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LANDOWNERSHIP & DISPLACEMENT ALONG THE APPALACHIAN EMMA GALLAUGHER
ARH 3260 | SPRING 2022 | FINAL PAPER
This final paper examines the history, design, and execution of the Blue Ridge Parkway and how the landscape it touches has been impacted as a result. Specifically, it looks at the issues of native people displacement, landownership, and unequal wealth disproportion.
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The Cherokee tribes of the Blue Ridge region have experienced great disruption and displacement, as the routes for the parkway cross through various Indian territories. By way of unfair federal policies, these tribes have been relocated to areas where federal authority over Indian affairs has consequently domesticated the “savagery” of Indian lifestyle, beliefs, and culture. These tribes also relied on agriculture and lumber trade for means of food and wage. The exacerbation of timber forests and arable land by the National park Service and federal mandates, depleted what was necessary for the sufficient survival of tribes and their members.
Related, land from generations of Appalachian people was bought or leased out to the NPS, whom destroyed homesteads and farmland with deep inheritance. These generational space and memories were lost forever in the regulation of maintaining the success and attractiveness of the parkway.
Finally, the parkway has brought a mass fluctuation of tourism to the Appalachian region, raising land and home costs. Today, some of the grandest real estate sit in close proximity to the Parkway, rising beyond what the lower to middle class population can afford. Thus, generations of families are being driven out from their native landscapes.
This paper concludes by arguing that while the Parkway has flourished the last fifty years and been popularized by recreational propaganda, the NPS has failed to preserve the people and cultures it has stolen from and destroyed. It must do more to protect these landscapes and experiences to genuinely thrive as a cultural center.
What could the NPS mandate to create a program that preserves and tells the narrative of cultures it has touched?
