Overview

This work highlights local narratives that sustain traditions amidst historical silences, connecting cultural values to heritage tourism and Indigenous stewardship. The Cultural Heritage Resilience of the Great Dismal Swamp explores the cultural resilience of the Great Dismal Swamp, emphasizing narratives of local residents that sustain traditions amid historical silences. It connects cultural values, heritage tourism, and the legacy of freedom while advocating for landscape stewardship rooted in Indigenous practices. The book highlights how marginalized communities create empowering knowledge spaces to honor their heritage despite lacking external resources. The Great Dismal Swamp Region reflects rich historical and cultural heritage, with settlements like Mattoanoak, Bowers Hill, and Skeetertown, which have maintained ancestral lifeways. Despite historical silences about marginalized groups, community members create resilient cultural narratives that emphasize their connections to land and tradition, beckoning a return to their roots.

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9780761874386

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Reviews

When the question is asked, ""Why aren't they out there in nature?"", Dr. Christy Hyman's wonderful work responds, ""We're out there, and have been, by force and by choice. "" Her Dismal Swamp work isn't an ode to foreboding darkness, but rather a brilliant illumination shone on Black power in a wild place. -- J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature Hyman’s rich textual and visual re-mapping of the history of the Great Dismal Swamp makes clear how the oppressive conditions under which Africans labored in the swamps on behalf of colonial extractors paradoxically enabled the enslaved to craft the “navigational literacy” needed to attain freedom. -- Andrea Roberts, director of the Center for Cultural Landscapes, University of Virginia This book is short but sweet. In it, Dr. Christy Hyman braids together three strands of wise study: birds and plants; the shape of the earth; and the history of the brave people who sought freedom in the great swamp of northeastern North Carolina. Follow the thread with her, and see how different people have made, are making, and will make meanings out of this past. -- Ed Baptist, author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize and Avery O. Craven Award

Author Information

Christy Hyman is a digital humanist and environmental advocate with a PhD from the University of Nebraska Lincoln, who investigates African-American cultural assertion in the Great Dismal Swamp. Her fieldwork combines digital cartography and GIS to analyze socio-environmental issues, connecting historical and contemporary narratives. She has held faculty affiliations in the past with Mississippi State University and Cornell University and is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, where she leads a range of environmental justice projects around public heritage and community resilience.

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