- What we need is a book that shows us the special challenges of the Cherokee people dealing with the non-Indian people who surround them in Western North Carolina.

Now we have it.

Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle's debut novel, "Even As We Breathe" is the first novel written by an Eastern band Cherokee person.

We'll talk to her about this important new book on North Carolina Bookwatch next.

- Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[sprightly music] ♪ - Welcome to North Carolina Bookwatch and to Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, one of great supporters for writers and for North Carolina Bookwatch.

I'm DG Martin and my guest is Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle author of "Even As We Breathe".

Well, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, welcome.

And thanks for joining us.

Did I pronounce the name right?

- You have, you did well.

You didn't even ask beforehand.

So that's great.

[laughter] - Well, you're an enrolled member of the Cherokee.. >> [Annette)} Eastern band.

>> [DG] Eastern band of the Cherokee tribe.

And you teach in the schools there, but you've had, I would say a cosmopolitan life.

Although you grew up in Western North Carolina, went to school there, you went away to school, to Yale, and then to William and Mary for graduate work.

And then you came back to work with the Cherokee people.

Why, why, tell us about that.

- I often say that that so many people work their whole lives to retire to Western North Carolina.

If I want to just start there.

So there's the part of that, right?

The beauty of the area I think is unmatched, but also just the, the cultural pull there.

I have family there.

We have such a rich history and there's a lot of work to be done there.

I like to be busy.

You know, I'm a public high school teacher, so I like work, and I, you know, I just, I just felt like that was the place that I needed to be.

I once had an instructor, my mom had taken me up to, to visit campus at Yale.

And she asked the instructor, why would anybody want to be a teacher after going to Yale, right?

You could, you have a lot of opportunities.

And he said, the best thing you can do with a world-class education is share it with other people.

So I think that's true of education in general, but I also think it's true of, of being back home in a community that I love.

- I love that.

But we came to talk about your book, "Even As We Breathe".

And when you, when you, what's your elevator, tell us a little bit about your book.

- So "Even As We Breathe" is set the summer of 1942, it's partly set in Cherokee, North Carolina, but also at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.

And that summer, the Grove Park Inn had access diplomats and foreign nationals as prisoners of war.

And if you know anything about the Grove Park, it's a high-class resort.

So it was an odd place to become a, a, a prison of war basically.

And so that summer, my protagonist, Cowney Sequoyah, leaves Cherokee to work there.

And he's joined by Essie, another young woman from Cherokee who he develops feelings for, they're complex.

And while he's working there.

- But these are both Indians?

- Yeah, they're both -- - They're both working in a white world really.

- They're 19.

So they're kind of figuring out the direction of their lives.

And so, while they're working there, Cowney is accused of being involved in the disappearance of a diplomat's daughter.

So he's working through proving his own innocence.

In the meantime, he also is unraveling a family secret back home.

So he's back and forth from, from Cherokee to Asheville during that summer.

- I want you to tell us in a minute about that secret back home, but I would love for you first to talk about the characters back home, his grandmother and his uncle.

- Sure, so Cowney's father was killed really at the end, after the technical end of World War I, but he was still in Europe and Cowney's mother died in childbirth.

So Cowney was raised by his grandmother, Lishie and his uncle Bud, his father's brother.

His grandmother Lishie, it's important to say that she is given this name Lishie, which is the Cherokee word for maternal grandmother, but she's actually his paternal grandmother.

She's just acting in a very maternal way in raising him.

- So that's not her real name?

- No, that's well, that's what she came to be called.

And so that's one of the things I play with in the book are, are labels and names and how we determine those things.

So it's, it's fairly common in Cherokee to earn your name in a sense, just like a nickname, but it just really stands in for, for what your birth name was.

- I always wondered where the name Cowne came, Cowney.

Where did that come from?

- It's a family name.

It's on my dad's side and uncle he had his name Cowney.

So I have some lovely family trees from both sides of my family.

And I'll often pick character names from that family tree.

- Well, it's it, but I mean, it's an unusual, it was since an unusual name for me.

Well, tell us a little bit about the mystery that developed in terms of the loss of the child that Cowney became accused of.

- Sure, do the, the book centers largely around this bone that, that Cowney found and the bone is talked about in the prologue.

So that's no mystery.

And actually it was the first thing I wrote about when I was writing the manuscript and he is, he's kind of fascinated with it, but it gets him into trouble when the young girl goes missing.

And there are a lot of assumptions that are made rather quickly in the pursuit of finding out what happened to the little girl and, you know, and assumptions that aren't logical in retrospect.

But because of the situation in the setting that, you know, it's 1942 in the middle of a war, you're dealing with foreign diplomats and this basically Cherokee kid who is associated with a bone and all the pieces aren't fitting together with, with his story.

He gets himself in, in a mess.

- So the bone, the bone, you opened that story really with, with Cowney finding the bone and treasuring it, it, and it I'll just have to tell you that was a, that was a leap for me, finding, you know, if I found a bone in the ground, I will, I'd either keep it or show it around, but I wouldn't treasure it like Cowney did.

Why, why, why, explain that.

- Sure.

So the burn works on a few levels in the novel, but what's important to remember is that even in Asheville, which is a distance from Cherokee, that is the, you know, ancestral homeland of, of the Cherokee people.

We, you know, there are even records of Cherokees being in Asheville racing canoes, you know, on the river, things like that.

So there is this, there's always this kind of unspoken commentary about where the bones of our ancestors are.

And so regardless of the fact of whether it was animal or human it's, it's still something of that requires care, that requires thoughtfulness around it, that, that we would treat any living thing, the remnants of any living thing with, with care and respect I think is, is, is pretty typical, especially it would be for Cowney and, you know, his, his obsession with it too, was also the other side of his character, which was very scientific based, his interest in anatomy and things like that from some of the classes that he had.

So to show a character who is not just sentimental or, or spiritual in a sense, but also interested in, in the science of things and that, I hoped to do that with, with the book.

- Well, you do that so well, but you bring it into Cherokee culture as something more than, more than science.

Well, I wish we could talk a little bit more about the mystery and how it got solved without, you know, without spoiling, you know, without spoiling anything.

One of the things that's real important to me at least, is the war and the participation in the war by these two Indian, you know, two Indian boys who come from Cherokee, are an important part of your book.

And how did, how did these Indian soldiers get along?

Was there any prejudice towards them?

- You know, of course they're fictional characters.

So there was, you know, I had a little bit of leeway in how I portrayed that, but I've heard stories, you know, casual stories from, from people about their experiences in the military, and either there's a, in the book, it talks about the white soldiers would take bullets out of the guns of, of the, the two Cherokee soldiers.

- Why, why?

- So a lot of it is a lot of stereotype around, you know, what, it's, it all sounds ridiculous to talk about, right?

With, with a thinking human being.

But, you know, there are stereotypes about how Indian people would act at night, right?

Those kinds of things that there's a distrust, simply because of ignorance of not knowing, the humanity of their fellow soldiers.

And that happened.

What is really interesting to me about Native Americans across the country is the, that we have served in the military, in the US military at far greater rates than any other group.

- Indians as a group, rather than turkeys.

- Yes.

- But Cherokees also are a part of that.

Well, your plot's very important, but one of the things that I love about the book are the varied number of, are the number of varied characters.

For instance, you have a monkey as a character.

Will you tell us about that?

- Yes, Edgar, the monkey is maybe.

- Is this totally fictional?

Is this?

- Well, if it's, yeah.

- Tell us about it.

- If, if it's that crazy, you know, it's not that fictional, right?

So Edgar, first of all, I think came about as a side idea because I had heard, I don't know if you're familiar with Gary Carden, who is a storyteller from Jackson County, long-time storyteller.

And he would tell this story about a monkey that used to kind of roam the Smoky Mountains and scare hunters.

- Really, did he make this up?

- He did not, I don't think he made this up.

I think that there's at least some element of truth to it.

- Well tell us about your monkey.

The monkey in your book.

- So I was always just fascinated with that.

And I was thinking a lot about what I, what I mentioned earlier, this balance between what is looked at as some kind of spiritual or cultural belief versus science.

So in the book, you'll notice there are a couple of references to bears and bears are the animals that in Cherokee tradition are most closely related to human beings.

- I want to talk about bears, but I want you to tell me more about what this monkey did first.

- So, you know, and so outsiders will often see a connection to something like bears as something that is very native, it's spiritual, it's, you know, it's something that they don't understand, but on the other hand, you know, I think it's widely accepted that primates are the most closely related animals to humans, right?

You know, scientifically speaking, we see it as, you know, evolutionary theory and science books and whatnot, and that's not strange for people to accept.

So I wanted to do, I wanted to use Edgar partly as a balance there to say these, these things are similar.

And then Edgar is also held captive prior to Zadzi, you know, helping him escape.

And that was used as a way to really talk about the captivity of the Cherokee people in stockades during the, the Indian removal.

- Removal time.

Well, theme the, the, I'm fixed on this monkey.

I'm sorry, but tell us, tell us what the monkey did.

How was the monkey special?

I mean.

- Well, you know, Edgar was held captive for much of his life.

And then all of a sudden was able to experience freedom when he was, when Zadzi freed him, he kinda came and went as he wanted to.

And throughout the book, we, we think we hear Edgar.

We rarely see Edgar in the book.

And so he is just kind of a reminder for Cowney, our protagonist, of this balance of, of freedom and captivity.

And we, we have to, at one point we realize that Zadzi, hadn't seen Edgar for awhile.

And so we have to wonder what has happened.

- What has happened to him.

Well, I'm still wondering, and, but a wonderful, wonderful character.

Well, let's, let's talk about some of the important characters and Lishie is maybe the most important for me anyway, the character.

Tell us about her.

- Yeah, sure.

So she is a very typical Cherokee grandmother, at least in my experience.

She is raising Cowney, like I mentioned, after the death of his parents.

And she, she wants to, to give him the tools that may lead to him, having more freedom in life, helping him, you know, pursue college perhaps, but all, but also she's a very traditional grandma in the sense that she provides a safe place for him to be.

- She's deeply religious.

- She is, she's Christian.

And that is also.

- Is that unusual?

- Not at all.

It's surprising to folks who aren't familiar with our community, how embedded Christianity is in our community, but it serves as not an antithesis to Cherokee spirituality, it's.

- What was her favorite song?

- Oh, "Amazing Grace".

I'm not singing it if you're getting [laughs].

- At least read it for us.

I'll sing along with you.

- Okay.

Well, I'm so glad you're filming this.

Okay.

[foreign language] - Amazing grace, how sweet the sound?

How about, how about Kelly's uncle Bud?

- Bud.

Yeah, so, Bud when we first meet Bud, he is angry and we don't really know why.

He's hard on Cowney.

He, it appears that he doesn't have a lot of faith in Cowney to become much of anything.

- We haven't learned that Cowney's I guess, handicapped.

Tell us about that.

And then come back to what uncle Bud does with that.

- Yeah.

So when Cowney was born, he was born with, with a deformity to his foot that leads him to limp a lot, right.

And unable to serve in the military.

And that's almost an affront to uncle Bud that, that this nephew can't serve in the military.

He treats him as if he is less than for that.

Once we get to know Bud, though, we, we realize there's a lot more going on that causes him to respond to Cowney in this way.

And that was something that evolved as I was writing, I had written Bud pretty flat early on as just a means of motivating Cowney out of the house.

But then I realized there's a reason why Bud is the way he is.

And I wanted to, to convey that a little bit better.

- A minor character getting back to the religious angle, is Preacher Man Davis.

There's not a lot of bad him except, but he is, but it is an important character.

- Yes.

He is similar to a lot of figures in these rural communities I think.

Someone that is kind of always there, he, he helps out when needed, but there's not a lot of conversation in terms of, you know, making him a hero for these reasons, right?

Like he just does the work.

He is there to support and, and also he's supportive of Cowney in his growth.

We don't see a lot about that, but if you really step back and look at the actions that Preacher Man takes, he he's supportive.

- Well, he introduces Cowney, our reintroduces Cowney to Essie, his love interest.

And I want you to talk a little bit about Cowney and, and, and Essie's relationship.

- Yeah.

Thank you for asking that question.

I love this relationship with the two of them, because when I have to explain the relationship in a couple of words, I can't, it's a pretty complex one.

You know, Cowney at first is enamored with Essie.

She's beautiful and smart.

And he is awkward and a teenage boy.

And, and he really falls for her, but also in a, in a way in which they build this special relationship.

They find this room at the Grove Park where they spend their free time playing games and.

- These are servants in the, and, and they're Indian.

So they've appropriated a room in this luxury hotel.

- Mm-hmm.

Yes.

- Where'd you get that idea?

- I wanted them to build their own culture within the Grove Park.

So they're bringing their Cherokee culture with them, but they're also in this new culture of the Grove Park.

And I wanted to show what that looks like when those two come together and what you create out of that.

So you'll notice in the room, there are references to games and art and music, dance, all of those things that really build culture.

- This is where their relationship blooms, I guess, but not really.

I mean, it doesn't really never flowers.

- It doesn't flame in the way that some people may want it to play.

- Why did you disappoint us?

- I have to say I had a, I have a colleague that I teach with, and she walked by me the other day in the hall and she looked at me and she said, I hate Essie.

And she, because she's just mad that relationship did not go the way that some readers wanted.

I wanted to be real about it.

I wanted readers to maybe see themselves more in the characters, the normal, because how many 19 year olds, you know, experience that intense of, of a situation and you know, what they want happens.

And they get it for the rest of their life.

You know, life doesn't necessarily work out like that.

But I also wanted to make the comment that relationships can be really important.

They can be incredibly significant and not be labeled as, you know, romantic, solely romantic that, that we can have a variety of relationships in our life that are incredibly important.

- Were you headed, I'm sure you dove into your experiences and the people that you knew, but is, is in you, any of these stories, the least bit autobiographical?

- I mean, all writers are a little bit autobiographical in that.

I think about how I would react if I were those characters and I've certainly left home before, right?

And the Grove Park is kind of like Yale, [laughs] but, you know, I wouldn't say completely.

I wouldn't say there's anything specific that's autobiographical.

I think a lot about my students though, when I was writing this, especially because of the ages of the characters, the, the two main characters.

And I think about the decisions that, that my students are making as they in their high school careers.

- Well, talking about the [indistinct] family.

It's also breaking away from the book a little bit.

Will you tell us about your family?

- I'm married to my husband, Evan, who is a former history teacher.

So he checked me on a lot, but he works in school administration now.

And we have two boys, Ross and Charlie, they are 12 and eight and they are a handful, especially Charlie.

So we're, I, well, our whole family is pretty active, so we're always playing sports and outside and everything.

- We've just got a minute or two left, but talk to us about the status of the Cherokee, the Cherokee community in the boundary, within the boundary and what's happening there.

Has the gaming industry been a positive or there's some consequences?

- Sure.

Yeah.

When gaming came to the Eastern band, it, it completely changed, you know, our, our way of life in a lot, in a lot of positive ways.

And we became, we were able to finally be more economically sovereign and viable and make decisions that ultimately protected our culture and things like language revitalization.

We took back over our hospital system and our school system in ways that have, have been extremely positive for our community.

So we were able to reinvest.

- So you're, I guess we're running out of time, but you're positive about Cherokee experience.

Now, and you are enrolled member, but you're not full blooded.

- Right.

Well, let me say this.

If you are Cherokee, you are Cherokee.

You don't talk about blood degrees or anything like that.

And especially if you're from a Cherokee community and have that ancestral history, that that's, that's just how it is.

- What a treat for us to talk about the first book, first novel published by an enrolled member of the Eastern band of the Cherokee and what a book it is and what an author.

Thanks so much.

- Thank you so much.

Well, our guest, on North Carolina Bookwatch has been, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, author of "Even As We Breathe".

We want to thank Flyleaf Books for hosting us in their popular Chapel Hill store.

Thanks to you for watching.

Check our webpage for more about our guests and upcoming programs.

And I'll be back here next week to introduce you to another one of our wonderful North Carolina writers.

See you then.

[mellow music] ♪ - Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.