Cara Ellen Modisett

When I first started working for Blue Ridge Country, I learned there were two words we don’t use in the magazine. One was “tourist,” and one was “Appalachia.”

The first is probably less surprising than the second. Tourists come to a place from the outside. They want to see things and go back home and say they’ve seen them. Travelers, on the other hand, want to explore places, meet people, experience the unexpected.

But “Appalachia”? Isn’t that where we are?

By its basic definition, Appalachia is a place, a geographic region – the mountains of our eastern states, with some variations in those boundaries.

The problem with “Appalachia” is that its definition has become weighted down with moonshine, coal mining and “Deliverance.” We know this. Thanks largely to various media, it has become a stereotype, a synonym for an uneducated, impoverished place and people.

One Google search turned up this entry in TheFreeDictionary.com: “An impoverished coal mining area in the Appalachian Mountains (from Pennsylvania to North Carolina).” Webster’s online gives the exact same definition.

Another search turned up an Elderhostel program describing the region as “a huge area of isolated communities protected by mountains, ignored by industry and exploited for natural resources… a place where things are largely as they used to be.”

What is Appalachia? Should we be embarrassed by the term? What does it mean, here and now?

“Appalachia is the Renaissance of America,” I recently heard poet Nikki Giovanni – Knoxville native, Virginia Tech professor – assert while speaking at an event in Roanoke, Va.

Our guest columnist this issue, poet Frank X. Walker, has taken the idea a step further by creating the term “Affrilachian.” The Appalachian people, he says, are not just “white native[s] or resident[s] of the Appalachian mountain area” (see Merriam-Webster online). There are African-Appalachian, Arab-Appalachian, Asian-Appalachian people who call this region home – and Native American Appalachians who were here for years before settlers arrived. Appalachia, the region, has been multicolored and multicultural centuries before Appalachia, the term, was coined and misused.

Has “Appalachia” come back to itself?

Theresa Burriss, on the faculty of Radford University in Virginia, told me, “When I identify myself as Appalachian, it is with great pride that I do so. Being Appalachian is an integral part of my character, a blood-borne gift from my family.”

I asked Sharyn McCrumb, novelist and contributor to this magazine, what she thought, sparking an e-mail conversation over the course of an afternoon.
She wrote: “Regional scholars use [Appalachia] as a term of pride to encompass incredible musicians and outstanding craftsmen. Urban do-gooders use it to mean ‘pore folks’ as an aid to fund-raising…

“Nowadays the scholars and stars of the region are not putting up with condescending crap anymore. We refuse to let ‘Appalachian’ be synonymous with poor. We DO have Nobel Prize winners and mansions and billionaires. Appalachia is a place – not a social class.”

Naming a region, naming a people, must encompass but not limit all the facets that make that region, that people, unique.

What do we name ourselves? What power does “Appalachia” hold? Write and tell us what you think: cmodisett@leisurepublishing.com.

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