On October 2-6, 2000, the Shepherd College Department of English will host Marilou Awiakta as its Writer-in-Residence and as the recipient of the Appalachian Heritage Writer's Award. Awiakta is an award winning poet, novelist, and essayist, whose work has been featured in Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within, and Ms. Magazine, Southern Exposure, Southern Style, and A Southern Appalachian Reader. Awiakta is author of Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet (1978), Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery (1983), and the critically acclaimed Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1996). She is also recipient of the Distinguished Tennessee Writer Award (1989) and the award for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature (1991). Awiakta's reading of Selu earned a Grammy nomination in 1996 and the book was given the distinction of becoming a Quality Paperback Book Club selection in 1994.

Awiakta's prose and poetry are a composite of three traditions: Cherokee, Appalachian, and technological. Growing up in the nuclear shadow of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, made the author acutely aware of both the hope and the hazard of science and technology, yet Awiakta has found in atomic technology a metaphor for a central idea of her writing: the interconnectedness and balance of all living things on Earth. "Nuclear science," she posits, "reveals how this balance operates in the invisible dimension, the heart of nature. On a subatomic level, the world is image and shadow, not solid mass. It's constantly moving, full of light" (Interviewing Appalachia 228).

Awiakta draws a parallel between science and the Native American concept of spirit in this way: Science is telling us that "everything is interconnected. One imagistic language talking to another, saying compatible things. What the Native Americans refer to as 'spirit,' the scientists call 'energy.' It's on that deep level, at the very source of energy or spirit$the mystery$that these two world views meet. A crucial difference is that the Native American concept includes the sacred, and the scientific does not" (Interviewing Appalachia 228).

Weaving the nuclear metaphor with her Native American heritage, Awiakta writes that the "whole forest is really one huge network of roots . . . a living organism." She explains, "Although trees, plants, grasses seem to be separate individual living things, in fact they are one sensate entity. The forest is a microcosm of the physical world. And also of the world underneath the tangible surface, where the atom resides, where the mountain and the atom meet, where the ancient and contemporary meet, where on the deepest levels we are all one, where what happens to one will happen by chain reaction to all. . . . The Creator put this law at the center of the universe. American Indians call it 'the Sacred Circle'" (Interviewing Appalachia 228).

Awiakta's Appalachian roots are Celtic [Scotch-Irish] as well as Cherokee, and she writes of the connection between these two identities. In Selu, she explains the relationship between the two seemingly disparate cultures: "From first contact centuries ago the Celt and the Cherokee got on well together because of what they shared: devotion to family; love of the land; reverence for the Creator and the natural law; the egalitarian relationship between men and women; the sense of fierce independence and outrage at foreign invasions . . . [and] the love of ceremony and symbol. All of these combine in a quality of soul that relies on the inner life of the spirit to survive" (299).

In "An Indian Walks in Me," Awiakta suggests how the two worlds of her mountain heritage Celtic and Cherokee have shaped her as an artist:
 

An Indian walks in me. She steps so firmly in my mind that when I stand against the pine I know we share the inner light  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I listened Long before I learned  the universal turn of atoms, I heard the Spirit's song that binds us  all as one. (1-4, 17-21)

 

Awiakta believes that her task as a writer is to create harmony and healing, by pointing out the connections that we all have with the world around us and with each other. "Writing," she says, is a matter of "listening" and listening "means using all the senses to commune with the cycle of sound" at the core of the Universe. "Mountain speech [the Appalachian dialect]," she writes, "carries the sound of the land where it's spoken," and that sound has shaped Awiakta as an artist. The function of the artist is to "weave" or translate what she hears into print, "translating from the oral to the written form" ("Sound" 43). Weaving this idea into a poem found in her essay "Sound," Awiakta writes:
 

Like most mountain people, I'm a natural-born listener and sounder Sound has shaped me: mountains sending thoughts elders telling stories memory running in my blood or crying out from ground  where blood was spilled. Everything I see/smell/hear/taste/feel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  I translate to words on the page, sheet music of the song.

A central idea that comes to her keen artist's ear as she "listens" is reverence for the land that sustains us. She particularly sees a distinction in the Western or European way of envisioning the land and the Native American way. Europeans came to America and saw the landscape in terms of natural wealth and how it could be utilized to create personal economic wealth, with ownership of the land tied to its "efficient" use (in the Western sense); the term "manifest destiny" became the driving force behind the transformation of the American landscape and many of the resulting environmental disasters that have visited us in the past century. Native Americans, on the other hand, looked at Earth less in terms of ownership than as a sheltering Mother, personified for Awiakta in Selu or the Corn-Mother. Awiakta writes: "Where the Western dynamic is detachment, the Native American dynamic is connection" (Selu 164). Detachment, turning the land (or people) into "other," will result in a cacophony of woes, as explained in "When Earth Becomes an It":
 

When the people call Earth "Mother," they take with love and with love give back so that all may live. When the people call Earth "it," they use her consume her strength. Then the people die.

Environmental pollution, child and spousal abuse, and a host of modern-day maladies have their antecedents in the Western or patriarchal habit of objectification and domination. Awiakta explains: "Then came the Europeans with their dominator system. They had the concept of woman as inferior, unclean, . . . unintelligent, unstable$and sinful, unless she was a 'virgin.' A schizophrenic concept, totally out of harmony with nature. They believed woman should be dominated and controlled, like the earth. They had the same attitude toward indigenous peoples and men without property. The Europeans followed laws of property" (Interviewing Appalachia 225). The result for America was a "hierarchical" model, a stratified social and political system based on ownership of property, and strict class/gender distinctions.

As Awiakta reaches for solutions, she returns to the idea of the Universal Web or interconnection of all things, a balance that has historically been omitted from the patriarchal system Europeans brought to America. Although she doesn't specifically call herself a "feminist," Awiakta is convinced that the "womanly" has not been utilized and our European social system has thus become off-balanced, an idea reminiscent of Alice Walker's "womanist" philosophy. Looking toward the Cherokee model, she writes: "The Womanly is strength, nurture, patience, wisdom--a force of nature. . . . The Womanly is life force, like the atom and like Mother Earth herself. The Manly is different but equal . . . . In American Indian tradition, woman embodies continuance; man embodies change and the transitory. Together they make a whole" (Interviewing Appalachia 224).

The patriarchal model (one-sided and thus distorted), for Awiakta, is fraught with a plethora of pitfalls. While she does not advocate a matriarchal system (Cherokee family and social traditions were, in fact, traced through the mother's lineage, with children receiving the mother's family surname and husbands joining and living with a wife's family), it is a "partnership" model that Awiakta finds in the Cherokee traditions . . . and that partnership or balance of the masculine and feminine, she believes, will revitalize social, governmental, and industrial segments of society.

For Awiakta, these ideas require a new mode of story-telling, "a new model inclusive of other cultural values, in life as well as in literature." The linear narrative mode, as well as hierarchical genres and styles associated with the patriarchal model, does not suffice. Awiakta writes: "Usually, the Western story (especially if a white male writes it) has organic unity with the thought construct from which it arises . . . . The elements of the story can be neatly arranged. It is written either in prose or (rarely) poetry. It has a category: novel, short story, myth, fable, folklore or some such. The structure of the story separates easily into components" (Selu 164-65). Awiakta prefers to weave together the genres and skew the linear story line, her cadences and repetitions as rich as the chants of the ceremonial song. Thus the structure of a book such as Selu will appear on first reading to break with accepted Western tradition of narration. Its blending of story-legend, poetry, and essay formats is both different and rewarding, a kind of Native American Walden and sure to give the reader much food for thought.

For more information call the Department of English and Modern Languages (304.876.5207), the Shepherd College PASS office (304.876.5113). You may also visit any of the following pages:

Writer-in-Residence Schedule of Events
The Appalachian Heritage Festival Home Page
The Shepherd College English Home Page
The Shepherd College Writer-in-Residence Program
The West Virginia Humanities Council Home Page