved forward with their long planned procedures to dam the Little T. It didn't take long before acetylene torches cut the cable on the sixth and last 7-ton gate. The shameful deed was done by 11:23 am.
Ariel Lavery: That morning, November 29, 1979, the Little Tennessee River slowly met its death.
Carolyn Ritchey: Wouldn’t you know it, Aubrey Wagner had a front-row seat and he watched the crane slap that last couple of gates into position in TVA’s last dam. Rising three fourths of a foot per hour, the river was eight and a half feet out of its banks by midnight and come Saturday night would be flowing over the spillways, covering the crops still waiting for harvest. In the span of only 19 days, we'd been evicted from the farm, our house had been bulldozed, buried in a hole and now we were watching the Little T vanish day by day, choking under its own backwater… The community we loved and knew so well was being erased from the map… We spent as much time as we could with the dying river in the community before it completely disappeared from sight…We grieved over the destruction of so much. We were sickened by the vast archaeological loss along with the fact that our community with its colorful characters were now wiped out from the face of the earth. Future generations would never know the beauty of a full moon’s reflection as it danced on the flowing waters of the Little Tennessee River. .. It was hard to stand by and watch but we seemed compelled to stay with our friend to the very bitter end.
(sad violin music fades out slowly)
Ariel Lavery: Perhaps one of the most tragic aspects of this story is that at this point, finally, now, the news media was taking note of what was happening. Two years after the dam’s completion CBS ran a four minute segment about the individuals who had lost their homes. Jean Ritchey and Nellie McCall were interviewed and featured.
Dan Rather: …but as Bernard Goldberg reports. It looks as though the only casualties of Teleco are human beings.
Bernard Goldberg: It's been nearly two years since Nellie McCall was forced to move from her home. Nearly two years since the wood frame house she lived in since the Depression was destroyed by the Tennessee Valley Authority to make way for its steel and concrete Teleco dam project. Most of Nellie McCall's neighbors sold out to the TVA without much of a fuss, but a few held out bitter that they had to leave against their will.
Burl Moser: It’s a hell of a country ain’t it. (car engine starting)
Bernard Goldberg: The Teleco Dam and Lake were built on a foundation of dirt rock, and despite appearances, more than a little bitterness, which is as strong today as it was in the fall of 1979.
Nellie McCall: What would be any different or what Russia does and what they do? Not any different? …If somebody comes in burns your home burn your furniture? They did. And I was 75 years old and had no place to go. What would you do?
Ariel Lavery: In the news footage Nellie’s white hair is curled, framing her face and her thick frame glasses and she is wearing a blue dress with white polka dots.
Ariel Lavery: What makes this news segment different from other national coverage I’ve seen is they finally challenged the economics.
Bernard Goldberg: Why is the controversy still continuing? Because the TVA said it was bulldozing homes and barns and farmland to create not only the dam and lake, but also a visionary model community around the lake complete with new homes, modern industry, and high paying badly needed jobs. So why the controversy? Because today, nearly two years later, there is no model community, no new homes, no new industry, no new jobs…Two years ago Jean Ritchey lived here. Today the house is gone, replaced by weeds. Jean Ritchey had a 119-acre farm. Only three of those acres were flooded for the lake. The rest of the land was to be part of the model community that, today, still doesn’t exist.
Jean Ritchey: When we go back there, it’s just like going home… We knew every inch of that land. Children were born and grew up there… I think that they’ll sell it for a lot more than they gave us for it. And we could be living right there, just like we always were, farming.
Bernard Goldberg: To the TVA this is not just a lake. This is progress, plain and simple. To some of the people who used to live here it’s not so plain, not so simple.
Nellie McCall: I’ll be angry as long as I live.
Bernard Goldberg: Bernard Goldberg, CBS news. Loudoun County, Tennessee.
Dan Rather: That’s our report for this Tuesday. Dan Rather, CBS News, New York. Goodnight.
Conclusion
Austin Carter: And that’s...it. It seems to end on a really sad note. It was great that the Cherokees learned so much about their history and that, as we know, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is there and the Cherokees have some kind of representation, but there are so many loose ends, Ariel! This can’t be the end!
Ariel Lavery: Ok. You’re right. I know. (fade in driving string music) There are a lot of unanswered questions like, “What happened to the fish? and “Where is everyone today?” and “How does the TVA answer for this folly in their own history?” And I will do my best to address all of it in our next and last episode of The Story of Tanasi.
Credits
You can find images of river day, Bob, Gene and other people and places we talked about on our website at middleofeverywherepod.org or on Instagram and Facebook at @middleofeverywherepod @middleofeverywherepod and Twitter at @rural_stories. If you want to learn some great behind the scenes stuff from this episode, sign up for our newsletter. You’ll see extra images, read side stories, and get to know more crazy details. This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me, Ariel Lavery, with editorial help from my co-host, Austin Carter. Our editor is Naomi Starobin. Thank you to Elijah Borwick and Zacherie Lamb for their excellent voice acting, and of course Zyg Plater for playing himself. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky. Other scoring was from APM music. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.
(driving string music fades out)