Historicizing Heritage

“We, the Talimali Band the Apalachee Indians are indeed, still here. We have been here, waiting for the time our voice will be heard, by people who are willing to help us as a tribe go home to Florida. We are called to Florida, deep within our spirits; we feel the calling to the bone. It is indescribable to visit Florida and see actors dressed as Apalachee, portraying us. We see items for sale in a gift shop, which were not made by us. Our time spent in Louisiana has not produced a spirit of happiness. Our spirits hurt. Our tribe hid in the deep swamps from 1834 to 1900, when the swamp was drained. Our people were forced to relocate to a remote hill section nearby, where a Catholic priest, Father Carpentier, found beaten paths leading to the Apalachee village, which had no road to it. After a little more than ten years, the village was burned, our resources taken from us, our relatives murdered by Klan members, our houses burned, and land taken to create a Wilderness Area. The Indians were forced to move to our current location in central Louisiana. ”

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The Apalachee Roots of Modern Appalachia

In 1528, with no knowledge of the local language and without the benefit of an interpreter, shipwrecked Spanish explorers in western Florida asked the Indigenous people who encountered them naked and shivering on the beach (near contemporary Tampa) if they knew where to find any gold. The Natives responded “Apalache,” and thus was born the enduring myth that the people known in English as the Apalachee possessed immeasurable stores of mineral wealth.

The Apalachee never mined gold, and repeated European attempts to find their inexistent mines proved catastrophic for mercenary explorers and besieged Natives alike. Nevertheless, the rumor would persist for centuries. In 1564, French cartographer Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues transposed a latinized version of the term to the mountains north of the Florida peninsula. The word was adopted by the chronicler of Christopher Newport’s westward voyage up the James River a few decades later, and thus modern Appalachia was born.

For the contemporary observer with any knowledge of Appalachia’s socioeconomic and environmental history, the revelation that extractive mining was the impetus driving Europeans toward the region as early as the sixteenth century may be a source of curiosity. For the Apalachee, it is one more insult added to five centuries of injury in the form of unprovoked warfare, mass enslavement, genocide, and land theft.

While most Americans are unaware of the obscure origins of the name for the ancient mountains extending down the eastern edge of North America from Maine to Georgia, the European misuse and abuse of their name is something that the Apalachee have never been able to forget. It was thus fitting that Apalachee heritage be historicized in a statement by the tribal council of the Talimali Band the Apalachee Indians, in the heart of Appalachia, during the Folger Shakespeare Institute’s Historicizing Heritage conference on the campus of West Virginia University in May 2022. Their words and tribal portrait appear above.