Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:05] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Weird World Adventures, the podcast. I'm your host, Mallory, and I'm here to show you just how weird this world of ours really is.
[00:00:14] Today, we're going to be talking about myths and folklore and some of the ethical conversations surrounding them.
[00:00:23] So I have a good example. I'm going to start with. Okay, picture this. You're driving through the Great Smoky Mountains, one of America's most visited national parks. Seriously, I know you've heard Michael and I talk about this before, but we had no idea when we were driving up there that we were going to effectively. What was Myrtle beach in the middle of the mountains? Just tourist central.
[00:00:46] You stop at a scenic overlook, and there's a plaque telling you about Cherokee legends and their association with the mountain.
[00:00:54] Maybe it's Spearfinger, the legendary witch with a stone finger who hunted children.
[00:00:59] You take a photo, you read the legend, you feel like you've learned something about Native American culture, and then you get back in your car and drive to the next attraction.
[00:01:08] But here's the question people aren't asking. Who decided to put the legend on the plaque?
[00:01:14] Who chose which story to tell and which ones to leave out?
[00:01:18] And more importantly, who's profiting from these stories?
[00:01:22] Today, we're driving into a complicated, often troubling history of how indigenous myths and legends have been used, misused, and sometimes exploited to sell to the American tourism experience.
[00:01:37] We'll look at how real Cherokee stories became theme park attractions, how sacred sites have become tourist destinations, how the tourism industry has both preserved and profoundly destroyed distorted folklore, ancient folklore. And I mean, the question we don't really have the answer to is, is it good? I mean, a lot of these stories were wanted to be spread and told, but, you know, they don't have the answers.
[00:02:06] We're going to be having a nuanced conversation because, like I said, it's not good or bad. It's complicated, and we need to sit with that complication.
[00:02:15] All right, so. So let's start in the Smokies, because this is where the pattern has really crystallized in American tourism. And I will say I had no idea when we first went to the Smokies this past year that the Cherokee culture was so embedded into all of the myths and legends. We actually went to the Smokies to write about the haunted hikes and the legends of the Smokies. But both Michael and I were really shocked to kind of find out that most of the legends and the folklore that came from the Smokies actually came from the Cherokee and that, I mean, really, like most of the legendary features of the Smokies, are all thanks to the Cherokees.
[00:03:00] So the Great Smoky Mountains, I'll say, were Cherokee territory for thousands of years before European colonization.
[00:03:08] The Cherokee called the mountains the Place of the Blue Smoke. They had an intricate relationship with the land, embedded in hundreds of stories that explained the land's features, taught moral lessons, and encoded knowledge about the natural world.
[00:03:23] And so from there came the Trail of tears. In 1838, the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their homeland and marched to Oklahoma. Thousands died. It was genocide, plain and simple. Really, really bad. But a small group of Cherokee managed to remain in the Smokies through various means. Some hid in the mountains. Some bought land and were able to stay. Some returned after the removal. But these became the Eastern band of Cherokee Indians who maintained the Koala boundary, their sovereign land adjacent to the natural park.
[00:03:59] Now, here's where tourism enters the picture.
[00:04:04] In the 1930s and 40s, as the great Smoky Mountains national park was being developed, park planners realized they needed a narrative to sell to visitors. They needed stories. And the most romantic, most marketable stories were the Cherokee legends. They were originally stories from the Cherokee, and they had been adapted by the settlers. And now they were just part of the identity of the Smokies. So they started putting them up on plaques. They named features of the landscape after Cherokee stories. They created interpretive programs featuring Cherokee culture.
[00:04:37] And they did this with varying levels of Cherokee input and control.
[00:04:41] Some of this was done in genuine partnership with the Eastern Band. Some of it was done without any Cherokee consultation at all. And some of it was just made up, invented by writers who thought they sounded authentic.
[00:04:55] So for an example, Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the Smokies, the Cherokee name for this is Kuwait, and there are real Cherokee stories associated with it. But when this Park Service needed a name for the tourist maps, they chose Clingman's Dome after Thomas Clingman, a white surveyor and politician. So the Cherokee name barely appears in the literature.
[00:05:20] However, I will say they did actually change the name back to Kauahe here after concerns were mentioned and addressed. So over the last few years, they did change the name back to give it the property honor from the Native American culture that it deserved. So that has been recently addressed and fixed, thanks to people raising up their voices about it.
[00:05:43] Meanwhile, other features got assigned to Cherokee legends, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. The story of the creation of the Smokies from flapping eagle wings, that's a real Cherokee creation story. But the way it's presented on roadside plaques, often strips out the cultural context, reducing complex cosmology to just a cute nature tale.
[00:06:07] But now let's talk about what happened right outside the park boundaries in the town of Cherokee, North Carolina, on the Koala border. Tourism became the primary economy, and the Cherokee community made a strategic decision.
[00:06:21] If the tourism wants these Native American experiences, they would provide it on their own terms, for their own profit. And to be honest, that is the most magical thing, in my opinion, for a group of people to be able to come together and share their culture with others who care about it.
[00:06:38] And tourists in the 1950s and 60s, unfortunately, didn't always want authentic.
[00:06:44] They wanted something romanticized.
[00:06:47] So the Cherokee business owners gave tourists what they wanted. They dressed in different regalia, things that weren't native to their area. They sold authentic crafts that were often mass produced elsewhere. They posed for photos, you know, in front of teepees that Cherokee people had never historically used.
[00:07:07] So was it exploitation? Yes. But here's the thing. It was also economic survival and in some ways, a form of resistance.
[00:07:15] The Eastern Band was able to take control of their own representation, even if it was fundamentally distorted sometimes by tourist expectations.
[00:07:25] Fast forward to today.
[00:07:27] The Museum of the Cherokee, which opened in 1998, tells a different story. It's managed by the Cherokee community and presents their actual history and culture with sophistication and nuance. The story of removal, of the Trail of Tears, the brutality of colonization, and it's all there, and it's not sanitized for tourist comfort.
[00:07:49] And the outdoor drama Unto the Hills, which has been performed every summer since 1950, was recently rewritten by Cherokee playwright Kermit Hunter to remove the romanticization and tell an honest story.
[00:08:05] But drive through Cherokee Town, you'll still see some of the roadside attractions, but you also get incredible experiences. There's one I really want to go back to, actually, that talks about some of the. The ghost stories of the Cherokee that's there in Halloween time.
[00:08:22] It's a landscape where authentic cultural preservation and tourist exploitation exist side by side, sometimes, often uncomfortably.
[00:08:31] But it is beautiful to get to see a culture, reclaim their story, present it correctly, and to present it to the world authentically. I think there's something so magical about cultures getting to teach and share their culture with the world.
[00:08:48] And that's something I want to go back to experience in Cherokee as well, because it's a beautiful town.
[00:08:54] We did a couple hikes in there and passed through it, and it's just somewhere I definitely want to go back to let's shift over to Niagara Falls, because the pattern we saw in the Smokies, it wasn't unique. It happened all across America, wherever indigenous stories could be commodified.
[00:09:12] If you've been to Niagara Falls, you've probably heard the legend of the Maid of the Mist. It's told on boat tours and visitor centers, on plaques around the falls.
[00:09:21] The story usually goes something like A young indigenous maiden was sacrificed to the thunder God who lived behind the falls. She was sent over the falls in a canoe as an offering. The thunder God caught her and took her into his cave, where she lived forever in the mist. It's tragic, romantic. It's been the subject of paintings and poems and even opera. And the biggest tourist boat operation at Niagara Falls, worth millions of dollars, is even named after the legend. But here's the problem. The story is told to tourists is probably not authentic from indigenous cultures or tradition at all.
[00:10:00] Please excuse me for butchering this. The Haudenosi people, often known as the Iroquois Confederacy, have lived in the Niagara region for thousands of years. They have real stories about the falls. In Seneca tradition, for example, the falls were created with the serpent who was defeated and its body carved in the gorge. But the Maid of the Mist story, as tourists know, first appeared in written form in the 1840s by white authors during the height of the noble savage romanticism.
[00:10:32] It is all the hallmarks of colonial fantasy. The beautiful maiden, the tragic sacrifice, and a doomed love story.
[00:10:41] Some indigenous scholars believe there may have been a kernel of authentic tradition at its core, perhaps a story about water spirits or real historical event that got dramatically embellished. But the version that's been sold to tourists for 150 years is almost certainly a colonial fabrication, and nobody told the tourists that.
[00:11:02] So the Made of the Mist boat company has operated since 1846, making millions carrying tourists into spraying Falls while telling a legend that sprang, probably not even actually an authentic legend.
[00:11:17] For most of its history, there was zero benefit to the communities who supposed legend was being commodified.
[00:11:25] And this is kind of what cultural appropriation looks like in the tourism industry, taking indigenous cultural elements, stripping them out of context, and then selling them for profit.
[00:11:37] So while the actual indigenous communities really see none of the revenue and have no control over how their culture is represented, now, in recent years, there has been improvement. The Niagara Falls area now includes indigenous cultural centers and authentic programming by educators.
[00:11:55] But the fake legend still dominates the tourist experience because it's been embedded in the infrastructure for so long. Somehow, the fake myth has become the Actual list the legend of the area through time. And here's what really gets me.
[00:12:11] How many tourists know how many people have been on that boat tour, heard the legend, and believed they were learning about something real, some real piece of indigenous culture.
[00:12:22] Now, I didn't know until I actually started researching the history of stories and talking to folklorists and people that would know.
[00:12:30] This is the kind of insidious nature of cultural exploitation, where it feels educational and it feels respectful, but without the proper research and understanding, it's disrespectful. So I feel like as tourists, as people going out and learning about other cultures, fact checking things, really taking the time to speak with people that understand that's part of our responsibility.
[00:12:57] And as someone who loves folklore and mythology, you know, it's. I'm not always going to be perfect, but I try very hard to fact check, you know, where the legends have come from and trace them back as far as I can to learn the real history, just to have respect for the cultures that are being taught. Talked about our final segment. Let's head to Sedona, Arizona, where the commodification of indigenous spirituality reaches its absolute peak. So Sedona is famous for its red rock formations and its vortexes. I'm sure you guys have heard about this. Supposedly they're areas of concentrated spiritual energy that can be used for meditation, healing, and spiritual awakening. I definitely remember these being talked about on bullshit by Penn and Teller, kind of breaking it down. So good or bad, these have been well known for a while now, kind of across our mythology, across people spreading tales of spiritual findings.
[00:13:58] If you visit Sedona, you can actually buy a vortex map. You can book vortex tours, you can hire vortex guides who will tell you specific rock formations that lead you to meditation. The entire tourism economy of Sedona, worth of millions of dollars, is built on the idea that this land has special spiritual properties.
[00:14:19] And how much of that marketing explicitly or implicitly ties in these vortexes to Native American spirituality?
[00:14:27] Here's the truth. The concept of vortexes in Sedona was invented in the 1980s by a white psychic named Paige Bryant. She claimed to have channeled information about energy centers in the landscape and published maps to show people where they were located.
[00:14:45] Okay, this is not traditional indigenous beliefs.
[00:14:49] The Yavapai Apache Nation, on whose traditional land Sedona sits, has never talked about vortexes. They do consider the land sacred. They do have traditional sites of spiritual significance in the area.
[00:15:04] But those sites are specific, often secret, and not meant for public tourism.
[00:15:11] So what happened in Sedona is that the white new age practitioners took this general idea that indigenous people considered the land sacred, mashed it together with concepts from eastern religions and western ideals, and kind of slapped a veneer of ancient native wisdom on it and created a completely fabricated spiritual tourism industry.
[00:15:34] And I'd be remiss to leave out the fact that they made millions of dollars from it.
[00:15:38] Meanwhile, the actual Apache people have seen their sacred spaces trampled by tourists seeking enlightenment. Traditional ceremonies have been disrupted, sacred objects have been stolen, and the community receives virtually none of the economic benefit from the tourism industry that's exploiting their cultural association with the land.
[00:15:58] This is the modern version of the same pattern we've been discussing.
[00:16:02] Taking other culture concepts, stripping them of their actual meaning and context, reshaping them to fit tourist expectations, and selling them back to people as authentic.
[00:16:14] The worst part, many of the tourists genuinely believe they're honoring this other culture. They think they're being respectful by seeking out sacred sites. They have no idea they're participating in some kind of appropriation and exploitation.
[00:16:28] Now, I want to be clear. This does not mean that non indigenous people can never visit or appreciate sacred landscapes or other cultures.
[00:16:39] But there's a world of a difference between visiting with respect, education, and awareness versus consuming spirituality as a tourist commodity.
[00:16:48] Really doing your research, going to the right people to ask real questions and respecting the answers that come back.
[00:16:56] I think that's the real value in getting to understand and explore cultures, is to not come with a jaded lens, to not come with some fake expectation, but to go to the people of the culture to ask the right questions and to be open to receiving the real answers. And that is what someone who truly is interested in other cultures, in anthropology, in.
[00:17:23] In learning more about the world, that's what we should be doing.
[00:17:29] So where does this leave us?
[00:17:31] Indigenous myths and legends have absolutely shaped American tourism, but not in the way that most people think.
[00:17:38] What shaped a lot of tourism wasn't authentic indigenous culture being genuine, genuinely shared. What shaped tourism was indigenous culture being taken, distorted, and commercialized and then sold to the public as entertainment and enlightenment.
[00:17:53] Now, again, that's not always the case, but there's a lot more of that going on than I think we realized. This happened through both international exploitation, intentional exploitation, and. And ignorance. It happened with some participation from indigenous people because economic survival sometimes requires participating in your own commodification. And it continues happening today, even as more indigenous voices push back and demand authentic representation. However, I will say I think a lot of places are getting better at it because people are learning to ask the right questions. So what can we do as travelers and as people who care about cultural respect?
[00:18:35] Again, question the source. Go to the actual tribe, the actual people that are being discussed, and ask real question. If you see plaques, ask who wrote this? Was it created in consultation with the relevant community?
[00:18:52] Is it authentic or is it colonial fabrication?
[00:18:56] And I mean, that's culture is always evolving and changing. A lot of colonial beliefs were adapted from Native beliefs and they were adapted from something else before that. So it's also understanding where things were taken from and how they've evolved.
[00:19:14] Second, seek out Indigenous operated tourism experiences, places where people can control their own narrative. Tours led by indigenous guides who can share their actual culture, not perform versions of what tourists want to see. Third, recognize that some things aren't meant to be tourist attractions. Some places should be left alone, and that's okay too. And fourth, educate yourself about real history, ongoing struggles, and the difference between appreciation and extortion. To an extent, appropriation, tourism shaped by Indigenous myths has given millions of people their only exposure to Native American culture. And that's a huge responsibility. And for most of American history, that responsibility was not handled correctly.
[00:20:04] So how can we fix that now? Kind of what I said above.
[00:20:09] You can find more information on famous myths and legends and also a lot on the Great smoky Mountains on mallorysadventures.com so be sure to do that. We also have an episode covering some of the myths and legends of the Smokies, so be sure to watch Weird World Adventures Season 2 on Amazon prime, releasing very soon. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today. I'm your host, Mallory, and until next time, everybody stay weird.
