Stuart Taylor: Reading and Signing

Join us on March 6 at 6 pm for an evening with Stuart Taylor. Taylor's Retracing the Keowee Trail: A Deep Map of The Cherokee Path in the History of the Carolinas explores the Cherokee Path’s role in trade, war, dispossession, and slavery. Blending history, memoir, and archaeology, it uncovers the layered stories of the Cherokee, settlers, and the enslaved who walked this trail, shaping the South’s past and present. 

Get a 10% discount on the book when you RSVP on Eventbrite and present it at the bookshop register!

RSVP

About the Book:

In Retracing the Keowee Trail: A Deep Map of The Cherokee Path in the History of the Carolinas. The story of the Cherokee Path that connected the low country of colonial Carolina with the Cherokee Nation. The Keowee trail was a busy trading route for a burgeoning deerskin trade between the Cherokee nation and the British Colony of South Carolina. Along this same path, epidemic disease made its way inexorably from the colony toward Cherokee society, reducing their population by more than half. Along this path, warfare was waged in both directions, by Cherokee war parties determined to defend their homeland and by settlers like my Scots Irish ancestors, evermore hungry for land. Dispossession of Native peoples was the necessary prelude to the advancement of slavery across South Carolina and the Southeast and so the enslaved ancestors of African Americans will forge a significant place in this story. 

A ‘deep map’ approach to the Keowee Trail opens up space for multiple viewpoints and perspectives, blending an array of genres and disciplines, including a trail journal of my own pilgrimage along the path. The concept of a ‘deep map’ assists in holding together multiple lines of perspective, including, memoir, family history, migration stories, religious history, indigenous wisdom, trauma theory, ghost stories, mythology, archeology, geography, the watersheds, and the flora and fauna of the Southern Appalachians.

About the Author:

Stuart Taylor, a Native of South Carolina is a retired Presbyterian pastor who served congregations in Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. He is a veteran peace and justice activist working with Witness for Peace in Nicaragua and as co-founder of No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization providing life-saving aid to migrants on the US/ Mexico border. He is co-author of St. Francis and the Foolishness of God. He lives in Elkin, NC.