“This idea of community is so important. Community holds you; it surrounds you. And so, if you believe as many native people believe, that everything around us in creation is alive and it's filled with spirit and with consciousness, and you are part of that great wheel of life…”
“I can say most of the things that have really strengthened me are not pleasant. I would never want to experience them again. And if I had any of my druthers, I would never have gone through them.”
Dr. Elle High
A little bit about Dr Ellesa Clay High by way of introduction: Ellesa was born and raised outside of Louisville, Kentucky. She got her Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1981, when she came to West Virginia, she started teaching at WVU. Dr. High remains an emerita associate professor in the English department where she taught Appalachian literature, Native American literature, and creative writing. Dr. High helped to found WVU’s Native American Studies Program in the early 1990s, chaired the program for seven years, and remains active in it today. She is also a chairperson of the Committee for Native American Ministries within the WV United Methodist Church and work on a regional level
on Native issues. Ellesa is a Cherokee descendant and active within a Shawnee community located in WV and Ohio. She lives on a farm outside of Bruceton Mills in Preston County, WV, which she shares with a wolfdog, three dogs, a cat, several chickens and ducks, an infamous goose named Mr. Man, a pony, and an Arabian stallion. Ellesa is also a mother, grandmother, sister, great auntie, and connected to the network of creation of everything and everyone who calls “her” farm home. At 72, Ellesa remains insatiably curious and hopes that she is evolving a little bit every day.
I
A roar over far hills tells you they are coming, sleeping over stone fans and cliffs a ridge away. The Standing People in their path sigh as the pass, clacking their branches, bowing their boughs, swinging their limbs with stampede.
And then they are here. You feel them as quick as you see them sometimes. Herds of white horses - flying across the hay fields tails stinging your face, chests plowing you under if you're not careful.
Azure-eyed Winter on the loose.
All day they pass bands twirling around the hills or clouding the meadows up yonder. Their hooves glitter when the sun comes out. If you approach too close, with a snort they will numb your face and take your breath away...
Elle has used literature, the story and struggles of others, to make sense of the trials of her own journey. Her stories grounded the students in the importance of place in identity. Her relationship to her land and the animals who share it with her are important in her spiritual growth and ability to deal with the tragedies and loss in her life. Revisiting the term resilience helped students to recognize that for some it is a long journey to come back to balance, to rebound from being knocked down. Once upon a time, resilience was a verb and the activity that would bring one back into balance. “Resilience, however, is not the same as going forward.” If we have been resilient, we will find ourselves starting again. Ellesa’s resilience lies in her relationship with language, the written and spoken word, the earth, animals and her faith.
Upon Paper With Pen
The art of words
Presented upon paper
The use of a pen
Creates a simplistic complex beauty
From heart
To mind
Through soul
Flows the words of creative truth
As you place the pen to paper
Words begin to glide
Glide ever so smoothly
One after another
Until a piece of art has formed
One after another
Until all to be said is done
One after another
Until the masterpiece is finished
By Shaylena Hess
This still life depicts the contentment Dr. High has had to learn to have within her life. Through her experience, High has a unique relationship with nature. This is represented by tree branches flowing from a handprint that overlaps a wolf dog's print. The dog’s print is also significant because of the connection she has with her own and the bond she has developed with him. By Brennah Staunton
The Trials that Strengthen Us
A Conversation is Ellesa Clay High
There is this great spiritual world that surrounds us. And when you have that connection with it, well, it's a whole different kind of living…
Dr. Ellesa Clay High started our conversation by giving thanks and recognizing the importance of our relationships with plants, minerals, animals, humans, and Mother Earth. “This idea of community is so important. Community holds you; it surrounds you. And so, if you believe as many native people believe, that everything around us in creation is alive and it's filled with spirit and with consciousness, and you are part of that great wheel of life…” Dr. High has recently retired from teaching English and literature at West Virginia University. She loves language and going deep in the meaning of words. She revisited the term resilience with our students to illustrate that for some it is a long journey to come back to balance, to rebound from being knocked down.
Once upon a time resilience was a verb and the activity that would bring one back into balance. Dr. High noted, “Resilience, however, is not the same as going forward. If we have been resilient, we will find ourselves starting again.” She has used literature, the story and struggles of others, to make sense of her own journey. Her stories grounded in her relationship to her land and the animals who share it with her. They are important to her spiritual growth and her ability to deal with the tragedies and loss in her life
Elle told us a story about her growing up grew up in rural Kentucky with two brothers and loving parents. A near tragic fall at eight years old, a near death experience, shaped her life. “I remember being in the coma. And it was wonderful. Euphoria and a peace…it opened… a spiritual portal. I started writing. I started having very vivid dreams and really thinking about things. I mean, it really changed me as a person. I was 14. I'd been in and out of the hospital… oxygen tents...”
Her survival was miraculous. Most people with her injuries died soon after such an accident. So, Elle considered that she was spared for a reason. It turned her into a very serious child who started asking questions about death and life’s purpose. Her serious nature led her to read and so grew her love for learning. Elle’s education brought the world to her bedside when she could not go out and play with other children. She remembered, “And it seemed like it was one thing after another until my parents finally gave way and got me the one thing I had asked for since being a baby. My mother told me the first word I ever said was ‘pony’ I didn't play with dolls. I played with toy horses. And that changed me. I really started to gain physical strength and (the pony) helped bond me with the rest of the creation. Without that horse, I don't think I would have made it; it allowed me some resilience.”
Elle used her challenges to show how they can make you stronger, and that without them we turn into “blobs of jelly” She pondered, “I can say most of the things that have really strengthened me are not pleasant. I would never want to experience them again. And if I had any of my druthers, I would never have gone through them.” Another story helped us understand how she relates to both the community that we can see all around us and the community that perhaps no one else sees, an invisible support system.
“I remember when my mother passed in the nineteen nineties; it was terrible. She had been ill for a long time. I was not there when she passed and that was hard. I carried a lot of grief, especially hard for the first few years. A friend of mine sent me a little gift talking about the spirit pony and the tradition of it, that this spirit guide [pony] would come and carry your grief. When you were ready to pass over, then that pony would be there for you to carry you.” That’s when a wolf named Blitz came into Elle’s life. “She [Blitz] carried this [grief] for me until I could carry the weight of it, that I could take it back and carry it. There is this great spiritual world that surrounds us. And when you have that connection with it, well, it's a whole different kind of living than if you're just by yourself somewhere and there's no rhyme or reason to what's happening. So, I think that that's part of not only resilience, but of going forward, that you find a spiritual way of working with your faith.”
Ellesa, now, lives on land that sings to her and cradles her loved ones. The land is one of her many relationships that gives her a sense of resilience.
Dr. High remains an emerita associate professor in the English department where she taught Appalachian literature, Native American literature, and creative writing. Dr. High helped to found WVU’s Native American Studies Program in the early 1990s, chaired the program for seven years, and remains active in it today. She is also a chairperson of the Committee for Native American Ministries within the WV United Methodist Church and work on a regional level on Native issues. Ellesa is a Cherokee descendant and active within a Shawnee community located in WV and Ohio. She lives on a farm outside of Bruceton Mills in Preston County, WV, which she shares with a wolfdog, three dogs, a cat, several chickens and ducks, an infamous goose named Mr. Man.
Mr. Man, the resident goose.
Past Titan Rock, a winner of the Appalachian Award for Literature, is available in a new edition as part of the series Sounding Appalachia, with an introduction by series editor Travis D. Stimeling.
In 1977 Ellesa Clay High thought she would spend an afternoon interviewing Lily May Ledford, best known as the lead performer of an all-female string band that began playing on the radio in the 1930s. That meeting began an unexpected journey leading into the mountains of eastern Kentucky and a hundred years into the past. Set in Red River Gorge, an area of steep ridges and box canyons, Past Titan Rock is a multigenre, multivocal re-creation of life in that region. With Ledford’s guidance, High traveled and lived in the gorge, visiting with people who could remember life there before the Works Progress Administration built roads across the ridges and into the valleys during the New Deal. What emerges through a unique combination of personal essay, oral history, and short fiction is a portrait of a mountain culture rich in custom, oral tradition, and song. Past Titan Rock demonstrates the depth of community ties in the Red River Gorge and raises important questions about how to resist destructive forces today.