SML_Vol.11-Iss.5 TRAVIS:Layout 1 8/26/11 2:42 PM Page 54
REVELATION OF THE ELDERS It sounds like a scene from a movie, really. A Native American elder takes a young boy under his wing, ostensibly teaches him how to how trap animals and build fires, eventually revealing that the young boy is, in fact, just like his teacher. “He looked at me and said, ‘You are a plain, red-blooded Cherokee,” Reed recalls. “He said, ‘You’re nothing else. You were born a Cherokee.’” While it’s easy to envision the boy immediately embarking on a vision quest, clutching a knife and wearing eagle feathers in his hair, the revelation brought nothing quite so dramatic. The young Reed took the news in stride and with a surprising amount of basic acceptance. He simply went to school the next day, then came home and tended the chickens on the family farm. “People ask me all the time what that was like,” Reed says. “I just don’t know. I’d never had another life. I’ve always lived the life of the Cherokee, because that’s how I was raised,” he says. His childhood, and that of his nine younger brothers and little sister, was, by his telling, no different from that of any other child growing up in a rural environment. For Reed, Cherokee life, perhaps, was just life as he understood it. And for 67 years, Reed has lived that life in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, just east of the North Carolina-Tennessee border, “excepting for those two years I was in the military,” he says. For as long as he can remember, Reed has fished the streams that flow through and out of the verdant wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park using flies he ties on his own. He carves bows out of sturdy but pliant branches of yellow locust and handtwists the sinew lines that form the strings. Now, more often than not, it’s his 12-year-old grandson who stretches those bows taut using his younger, more limber hands. “I always call him Jarvis,” Reed says of his young protegee. “But his name is Xavier.” With Jarvis at his side, Reed searches the banks of the rivers that he fishes, looking for flint- and hammer-stones to make arrowheads. “I make the arrowheads from flint, doing it the way that I was taught as a kid,” he says. “No 54
metal tools or nothing—just your bare hands and a big old river rock for a hammer-stone on a piece of flint.” This is the practical wisdom he’s learned from tribal elders like Kinsland, wisdom he crafts into simple maxims to pass on to the younger generations. “I’ve got an old saying that the larger the stone, the larger the flake, the smaller the stone the smaller the flake,” he says,
used to bring down invaders or dinner are now a souvenir from the Indian village tourists visited on summer break. The full-blooded Cherokee is employed as a mentor and historian to the curious, a possessor and maker of curio. But to Reed, the passing on of these traditions is like story-telling—it’s his way of preserving his heritage. He sometimes speaks to classes of school-age children and shows them what he
“I’ve also wondered, what is a hero? To me, it’s somebody I’ve learned something from, like Mr. Ray Kinsland. I learned right from wrong from him—the difference between a good life and a bad life. He told me that I had to make that decision myself. I’ve learned a lot from Mr. Kinsland.” — Bob Reed
CHEROKEE TRAVEL & TOURISM PHOTOS
explaining how to select the perfect tools for the job. “Then, you get that arrowhead chipped out to look like one, and then use the point of a deer antler to press the small edges off the flint, work the shoulders in and sharpen it.”
HONORING A TRADITION Reed says that, for him, the art of making bows and arrowheads is simply a way of honoring a tradition; what he crafts won’t likely end up embedded in the flanks of a buck any time soon. In fact, he spends much of his workday on Antique Row in Cherokee, “across from the KFC,” he says. There, he vends his wares and makes crafts that he sells to tourists. “They’re more or less just to hang around tourists’ necks,” he says of the arrowheads. And the bows he and his grandson fashion out of yellow locust wood during their afternoons together—do they make for an accurate shot? “I don’t know because I’ve never shot them,” Reed says. And that, in a way, reveals the modern truth of the proud and storied Cherokee tradition. The once-vital weaponry now finds its place as a showpiece on the wall, the tips of arrows once SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 11 • ISSUE 5
knows. For Reed, it’s natural to follow in the footsteps of his own mentor and teacher, showing younger boys the way of the natural world and the history of the Cherokee. “I enjoy teaching the younger ones,” he says. “My grandson now is learning to shoot the blowgun, and I’m trying to teach him everything I know. He’s trying to make arrowheads and doing woodcarvings and fishing—that’s what I love to do, too.”
INDIAN-STYLE When Kinsland revealed Reed’s heritage to him, he tethered the boy’s future to it with unequivocal strength. “My uncle Johnson Bradley—poor fellow, he’s at rest now—he and Mr. Ray Kinsman, in 1957, got me a job as a guide for visitors coming here to Cherokee,” Reed recalls. “And when I got older, I went to work at the Oconaluftee Living History Village as a guide and a craftsperson.” It was at that time that Reed began to really hone his traditional skills, the arrowhead-making, woodcarving, hand-crafted blowguns and blowgun darts, all of the skills that still sustain him today. “I’m good at just about all of it,” he says. He still makes an adept guide, he adds. “I