Southern Appalachian Cultures: Their Pursuit for Prosperity and the Environmental Outturn

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in the United States and the most photographed area was the Appalachia region. Many of the photographs intentional or not, became a visual definition of the Appalachia region. The images have drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the war on poverty, but came to represent the entirety of the region. The point of the Looking at Appalachia project is to explore the diversity of Appalachia and to establish a visual counter point. (Home - Looking at Appalachia.) The three images I am going to analyze are challenge some of the stereotypes put on the Appalachia region. I believe my images challenge the stereotype that all Appalachian people do is work hard, go to church, and don’t have time for anything besides those two things.

I have been fortunate enough to travel, and see more than just Appalachia. With being able to travel comes the judgement from others when you tell them where you are from. When I was at cheer camp in high school, I got asked if I wore shoes. Comments like that use to belittle me and made me question my self-worth. The media has made the people of Appalachia out to be people of mountain dew mouth, unintelligent, poor background which is the furthest descriptions of what we really are.

For Europeans, the to be a member of a family you had to be related to the eldest male in the household. This was a total opposite to the Indian society. For example, in the Iroquois society, family membership was determined by the family of the female. At the head of each family was an elder woman, followed by her daughter, their husbands and children, and finally her unmarried granddaughters and grandsons. When one of the men married, he moved to the family of his wife. This was a very sharp contrast to the Europeans, whom had for centuries, been the top of their social hierarchy. In Europe, the women had a very relatively primitive, limited role in society. They were not allowed to attend or partake in political affairs, with very few exceptions. Now, on the other hand, in Indian society there was a council of chiefs, whom was all male, but they were appointed by an elder women. Also, during their deliberation over issues, the males made the final decision, but would be expelled from the council, if they didn?t conclude to the same decision that the elder woman came to. The women's main job in Indian society, was being in charge of cultivation of, harvest of, and distribution of food. When the men left to go hunting, women were left to run society. The Europeans simply believed that the males were far superior to the family, which is why women could not have jobs, and were left to

Being known as the region synonymous with destitution and home to some of the pauperized counties in the country, Appalachia has always been hidden from or sort of isolated from the rest of the world because of their geographic location. The people of Appalachia are often seen as unintelligent and less civilized than other Americans as they were less developed and not exposed to the commercial world. Because of

Appalachia is often portrayed as an arrested frontier, a geographically isolated subculture, and reservoir of culturally homogenous. Appalachians are pictured as proud, fiercely independent, and god-fearing southerners. But in all reality they are portrayed as fighting and feuding, barefooted and backward, ignorant degenerates, downtrodden by centuries of isolation, inbreeding, and poverty. So how was Appalachia discovered? Well Appalachia was prompted in the mid 1870s by local color writers such as Mary Murfee and John Fox Jr. who explored in fiction and travel sketches such mountain themes as conflicting Civil War loyalties, moon shining, and feuding. (Billings)

Other than being white, there is another major reason generalized personas arise specifically for Appalachia, and that is isolation. Unlike most ethnic and cultural groups, Appalachians, are from and in Appalachia and only Appalachia. Of course, hillbilly is thrown around not always in direct description of the group, but the persona associated with term is completely rooted in

One famous Indian tribe is the Cherokee. The Cherokee are original residents of the American southwest region, but now they occupy most of Oklahoma.There are three recognized Cherokee tribes. Most Cherokee people speak English today, but many still speak the Cherokee language. Children had jobs to do after school just like men and women had their own jobs. Many Cherokee Indians died when president Andrew Jackson forced them to leave their homes in Georgia. In the following essay I will be talking about the Cherokee life before,during,and after the Westward Expansion.

The collection consists of 15,000 pages of original historical material documenting the land, peoples, exploration, and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The collection is drawn from the holdings of the University of Chicago Library and the Filson Historical Society of Louisville, Kentucky.

The multidimensional expression “hillbilly” carries different cultural significances throughout the book Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. First, Vance utilizes the term “hillbilly” to refer to the working class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree (3). Second, Vance uses the term hillbilly to refer to a group of people from a specific geographic area, namely the area of the Appalachian Mountains. According to Vance, the area stretches from Alabama to Georgia in the South to Ohio to parts of New York in the north (4). Third, hillbilly indicates the way of life, behavior, or identity of the people of Greater Appalachia.

In James Lane Allen’s Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback, the mention is made to the beauty of the land and that the climate was just the same but that traveling to the mountain region was not only difficult as they had to take a train then a wagon ride, followed by a trek on horseback, but a lengthy process. Among the experiences recorded Allen describes the meeting of several locals and this is where his responsibility for Appalachian

The Cherokee are a culturally rich and interesting tribe. They write amazing myths, focusing on creation and nature. In its prime, the Cherokee nation spanned over an estimated 100,000 miles. The people in it respected the universe. They only took from the what was needed from the environment. They were a peaceful tribe that knew very well how the land around them worked.

A long time before this land was called the United States, the Cherokee people used to live in this land in the valleys of rivers that drained the southern Appalachians. These people made their homes, farmed their land, and buried their dead. Also these people, who are now called Indians claimed larger lands. They would use these for hunting deer and gathering material, to live off of. Later these lands were called Virginia and Kentucky. As it is mentioned in the text, these people had their own culture and own way of life. They had their own gender roles and religion; even eating food had a different definition than the white man’s culture. They had equality between genders, and other members of the tribe had equal rights to talk. But

In Uneven Ground, the author Ronald D. Eller narrates the economic, political, and social change of Appalachia after World War II. He writes “persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.”(pp.2) Some of the structural problems stated by Eller include problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture; personally view the economic myopia as being the most daunting.

Daugneaux, Christine B. Appalachia: A Separate Place, A Unique People. Parsons: McLain Printing Company, 1981. Print.

The Iroquois was a culture based on equality. The roles of men and women were different, but each gender shared an equal