The history of Appalachia is present in the current misinformation and stereotypical coverage in the region following Hurricane Helene. Image courtesy BPR.
While disaster workers were still carving out roads in washed away mountainsides after Hurricane Helene, some national publications focused instead on misinformation swirling in the communication-less region.
Many stories focused on rumors that the federal government sent the hurricane to the mountains to steal land instead of focusing on the needs of the people in the region.
For Appalachian scholars and locals, the news struck a chord from an old sad song of mountain stereotypes.
Meredith McCarroll, an Appalachian scholar from Waynesville, currently teaches in Maine, but came down to help after the storm.
“It felt like I just needed to set my eyes on what was actually happening. I think a lot of people who are away were kind of looping on the images that they're seeing on social media,” McCarroll said.
She said she saw a lot of people helping each other and was struck by just how severely the storm damaged or missed different parts of the region from holler to holler. Her family’s home in Haywood County was fine, but she witnessed the damage to homes in her community.
Lilly Knoepp
Haywood County's Frog Level business district on October 3. The area was damaged by the storm.
“I went and visited a friend in Henderson County…they lost everything. They had to take their house down to the studs. I mean it was just devastating and so really shockingly different just from county to county,” McCarroll said.
Her 19-year old son was in Haywood County during the storm taking an EMT course. He served on a FEMA Strike Team as his first clinical rotation. She said he asked her why the national media was so focused on the misinformation about FEMA after the storm - instead of seeing the important work they were doing.
“What I found myself wanting to tell my son was the history of the government coming in and taking land for things like building national parks and we're moving people from the land to say nothing of the native people who were here before settlers,” McCarroll said.
This history is just part of the region’s ethos. McCarroll, who studies the stereotypes of Appalachia, authored “Unwhite: Appalachia, Race and Film” in 2018, a book about how the region has long been “othered” as a majority white population that is unclaimed by other parts of the country because of “backwards” practices.
McCarroll cited the news of FEMA briefly pausing door-to-door operations after rumors that there was an armed militia threatening FEMA workers. FEMA operations were quickly resumed following the arrest of one Rutherford County man.
“That story I believe just got totally blown out of proportion. I think that very quickly FEMA was able to return and thankfully nothing actually happened and it was a very small, not representative group of people that were resistant to FEMA,” McCarroll said.
“And yet that story really took off both because it's a wild story that someone would be resistant to FEMA. But also I think it took off because it matches up with the stereotype of people from the mountains.”
The lack of communications combined with the vast 25-county area impacted by the storm created an information void that provided fertile ground for misinformation and grifters. The storm also became a political football as the November election drew closer with misinformation repeated by politicians including now President-elect Donald Trump.
“There are people who are misled and there, apparently, were a lot of people who were - I don't know, if they were eager to, or just willing to really latch onto some just conspiracy theories about the government,” McCarroll said.
Misinformation has continued since communication has resumed as people on social media have raised claims - and fundraising pages - faster than journalists and FEMA can fact check the stories.
A history of distrust
Local author and Eastern Band of Cherokee member Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle agreed that the narrative in the region after Helene has been blighted by stereotypes and misinformation.
“The narrative - that is coming from outside often - the politicized narrative feeds on that history of this area, this region, that reminds us that we can't always trust the government,” Clapsaddle said.
Her award-winning novel “Even As We Breathe” is fiction, but her perspective about identity and connection to Appalachia come from her own family history - both as tribal members and as Appalachians. The other side of her family hail from Swain County, one of the Western North Carolina counties that intersects with the Qualla Boundary.
Lilly Knoepp
The Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on December 15.
She said the lack of trust in Western North Carolina comes in part from the real history of federal overreach in the region.
The Eastern Band, of which Clapsaddle is a member, is the last remaining Cherokee in the region who escaped when the federal government removed Indigenous people from the region during the Removal Act. The actions of the federal government killed at least 4,000 people on the Trail of Tears.
Clapsaddle explained that the Removal Act happened despite a lack of unanimous support in the government.
“Even though, you know, one branch of the federal government was opposed to removal. The other branch did not care and did it anyway,” Clapsaddle said.
In 1832, U.S. Supreme Court ruled states did not have the right to impose regulations on Native American land. Despite the ruling, then-President Andrew Jackson didn’t enforce the decision, and the removal moved forward.
“So this mistrust that even our systems in place of checks and balances have not historically, always weighed out and I think now in the climate that we're in, there's so much challenge to that kind of rule of government now,” Clapsaddle said.
But this is not the only historical context for land being taken in Western North Carolina. Land has been taken through eminent domain or purchased for low costs to build federal projects like the National Park System and local dams.
In the 1920s and 30s there was a “flurry of land acquisition cases in support of New Deal policies that aimed to resettle impoverished farmers, build large-scale irrigation projects, and establish new national parks,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
There were 5,665 people who were displaced when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park(GSMNP) was built and they “deeply resented being forced out,” the federal website explained. Clapsaddle said she loves the park so it requires balance to hold that history.
“I love living so close to trails and all these wonderful things. And then on the other hand, I'm sometimes on these trails and see these remnants of displaced families and think, ‘Wow, you know, people gave up their lives for this,’” Clapsaddle said.
The balance points to a complexity that Clapsaddle said is part of American history.
“It is the story of America. How you balance personal well-being and economic survival - and its constant. It could be a lot worse, right? It's nice to have a national park as opposed to extractive mining. So you know there are some pluses to that but it is still a story of removing the original people for what this country thinks is in the best interest of everybody,” she said.
In recent years, the GSMNP has been working to tell the stories of the people who lived in the park, including Black people specifically through the African American Experience Project which was started in 2018 to include the stories of Black people in Western North Carolina into the history of the park.
“The Smokies realized that we weren’t looking enough into the Black history of the area. We know a lot of white settler history and Cherokee history, but we didn’t have that many Black and African American stories,” GSMNP’s Atalaya Dorfield told BPR in 2022. She explained that Black people have been in this area since the 1540s.
The development of the region has been a slow process with running water and electricity not reaching some homes in the region until the mid 1900s. In the 1950s, about 95% of the region had electricity, according to Plateau Magazine.
Infrastructure improvements came with a cost. Dams across the region were built to supply power but the land that was flooded to build these man made lakes once held homes and farmland for many.
In Swain County, for example, the Fontana Dam was built in the 1940s, to bring power to the area. The Tennessee Valley Authority called the dam “the miracle built in the wilderness,” but for some local residents, the construction was a long-unrecognized sacrifice.
The federal government promised the county a road to graves that were covered by the lake. The road, now known as the “Road to Nowhere,” was an unpaid debt until 2018 when the federal government paid $35.2 million to the county for the unfinished construction project.
“I want people to know that Swain County citizens made a huge sacrifice - a huge sacrifice - when they gave up their homes and left everything they had,” Chairman of the Swain County Board of Commissioners Phil Carson told BPR in 2018.
“I think having on both sides of my family history and this removal of families from home, of property taken, is something that is always going to be with me and always sits with me,” Clapsaddle said. “I think that it is just this deep sense of really belonging to a place and being of a place. And for me, it's not so much that somebody is gonna take it away from me. It's that somebody's going to harm this place. I think that's what really sits with me more.”
Clapsaddle said ultimately these histories inspire her to be even more connected to her community. After the hurricane, neighbors stepped up to help each other.
“What I actually do see is like a ray of light in disaster areas is that people work together, across differences, economic differences, political differences, racial social differences, and that, there's still that building blocking communities,” Clapsaddle said. “I want to know how we translate it. You know, how we carry that and kind of deafen the division noise that's happening in this country and how long we can sustain that spirit of cooperativeness, right? Because I think that that's, you know, at least we have the roots of it. I'd love to see how we can grow that.”
Community will rebuild
Across the region, community members stepped up after the storm in many ways: mutual aid organizations, nonprofits, churches or individual volunteers
Corey McCall, one of the owners of Outdoor 76, an outfitter store in Franklin, said the community response was immense.
“And I woke up on Sunday and I told my wife, I said, you know what I said, we've got to do something and so I just decided that we were going to pull an enclosed trailer to our business and told her, ‘I'm going to put a plea out for people to bring stuff, donations. And we're going to try to do what we can,’” McCall said.
About a week after the storm, people from across the community donated 70,000 lbs. of supplies. McCall and his team distributed the resources across Asheville, Old Fort, Curso, Spruce Pine, Burnsville, Black Mountain and other communities that were more severely damaged than Macon County.
Outdoor 76
Outdoor 76 shared this picture of supplies collected on October 5.
“We don't have to worry about all of the red tape or any of the strings that have to get pulled. We just stepped in, and it's not to say that that's anything bad about those other organizations. I just think that it speaks volumes to the number of people within the immediate community and beyond that wanted to step up and be able to help,” McCall said.
As Western North Carolina looks to the long road ahead, governments at all levels will have to work with these communities to rebuild. Clapsaddle wonders what resources will be required to move forward.
“I know on a good day before Helene, I couldn't find a plumber, right? So how do you rebuild all of these towns and cities?,” Clapsaddle asked.
“What is our tolerance to wait to fix things before people are like? ‘I can't wait, I'm out’…I know that communities have rebuilt during national disasters or natural disasters, but I worry about how quickly it will come in the next phase. When the real hard work begins, because we can take supplies and we can muck out house houses. But the rebuilding is the hard part.”
