Did You Know?
There are over 14,000 signs on the Parkway, but no billboards! Photo by Vicki Dameron
Barbara Duncan
Education Director
Museum of the Cherokee Indian
Barbara R. Duncan, Ph.D., has published numerous books and articles on Cherokee history and culture including the award-winning Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook (coauthored with Brett Riggs), which received a Preserve America Presidential Award, and Living Stories of the Cherokee, a collection of contemporary Cherokee storytellers, which received the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award and World Storytelling Award. Duncan received the Brown Hudson Award from the North Carolina Folklore Society for contributions to the study of folklore in North Carolina. Duncan is also a songwriter and poet, with a book of poems, Crossing Cowee Mountain, published in 2008. She has two children, and one grandchild, and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
Presentation
Cherokee Heritage Trails
The Blue Ridge Parkway ends (or begins) in Cherokee. As you travel the Parkway anywhere from middle Virginia south you can look out at the vistas and know that everything in sight was once Cherokee territory. The Cherokee Heritage Trails project documents this rich history and is one of four heritage trails projects of the Blue Ridge Heritage Initiative, a partnership between the states of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia. This initiative brought together organizations and individuals involved in a broad range of activities, including arts, culture, historic preservation, recreation, economic and community development, planning, and natural resource management. It is this diversity in approach that allows a community’s culture and heritage to be experienced most authentically and most sustainably. The Cherokee Heritage Trails, as part of the Blue Ridge Heritage Initiative, won the nation’s first Preserve America Presidential Award for Heritage Tourism.
