Trail of Tears: An American Tradegy 

 

At our February 13, 2023 meeting, Kay Stine eloquently introduced our speaker, our member Sally Hartman.  Kay had these insights to share:. Sally graduated with honors from the University of Arkansas with a degree in journalism and studied abroad in Japan. She worked at The Arkansas Gazette before becoming an editor and staff writer for Virginia Business. She retired in 2020 as vice president of communications at the Hampton Roads Community Foundation. Sally joined our Rotary Club in 2007, is a both a Paul Harris Fellow and a Charles Woodard Fellow, and served as president in 2015-16.

 

Sally gave a riveting presentation on the forced displacement of approximately 60,000 indigenous people from the "Five Civilized Tribes."  From between 1830 and 1839 Native Americans were marched from the South and Southeast 5,000 miles to Indian Territory, now present day Oklahoma. History commonly now calls this the “Trail of Tears” where 15,000 people died. Sally recently became interested in the subject due to learning that much of this happened around where she grew up in Northwest Arkansas and that all 60,000 migrants passed through her home state. Sally gave a moving presentation detailing the causes of Native American removal, life in internment camps and on the nearly 1,000-mile trail routes, and the success of the Cherokee citizens' in rebuilding their lives and creating businesses.

 

She made the program even more memorable by introducing her friend Kole Matheson, a Cherokee Nation West citizen. Kole can trace his family back seven generations and told of ancestors who suffered on the trail when they were forced to move to what is now Oklahoma. Kole reminded us that in Hampton Roads three groups of indigenous people were flourishing on this land when the first settlers arrived. The Lumbee, the Nansemond and the Chesapeake tribes were all part of the Powhatan Confederacy. Kole ended his talk by reading a poem in Cherokee and English about the Trail of Tears that he was commissioned to write. Kole, an English professor at Old Dominion University, invited us to an Indigenous Language Symposium at ODU on March 11 from 12 noon to 4 p.m.