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• 1 media/appalachia-4672936_1280 (1).jpg 2020-11-23T06:24:25+00:00 Appalachia 6 What is it? Where is it? Who is it? plain 2023-03-28T17:30:13+00:00 Appalachia, as with the rest of the United States, is built on the stolen land of numerous Indigenous nations. The colonial and imperialist powers who stole this land continue to exist and exert their violent control over these Indigenous nations through policing, industrial destruction of the environment, and the legislative violation of Indigenous sovereignty. The Indigenous people and cultures of Appalachia are not gone and Indigenous Appalachians live their lives in the region and across the country every single day. 
  
  Some of the Indigenous nations in Appalachia, particularly those in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, include the Eastern Cherokee Nation, the S'atsoyaha (Yuchi) People, the Shawnee Tribe, and the Osage Nation. Please take time to carefully explore each nation's website and make donations when possible. To learn more about the Indigenous nations in your area, check out the Native Land Map. 
  
  Decolonization is not a metaphor and this land acknowledgement is a small step in a much larger push towards the dismantling of American colonialism and return of Indigenous sovereignty. 
  
  Appalachia is a region of myths.  For decades, Appalachia has existed in the national imagination as an alien wasteland.  The mere mention of the mountains, which stretch over 2,000 miles from New York to Alabama, conjures images of toothless hillbillies and dusty coal miners tragically fighting for survival in a landscape that is wildly uninhabitable for anyone daring to enter.  Appalachia is, for many, out of place and out of time—an empty spot on the map of the United States where everyone lives without electricity, running water, or the modern liberal politics of the metropoles down below.  
  
  These dominant narratives regarding Appalachia have mobilized even more aggressively over the course of the past few years. During the months leading up to and following Trump’s election, major news outlets scrambled to explain why such an outwardly hateful and unrespectable person routinely usurped the other, respectably liberal candidates. Appalachian historian Elizabeth Catte characterizes this genre of journalistic writing as “the ‘Trump Country’ piece” and argues that the conclusion drawn by the genre points to Appalachia as the source and explanation for these political woes. HuffPost ran a profile on McDowell County, West Virginia, in which they scapegoat the Appalachian county as the cause of Trump’s victory.  The article’s title, “This County Gives A Glimpse At The America That Voted Trump Into Office,” constructs the region as a distinct “America,” an othered country separate from the presumably liberal areas outside of the mountains.  The article itself describes the county as a "stronghold for Trump” and uses a series of staged black and white images to suggest that the town is close to death, if not dead already.  Vanity Fair’s “Welcome to Trump Country, U.S.A.” explicitly states that it is searching for “What one West Virginia county explains about the G.O.P. front-runner—and America,” similarly constructing Appalachia as a microcosm for the entirety of conservative America.  The article relays multiple anecdotes about an almost caricatured Appalachia, such as the opening paragraph which takes place “in a strip club in Morgantown, West Virginia, drinking shit American beer that tastes like ice and newspaper. A man is passing me a semi-automatic handgun and telling me to pull the trigger.” Countless other major news sources, including The New Yorker, PBS, and The Guardian, published similar articles in the months surrounding the 2016 election, in which they depicted Appalachia as a wholly backwards region whose votes for Trump exemplify their disconnect from modern liberal politics.
  
  Catte argues that these caricatures of Appalachia “cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional ‘other’ who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate.” This is by design.  By casting the poor and the rural as the root of the country’s malaise, powerful media outlets distract from the much more probable explanation that the desire for profit drives wealthy corporations (including many of these media outlets) and politicians to work towards the interests of the wealthy and not the working class.  Instead of analyzing the ways in which liberal political structures have alienated and failed to address the concerns of Appalachian people, media institutions instead blame Appalachian people themselves for either voting Republican or not voting at all.  Not voting at all is an especially common outcome—Catte notes that McDowell County, West Virginia, the focus of many “Trump Country” pieces, had a voter turnout of 36.24%.
  
  This is not to say, of course, that Appalachia is a left-wing paradise without the slightest presence of racism, homophobia, or misogyny, but rather that the region is not uniquely bigoted, nor does it exist as a monolithic culture. These media outlets, and the well-meaning liberals who read them, are able to absolve the blame that wealthy corporations and politicians elicit and pass that blame onto Appalachia, allowing themselves to feel good and remain complacent without addressing any of the deeper problems of capitalist exploitation (and related problems like racism, sexism, and homophobia) that better explain the current state of American politics.  This framing also obscures serious problems facing the region, such as the mounting opioid crisis and the proliferation of harmful mountaintop removal mining practices, and distracts from the multitude of progressive organizations working to ameliorate those problems. By blaming Appalachia for the nation’s problems and overlooking actual instances of struggle and action in the region, media institutions erase any semblance of a “real” Appalachia, reducing the mountains so that they exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
  
  One must also consider that the decolonization of Appalachia would render the concepts of “Appalachia” and “queerness” as less useful. The region currently known as “Appalachia” is partly a political fabrication put together by the Appalachian Regional Commission in 1965 to decide which counties and states received certain financial development opportunities, an action which excluded many places culturally and historically regarded as Appalachia. This fabrication exists on the violently colonized land of multiple Indigenous nations, the borders of which are not always constrained strictly to the mountains. So, decolonization in Appalachia through repatriation of the land to these Indigenous nations may render “Appalachia”—an already slippery signifier—as even less conclusive or helpful. Similarly, “queer” or “LGBTQ+” as identities and descriptions of groups exist largely as a response and subversion to heterosexual and cisgender norms, many of which have been imposed (at least in the United States) through the process of settler colonialism. If decolonization of the land is combined with the decolonization of social structures and these norms are decentered, then umbrella terms such as “queer” and “LGBTQ+” may not contain the same political utility that they currently possess.