Walking the Trail of Tears, DeLanna Studi retraces her ancestors’ steps in ‘And So We Walked’

In the 1830s, the United States forced the relocation of tens of thousands of Cherokee people from their homelands in the southeastern United States to Oklahoma. This ethnic cleansing, known as the Trail of Tears, led to an estimated 4,000 deaths and ended with European colonists occupying the Cherokee homeland. Now, one woman's journey to retrace her people's history on the Trail of Tears will be showcased in "And So We Walked," writen and performed by DeLanna Studi. The one-woman show directly faces the genocide that took place in our country.

"And So We Walked" will be playing at Arts Emerson from April 26 through April 30. Studi spoke with GBH's All Things Considered host Arun Rath about the journey that inspired the show. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: So first, let me ask you about what led to your decision to retrace the Trail of Tears. Is this something that Cherokee people do, or is this an original thing?

DeLanna Studi: For me, it was a dream I've always had. It was a missing puzzle piece, if you will. My father and his family grew up in Oklahoma, and they never talked about our life before the Trail of Tears. I was always curious about where our family had come from and that story behind my ancestors. So, it's something I've always wanted to do.

And I'm very lucky that the Cherokee Nation has a program called the Remember the Removal bike ride. It's a leadership program for Cherokee Youth, and it's where about 20 to 25 young Cherokee people retrace the northern route of the Trail of Tears on bicycles. So, it was in that process of learning about that, that I knew it was something that could be done. And so, I asked my father if he'd be willing to go on the trail with me. I had to strongly convince him, but he was finally able to say yes.

Rath: Wow. Is it something that, for people of his generation, they don't want to talk about it as much? Why was there the reluctance?

Studi: Well, my father is a boarding school survivor. He was forcibly removed from his family when he was nine years old and sent to, basically, a military school where he grew up without parents. Instead he had these teachers that were very strict in how they reared my dad. And so, survival for them was not saying anything about their culture, because my father is very lucky that when he did leave the boarding school, he was able to keep his identity and his language. Not many people did so, but he did that by keeping it inside of him. He purposely didn't teach me anything because I'm the first generation in my family not to go to boarding school. He was terrified I would go and have to suffer the way he did.

Rath: Wow. I can't even imagine that. He's kind of a survivor two times over.

Studi: Yes. What was fascinating about going on the trail with my father is he didn't want me to do research ahead of time. He wanted me to visit these places and just let my body have feelings, to see if there's something that was triggered inside of me — something we call blood memory. I could do research after I visit a place.

I like to hide behind my research. It makes me very happy, it's very safe. My father wanted me to be very vulnerable and be open to what was coming up. And I jokingly say, along the Trail of Tears, I saw my father come alive because so much of his life he had to hide whenever he was a young man. To be able to see him on the trail, visiting the places where we originated and talking to the elders in his first language, I got to see my father be his real, authentic self. It's the first time in my life that I've ever been able to do so.

Rath: Wow. I have to imagine, as a writer, it was probably hard not to do the research that you wanted to do. But, what happened? Did you have that experience that the land spoke to you in some way?

Studi: I did. It was really bizarre because I don't normally believe in these things because these are things that my father believes in. I'm a very scientifically minded person and so I love my research and It was very hard for me.

But there were places where I would go, and my body would feel disturbed on a visceral level, and I couldn't quite figure out why. And then I would find out this is the place where our ancestors were buried, or this is where my great, great, great grandmother was orphaned on the trail.

There'd be other instances where we'd be visiting just like a mundane spot of land that's not very noteworthy, but I would feel immense amounts of joy, and I'd find that's where our families intersected again — because there were so many different Trail of Tears, and at one point they would intersect and they would get to reconnect together. I'd have these moments of joy in these plain places and I didn't understand why until I got home and read the journals that the Cherokee Nation had given me to research.

Rath: Talk about that next stage. You're a writer, and I imagine it's one of the ways you understand the world. Did you go into this thinking that you were going to come out it with a creative work? Or, how did this one-woman show come together?

Studi: I knew it was going to be a creative work. I knew it was going to be a one-person show just because it's always easier to travel with. I didn't realize it was going to be such a personal story. I really thought it would be about the people I met along the trail, but my producer-director, Corey Madden, she asked, "Where is your dad?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "Well, he was on the trail with you, but he's nowhere in your script." And I jokingly say, "We're not the Kardashians and no one cares." And she was the one that pointed out to me that people wanted to know about this contemporary Cherokee family reconnecting with their history and their past. And also, how do you overcome historic trauma?

And at the time, I was going through my own personal trauma. I was involved in a terrible car accident and I hadn't told my father about it, and it was slowly eating away at me. So through the course of the Trail of Tears, I had to reclaim my past traumas and also relive the historical trauma that my great, great, great grandparents had faced. In a weird way, it's what led to my healing and led to a better understanding of who I am as a Cherokee woman now. It helped me eliminate all these preconceived notions of what a Cherokee woman should be.

Rath: Well, it sounds like doing this has changed you.

Studi: It really has. I don't want to jinx it, but I do say for the better. I have a clear understanding of who my father is and why he reared us the way he did, and I've learned to forgive him for not teaching me a lot of things about the Cherokee way of life. He did teach me through observation — if I observed him doing things, I learned — but he never actively taught me. And I didn't understand where he's coming from and why he tried to protect me the way he did.

It's really brought our relationship to the next level where we have a new respect and love for each other that we didn't quite have before. It's also helped me understand the dynamics between him and my mother. My mother is not Cherokee, but to understand their relationship at a different level and also how he reared me as a child versus how he is rearing my sister's children, his grandchildren, and the difference in the way he treats us.

You can see that it's healed him as well because he's no longer set in the ways that were enforced in him at a young age at the boarding-school level.

Rath: DeLanna, It has been such a pleasure speaking with you. It's such an amazing story and I just want to encourage everybody to go and see this. Thank you so much.

"And So We Walked" is playing at ArtsEmerson from April 26 to April 30.