This post marks our first podcast episode for the new UNG Press Play Podcast, currently hosted exclusively on Spotify. Please enjoy the transcript and recorded options for this episode, and don’t forget to let us know what you think of this conversation down in the comments!
Between History and Heart Transcript
Editor’s Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ariana Adams (host): Hello everyone, and welcome to the Press Play Podcast, a new University of North Georgia Press production for the inquisitive, bold, and bookish. I’m your host, Ariana Adams, an incredibly excited fellow listener for today’s episode. We’re sitting down with author Jim Barnes, who has produced the new book, Cherokee History and the Spirit Family. Among his many accomplishments, Jim is a lawyer, having received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan in 1970 and he is the founder of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, which brings together environmental organizations around the world to advocate for the production of Antarctica. Jim is an author, advocate, Cherokee historian, Spirit family descendant, and our very special guest for today’s episode. Welcome, Jim! Thank you for taking the time to be with us today.
Jim Barnes (guest): I’m very excited to be sitting down. So nice to be here with you. Thank you.
Ariana: Okay, so I’d like for us to get started today with a little bit of an explanation about your journey. What has it been like moving from being a lawyer to an advocate and to an author? What has that process looked like for you?
Jim: Well, in a way, it’s been a seamless process, because I became really interested in writing this book. I didn’t know what the book would actually look like, but writing a book about my family’s history in the context of Cherokee history a long, long time ago, and in the 1990s I went to Tahlequah, the headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, and I used to go to Tahlequah often when I was a boy, because my grandmother lived there. And I went to the Cherokee Nation and asked, “Do you have any pictures of my great, great grandmother?” And in those days, the Cherokee Nation Library was not very well organized, and there were just lots of things lying around. And one of the women there said, “I think we’ve got a picture of her,” and she pulled down a big stack of photographs. They weren’t filed or anything. I knew what she looked like from family photographs and stuff, and among the pile on top of this bookcase was a large like 11 x 14″ size, black and white picture of my great, great grandmother. And they said, “Do you want that? Because we have several others.” I said, “please.” So they roll it up, I took it home, etc., and that picture hung over my desk wherever I lived and worked from then until now, basically. And so I started just asking all my relatives, “what do you have in the way of information?” Well, turns out that a lot of my relatives are kind of pack rats, and they had rather a lot of information. And my father, who died in 2007, wanted me to, before he died, write a short version of the family’s history, and so I had plenty of information to write a 25 page document for him and the family before he died. And he said, “I really hope you’ll continue with this.” And I said, “Well, I hope I’ll have time to do it someday.” Fast forward–I retired from my job as executive director of the Antarctic coalition in 2014, and I had a lot more time. And I thought, “well, I’m going to really try to gather all the rest of the stuff I need to write this book,” and I made a trip in 2015 to northern Georgia for a couple of weeks, and found an awful lot of information at various museums, and I was able to find the area along the Etowah River where they actually lived in 1838 when they were driven, like all the Cherokees, West and so forth. And so I started, you know, putting chapters together, and wrote an outline the way people do. And then COVID came, and I couldn’t do anything for about a year, and I just sat up in my desk in my library and I wrote the first serious drafts of the book. So it’s been a long journey, basically. But there’s not a kind of abrupt change after work, except that I finally had enough time to finish.
Ariana: So how long, would you say, from that beginning conception of the 25 page synopsis of family history was it to putting together the full book? How long would you say that process was, in total?
Jim: Well, so that was about 12 or 13 years.
Ariana: That’s amazing. The book really is such an accomplishment. It’s so amazingly thorough, and one of the things that I appreciated the most about it is how in depth it goes with Cherokee history, and how comprehensive it is in taking readers through the various treaties, the various meetings, the various diplomatic missions, and really breaking them down in a way that feels very approachable and digestible. Sometimes, I think maybe for a lay person or someone who doesn’t have a law background, some of those elements can almost feel a bit too daunting to be able to fully wrap my mind around, anyway. So I really, really appreciated how intentional you were and how carefully you took readers through those processes. It really made everything very approachable and so clear.
Jim: Well, thank you. That was my hope, and thank you very much for that.
Ariana: So based on some of that, there is so much documentation in the book–the treaties, the property audits, territory maps, original photographs–how did you go about collecting all of that information, and was there a system you used to sort of keep it all organized and synthesize it the way that you did?
Jim: Well, I’m a pretty organized person, the way I’ve run my life. And if you go sideways briefly, if you’re trying to run a global coalition of environmental organizations for 30 some odd years, and you’re following what governments do or don’t do or promise to do, et cetera, about 10% of the Earth, which is Antarctica and the ocean around it, you have to be very organized. And so I found that my normal filing methods, if you will, work really quite well, and I had a good outline. And I think it–well, for me, at least, I couldn’t write anything. I’ve written a lot of academic articles, as well as a book called, Let’s Save Antarctica in 1983 I think it was. And for anything I’ve ever written, I make an outline, and it’s not that I’m not going to stick to the outline totally, but without the outline, I don’t have the guideposts that I’m looking for. And so from the beginning I started organizing maps, folders of maps, and then they’re there. In that case, they were chronological. I had folders of people, whether they’re Cherokee people or politicians or whoever they were, and I just kept everything in more or less good shape so that I could say, “okay, this chapter here, I need the picture of Mr. Ridge,” you know. And I have this beautiful painting of The Ridge. It was a famous Cherokee figure. And so it was pretty easy to pull it all together. The complicated part, really, and your editor has helped me a lot with this, is connecting things, connecting chapters in the correct way, connecting even inside chapters and so forth, because there is a lot of information, and one of my fears was that there was too much information, but I think it finally worked out to be kind of a balance, and I wanted it to be different from any other book that I’d seen about Cherokee history, because I wanted maps and photographs and etchings and so forth to break up the dense words and to show people. I’m a big map person. I like to think, “well, where is this place we’re talking about,” you know? And that’s how it worked.
Ariana: Yeah, I really appreciate that as well. I’m a very visual person, so having maps and different visual touchstones, especially in a history as comprehensive as what you put together is so helpful, because territory lines changed as well. So it can be somewhat of a challenge, personally, to try and visualize it in my head and go, “okay, so this is where certain territorial lines were at the beginning, and now we’ve moved into a different period of history. This is how they’ve changed again, but exactly what does that mean as far as scale?” So having visual touchstones throughout the book is so helpful to be able to look at that and go, “oh, wow. Like, that’s–this is really the impact of these, this different legislation and everything that happened,” so I really enjoyed that.
Jim: That’s great, I’m so glad.
Ariana: So with the history and talking about how comprehensive it is, and how much information there is in the book, and I completely understand your fear of going, “is there too much information?” Because there’s just so much to cover. It’s such a multi-faceted history. There are so many different things that happened all at once, so I can definitely understand wanting to strike the balance between honoring everything that happened, but also maybe not wanting to overwhelm readers at the same time, or feel like there is so much. Maybe the overall idea of what’s going on is kind of getting lost in translation with everything else. But with this particular story, you do sort of have two interwoven story lines going on at the same time, the big picture and what’s going on more on the political and the social levels, but then also, what’s going on with the Spirit family too, and what are these wider issues, the type of impacts that they’re having on local families and communities? So why choose to specifically focus on the 1826 to 1910 period for all of this?
Jim: Yeah, well, it’s a simple thing. My great great grandmother, Annie Spirit, was born in 1826 in the Cherokee Nation, here in northern Georgia along the Etowah River, and she died in 1910. So in 1826 the Cherokee Nation seemed to be soaring. It seemed to be really coming into its own as an independent, sovereign Indian nation in the United States of America. And they had signed a series of treaties over a period of 50–60, years with first England and then the United States. And it looked like their future was really going to be quite good and quite secure, and as many people will know, one of their great heroes, Sequoia, had figured out a way to capture their entire language with a 76 syllable–it’s not an alphabet. They called it a syllabary, because you take every basic sound in Cherokee, and you can write the symbols for it, and it’s easy to learn. I haven’t quite learned it yet, but I’m maybe too old for it now, but I’m working on it. At any rate, the Cherokee Nation became literate very quickly, and they had a weekly newspaper in English and Cherokee, and they had a school system, and they had an elected government, and they were trying to model themselves in a way after the United States. They had a Supreme Court, they had a legislature. They had elected chiefs every four years. And so they were on this upward curve, you could say, and very hopeful. And then Andrew Jackson was elected president, and Andrew Jackson really didn’t like Indians, and he wasn’t alone. Many, many politicians in that era thought that all the land should be theirs and that all the Indians should go somewhere else, and think what a radical idea that would be, because these are sovereign Indian nations. They designed these treaties saying, “in perpetuity.” It’s a big word. “In perpetuity, this event will be yours,” you know. And suddenly, by 1830 when Jackson got really serious about moving Indians, not just Cherokees, all the Indians in the Southeast–West, he brought forward legislation called the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and eventually it was passed, only by a vote or two, but eventually it was passed. So that started the kind of downward cycle. I’m calling it the first epoch. And that led to the Trail of Tears, which everybody’s familiar with. And there are many trails of tears, almost all Indians in the southeast and east, northeast, whatever, and eventually in the west, were driven off their lands, and many of them parked in what’s now Oklahoma. And so she (Annie Spirit) was only 11 years old, I think, when they came on the Trail of Tears and they got to what’s now Oklahoma, and nobody was much living there. And it was kind of wild and hard. It was hard. So they had to be pioneers again. They had to build farms, they had to make roads, they had to learn this new land that they knew nothing about, etc. And they did really well. And by 1852 I think or three, they had taken their educational system to a new height and started this really advanced set of schools called the Male and Female Seminaries. And they were on an upward curve, and then the Civil War happened, and they were divided, like the rest of the nation was, but they came through that, survived that, and then began to build again, and were soaring upward and doing really well again. They had a public school system the equal of anything in the United States at the time. They had an orphans’ home. They took care of their other people and the land. And there was a lot of land, still not as much as they had here, but they had plenty of land for everybody to have a farm. If you wanted a big farm, you could have a big farm, little farm, fine, you know, whatever. And then in the 1890s the politicians in Washington, once again, thought, “ah, we’d really like to have that land after all, why did we give so much of it away?” Now, why did that happen? Because of oil and, you know, the usual things. And so my grandmother, who was a fierce fighter, you could say, for Cherokee sovereignty and for education and all that, in her waning years she had to witness the takeover of the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty. They lost by 1909. That period, they lost control of their schools, their government, their newspaper was closed, everything, and then she died in 1910. So for me, they’re kind of like bookends on a long stretch of history that was hopeful and then crashed, and then hopeful, and then not quite crashed in the Civil War. And then hopeful, really hopeful. And then, once again, in spite of all the treaties, they lost their sovereignty. So that’s why I chose those periods.
Ariana: And when you talk about removal and everyone having to pick up and leave and build something new, we’re not just talking about, you know, maybe what people would kind of visualize today as homes with a little bit of land or different things like that. We’re also talking about businesses. We’re talking about whole functioning mills and farms and ferries and all of these different things. So having to–and not just because things have been destroyed, but because they’ve been taken out from under, and so having to witness that and then move to this new area that’s essentially kind of a clean slate. It’s a–it’s a wilderness, basically, right? And having to completely start over. There are different layers of meaning behind the Trail of Tears too, because there’s this, there’s this multi-layered grief process that’s also going on. And I really appreciate that the book touches on that, and it really does go into, “here are the lists of things that family members left behind, that they were forced to leave behind, that were taken in lotteries,” and, you know, all of these different things. And so it really does bring it into a stark reality of, you know, this isn’t just some broad historical concept or situation that happened. These were families, these were communities. This was a whole people group forced to pick up and just completely relocate, and the reality of that, the human emotion and reaction to that, I think, really does echo through in the book.
Jim: I’m so glad it does. It needs to, so I’m very appreciative of that. Now again, that was one of my hopes that it could come through. And there’s so much to say, so you have to–what’s the right word, parse your words or something. At one point I think I went back, well before you got involved in this process, and I–I have told too much here, and I cut out 10% or something of the then book, my then manuscript, I went through something like 50 drafts before you ever saw the book, because telling enough and not too much. But there’s so many, so many stories and so many facts. But the list you mentioned–that’s really interesting. And that was one of the great finds for me, is to know that in 1836, 7, 8, and 1842 and so on in that period, the US government assigned clerks to go to every farm in the Cherokee Nation and record what they found there, the size of the houses, how many houses? The size of barns, how many horses? Did they have porcelain plates? Did they have silverware? Did they have a fiddle? And so forth. It’s all written down there, and then they were supposed to be compensated, and they weren’t. And then they get to Cherokee Nation West, let’s call it, and the wilderness. And by 1842 they had started to rebuild homes and farms and so forth, and they were upset that they had never been paid for all these things that they had lost. There are two levels to that. One is, did the Cherokee Nation ever get the $6 million they were promised for their old land? That’s a long and very difficult story. The answer basically was not for a long time. And then did the individuals get what they were promised? And the answer was no, and so they started filing these claims in 1842 again, and there was a bilingual clerk, and my family, like many, many others, dictated what it was that they had lost back here in Georgia. And it’s very moving to see all these itemized things and to see how well off–even a middle class Cherokee family had a lot of stuff. They had beautiful land. Look at the land around here. They had wonderful animals. They liked animals. They loved horses and stuff, you know. They had cattle. They had all kinds of pigs. They had apple trees, and what do we have around here today? A lot of apple trees and so forth, peach trees and all that, you know. So it’s very–as a researcher and a writer, it was personally very moving for me to see objectively all this stuff written down.
Ariana: Absolutely. Would you say, over the course of that pretty intensive research process, there were any additional discoveries that maybe took you by surprise, either about your family history or even just about Cherokee history during that time period?
Jim: Well, especially about my family. I had no idea, for example, that my family, which I knew from a lot of family sources, they were, you know, they were a pretty well-off family. They weren’t rich. They were what you’d call a middle class family, or upper middle class, maybe in Cherokee terms. And I learned that Annie Spirit’s grandfather had three slaves. That was a shock, and I found out that a couple of the other family members had two or three slaves, so they weren’t big slave holders. And they, I don’t think they were slaves in the same way that white people at the time had slaves, but they were still black men and women. And then I found some ways to research that and learned that most of them were really skilled. They were weavers, they were blacksmiths and so forth. They were housed, as far as I can tell. Well, they had similar houses to the Cherokees themselves. But still, it was a real shock to me to know that one of my ancestors had a couple of slaves. And I had a hard time at first thinking, “how am I going to write about this even?” But I found a way to do that, and that might have been the best, the biggest surprise, but maybe the second thing was just how, when I could see these lists, and can you see that in my, in my fourth great grandmother. She was a horse woman. She loved her horses. She had names for–she owned, like 18 horses, you know, and all that of course was lost. But anyway, it was real meaningful to see these details. And I had, without these records that I had, when I started researching, I had no idea that records like this existed, so that was really an illuminating point.
Ariana: So over the course of discovering these different points about family, and to a certain extent deepening some of those connections to past family members, would you say that creating the book has impacted you in any way, like have you come out of it with some different viewpoints, or maybe even feeling like you have a different relationship either with your family history or with Cherokee history?
Jim: Yes, at first it made me really angry. The more I learned about the intricate details of how close the decisions were in the US Congress and the fact that Andrew Jackson would not listen to the Supreme Court, and he didn’t, the Supreme Court ruled clearly in favor of the Cherokees, and he basically just blew it off. And he said, “do they have an army? How are they going to enforce this?” Etc., you know? And I found myself for about a year as I remember it, having kind of wild dreams, you know, all this stuff became really alive in my mind, and my wife would say, “you’re talking in your sleep about things,” you know. And today, I’m not nearly as angry as I was when I was in the depths of all this research. But it still really upsets me to think that our political system in those years couldn’t honor the Constitution of the United States, and that at the time that all this was happening, 1831, 32, 33, 34, etc., there were these huge debates going on in the US Senate and US Congress, and all the votes were very close. There were votes by one or two votes, you know, to go along with Jackson, even some of his staunchest friends, like Davy Crockett, who was a legislator from Tennessee, broke with Jackson, and I’ve got some of that stuff in the book too. And many, many religious people of the day were, not violently, but they were vehemently supportive of Cherokees and Creeks and Choctaws and so forth, and on the record in the hearings of the US Congress, the Senate and so forth, you can hear Daniel Webster speaking out forcefully and so forth, you know. And so I found it–I still find it troubling to think that we have a wonderful constitution in this country, and we have a political system that we want to be proud of. But every generation is faced with the same or similar dilemmas, and we’re faced with one now, in my opinion, you know. If people won’t accept judgments of the Supreme Court, you know, that’s a very difficult situation, at any rate. I’ve gone on too long about this stuff, but that’s it.
Ariana: No, that’s–those are fascinating viewpoints, and I completely agree with you. It’s really, I heard a quote that said, I can’t remember. I’m gonna have to go back and look and maybe put it in show notes or something. I don’t know quite who to attribute this to right now, but somebody said that history never repeats itself, but it always rhymes, and you can sort of feel that echo, I think, and with histories like this, I think one of the aspects that makes them so influential, so important, so valuable to us, is that we’re able to go back and have such thorough documentation of what happened, first of all, to get a real grasp of what happened, but also to essentially have a guide, a real record of the past from previous generations that says, “here, here are some of the triumphs that we had, but maybe here are some of the mistakes as well, and here are the consequences of those mistakes too,” that we’re still feeling that impact us all the way into today, and really be able to use those as both guides and cautionary tales too.
Jim: Exactly.
Ariana: So it’s, it’s so important, and I feel like this book, even though there are only so many stories. There’s only so much room. I really feel like it–there’s so much intention in it that, for me–I’m gonna kind of fan girl over it–but that’s really what I appreciated so much about the book, is the intention just is so clear. You’re so careful in how each chapter kind of feeds into the next and really takes people step by step through this period of time, from 1826 to 1910, and just in a positive way, very relentless in going, “this is what was agreed. This is what was promised. This is what happened. Happened, and then this is how people responded afterwards.” And there were positives and there were strengths, and how people responded in their weaknesses too. And really taking a full view of that whole period and going, “this is the reality of what happened. We’re not trying to sugar coat, this is what happened,” and just the integrity of that through the book, and the very careful intention of it was just such a pleasure to read through.
Jim: Well, thank you so much. That’s really nice to hear.
Ariana: So through impacts and everything that this book, I feel, has achieved. . . Looking back on it, and maybe even from the beginning too. Were you hoping that this book–what kind of goals were you hoping that it would achieve? How would it impact readers? What was the intent behind it?
Jim: Well, I have several intents. One was, most histories are just filled page after page after page of incidents and facts and so forth. And the people who are featured are the so-called, quote unquote, “important people.” And I thought it would be interesting to take my family, which I know quite a bit about, and was able to find out much more, which is like an ordinary family, and try to show what was happening, partly through what happened to them and what they did about it, and I always wanted to show the incredible resilience of the Cherokee people. And I think it’s really deeply admirable that in spite of all the adversities they suffered, and in spite of how they were lied to and cheated and so forth, they really didn’t ever give up, they had their own dream. And I wanted to convey that too, and I think I managed to do that pretty well. I don’t try to kid myself that I’m the last word on anything about Cherokee history. In fact, I couldn’t write the book if there hadn’t been so many wonderful historians at every time, going back to even the late 1700s and during the 1800s and I found writers that most people never, maybe never even heard of, you know, but they had deeply thought about things, or deeply observed things. And I wanted to extract some of that great stuff that they had done and give them full credit for it. But it was my intention to show how all this stuff happened and what through all the horrible changes and the good changes, what happened to the families and in my family, in that sense, the Spirit family is just like most other Cherokee families, but because it’s my family, I trust to focus on that. But it’s amazing, I think, and I hope people will come away thinking, “boy, these people never gave up, and they believed in each other. They believed in sound government. They really believed in democracy at a basic level. They really believed in education, and they, no matter how bad off they were economically, they always found the wherewithal to invest in their school systems, and that’s a wonderful legacy to lead.” I was just in Oklahoma last week, and I went to Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, where my grandmother lived, and the building, the main building for that university, is the old Female Seminary, and it’s a beautiful building. And when you walk in the entry, when you’re walking up the sidewalk, there’s a huge statue of Sequoia and the inventor of the syllabary. And then you walk into these doors, and a lot of my ancestors went through those doors, but so did many, many other people. And it’s this gorgeous building, you know. So it’s full of its own history, connecting the past to the present. And anyway, it’s so beautiful that it’s still here, that you can still walk through, and it’s still standing. Such a wonderful legacy to have.
Ariana: So we’re starting to wrap up our conversation a bit now, and I want to, before we close, ask if there’s anything we haven’t covered yet that you’d like to talk about. Any topics that you feel like we might have missed that you might want to share with people.
Jim: Well, just one thing, perhaps. When I was researching this book, I was always curious about the money, so to speak. Why didn’t the Cherokees ever get compensated for what they lost here in Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and so forth, when the treaties were so clear about it, and there were a lot of other things that happened along the way. Including once they were in the West, they had some formally Cherokee demarcated territories, because some Cherokees started moving west voluntarily as early as 1815, or something like that. These people were probably prescient. They probably thought, “this is not going to work out well for us.” They looked at the politicians already in Georgia and so forth, and they thought, “well, maybe we should create a new nation in the West,” so it was an active discussion. And so quite a few of the Cherokees, including one of my great, triple great grandfathers, came out here in 1818, and they created what you could call Cherokee Nation West before removal, and they had land in Arkansas. They had land in Kansas, right along the present Oklahoma-Kansas border, and some land in what’s now Oklahoma that they had staked out and they had traded it for some of their land in Alabama, particularly, that’s where a lot of this people came from, originally, Northeastern Alabama. Anyway, so there are a lot of pieces of land that somebody owed money for–the land back here, the animals and farm implements and houses and so forth–and some of these parcels in the West, in Kansas and Arkansas. And I never had heard what happened to this, the money. Why weren’t they paid? Well, what I found is a guy named Frank Bucha, who was a famous lawyer in his day, kept fighting for the Cherokees, even after the death, the tribal government was dissolved, and Oklahoma became a state, and Frank Bucha kept filing these lawsuits, and he won a series of lawsuits in the Supreme Court, and I think the largest one was for $10 million at the time. I don’t know how much $10 million in that time would be worth today, but it’d be a lot more than $10 million. And so he kept chipping away at these old claims, and he won case after case after case. And he finally moved to Washington, DC, so he could continue to work on his cases. He died, I think in the 1940s I can’t remember when exactly, so I tell that story quite briefly, but at the end of the book, what I call the last chapter, it’s called “End of the Dream,” because they’re losing everything, but then they’re still resilient. They’re still fighting, and they won eventually, and got money to invest in the Cherokee Nation. And so that’s a story not many people I think have ever heard of, really.
Ariana: Yeah, I really love that piece of the book. There’s this, in a really positive way, there’s this very defiant spirit in there of, “we’re going to remain hopeful, we’re going to rebuild, we’re not going to give up, we’re going to advocate for ourselves. We’re going to fight for what we’re owed,” and that piece is so inspiring to me, personally, to see how important the community aspect is in that, to have a group people who are willing to all come together, regardless of potentially varying political beliefs as well, and say, regardless of these, in some cases major or minor differences, “we are still a family. We are still this community, and we’re going to put these other things aside in order to fight for each other.” That’s such a moving piece of the book to me, and I love that so much. How highlighted that is the whole way through of, there are disagreements, and sometimes they’re violent disagreements. Not everyone makes it out of some of those disagreements. But at the same time, there is this overarching sentiment of, “we may not always get along, we may fight sometimes, we may not always agree, but at the end of the day, we’re always going to pull together for each other.”
Jim: Yeah, we’re a community. We’re Cherokees, and that’s it.
Ariana: Yeah, I absolutely love that. All right, so, Jim, where can people find you online and how can they continue to support your work?
Jim: Well, I have a website, and it’s called Cherokee history and the spirit family, all lowercase, .org. They can find me on Facebook, where, again, I have my own Facebook page, but a companion page to it with the same name is right there. And I publish a blog periodically. I’ve done two so far. I’m in the middle of doing several more on this trip, and I think they can find on your website, the University of North Georgia website, and a very nice section on the book, and that’s how they can find it. You can go to Amazon, you can go to Barnes and Noble, you can go, I think, to virtually any independent bookstore in the United States, and just type my name, James Barnes, and then start with Cherokee history, and it’ll pop right up, and the bookstore will order the book for you.
Ariana: Perfect, and we’ll include a link to your author site, and then also to the Cherokee History and the Spirit Family Facebook page in our show notes for everyone to find. All right, so now we’re gonna go for our rapid fire, final five, fill-in-the-blank questions. So we’re gonna go through these pretty quick, and answers will be one word to a couple of words long. I’ll give you a little leeway. You ready?
Jim: Yeah, all right.
Ariana: First question–the Cherokee Nation is. . .?
Jim: . . . still alive and vibrant. I think it’s the biggest Indian tribe in the United States.
Ariana: Love that. Two–family means. . .?
Jim: Family means everything to the Cherokees, along with education. Family and education.
Ariana: Absolutely. Number three–history is valuable because. . .?
Jim: History is valuable because we can learn from it, and if we don’t learn from it, as one person said, we’re condemned to repeat it. So it’s really important to learn history, to keep reading history.
Ariana: Absolutely, it always rhymes. Number four–I hope this book teaches. . .?
Jim: I hope this book teaches people to have hope in spite of every adversity life can throw at anyone. If you have hope and you don’t give up, it will probably work out much better than you imagine.
Ariana: That’s beautiful. Okay, number five–it starts with a blank, so–blank brings me joy.
Jim: Nature brings me joy, and nature brought the Cherokees everything to joy, happiness. They just loved nature, and they worshiped nature. In that sense, native peoples find the spirit in all of nature.
Ariana: All right, that’s our time for today’s podcast. Thank you so much for spending time with us today, Jim, and thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in with us. We’re so grateful to you for dedicating a piece of your day to learn, grow, and talk books with the press. Don’t forget to share your thoughts about today’s episode with us down in the comments, and please tag the UNG Press and Jim on social media to share which parts of the podcast resonated most with you. Thanks again for joining us and being a part of the Press Play community. We’re so thankful to each and every one of you for being here. Have a wonderful rest of the day, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thank you, Jim!
Jim: Thank you.
Ariana: This was so much fun!
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