A few weeks ago, I reread Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle’s debut novel Even As I Breathe for class. When I initially read the novel back in 2023, I found it engaging and important, but I did not really get into it until about halfway through the novel when the various threads throughout the story started to come together. This time, though, the book grabbed mu attention and led me to think about a lot of things that I have been contemplating over the past few years, specifically the ways we construct the past and the ways that the past exists even when we don’t want too recognize it or even think about it.

Before Cowney Sequoyah even tells us his story, he exhorts us to think about our sense of place and memory. He begins by stating, “About the place — when I take you there or when you find it on your own, just know that what the old folks say is true.” Cowney, over the course of the novel, will lead us to the “place,” his home in Cherokee, North Carolina. He will show us the land, and when he shows us the land, the place, we will know see what the old folks say.

Cowney continues by pointing out that wherever we walk, we walk on a foundation of the past. This past exists whether or not it appears in writing or if it gets passed down orally from generation to generation. No matter what, it exists. He tells us, “This land is ours because of what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper.” For many, if a person or even does not appear on paper or in print, the person didn’t exist or the event didn’t happen. Yet, that is not the fact. As well, the use of “ours” to describe the land, juxtaposed with words on paper, points out that even with “legal” documents that seek to erase individuals and history, the paper does not do that. The people still exist, on the land, beneath the land, as part of the land.

This latter part, of appearing on paper, holds important significance in the novel since Cowney is Cherokee. His ancestors were able to resist removal by hiding out, but the government, as he mentions, forcibly removed others, pushing them off of the land. This occurred, of course, not only with the use of weapons and physical violence but also with words inscribed on paper, whether that be legislation, court cases, or even cultural representations of Indigenous individuals in literature, poetry, or newspapers.

At multiple points, early in the novel, Cowney points out the ways that words on paper create and shape meaning but do not detail everything. He relates how Lishie, when the Goat Man peddler came through town, would buy him things, including a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. When she “damn near burned Ulysses” because it harmed her “conservative religious practices,” though, Cowney says that perhaps “the bunting-esque spirits of a fairy tale were somehow godlier than man’s quest fro godliness.” In the “fairy tales,” or on the “classics,” Cowney saw depictions of faraway lands that merged, in ways, with the forest he inhabited in Cherokee.

Even though these books depicted “Hawthorne’s’’ darkness” in the forest or the romantic atmosphere of “Sherwood Forest,” they did not depict the hollers and mountains of North Carolina where he resided. That place, the place he tells us that he will take us, “was a wood not yet known in literature or picture shows.” It did not appear on the page, at least in the saw way that Hawthorne’s foreboding woods or Robin Hood’s picturesque Sherwood Forest did. Instead, if Indigenous individuals and the forests appeared on the page, it came in the form of stereotypes or with the belief, as Sol tells Cowney later, that no Cherokee or Indigenous person lives on the land anymore, the Vanishing American. Cowney provides the voice of place, and he does so to give voice to himself and those and he loves and so that we can understand “the stories of this place.”

Even though the place did not appear in words on the page, it existed. Even though the people did not appear in the words on the page, they existed. Conwey continues his prologue by telling us that lies “buried” beneath our feet in this place is not what we always think. “It’s just the beginning,” he says. It serves as the start of the story and as “the beginning of all of us who call ourselves Homo sapiens.” The land and what lies beneath is us. It tells us who we are in this world. Where we came from. Where we will go. It tells Cowney that he was not who he thought he was, “[a]nd neither was this place.”

To understand a place, and to understand ourselves, we must understand the past. We must understand and acknowledge the bones that reside in the soil. The bones interred there centuries ago, long before we even form in the womb, fertilize the earth with their stories, with their essence. They say to us, “We were here. We remember this place.” And they call to us, “Remember us.” When we stop telling the stories of those who came before, of those who lie beneath the dirt, becoming one again with the soil, then they cease to exist. They experience a second death, one where they can rise again, as long as someone remembers and tells their stories.

Cowney ends the prologue looking back on his life. He thinks about Essie Stamper and the ways he remembers her following her death. He ponders “what remains of her here . . . for me . . . for anyone who knew didn’t know her.” Her body has gone back to the earth, but does that mean she has gone too? He then asks, “What happens to the memories? How long do they survive?” The memories maintain, as long as someone relates them to those they know. Thus, Essie remains, as along as she moves from person to person. She, along with the love he felt her, remains, “but only if we continue to tell its story.”

Even As We Breathe contains a lot of layers dealing with memory and the past. It focuses on the personal story of Cowney Sequoyah and those he loves, but it also deals with a longer history, that of Cherokee Removal and the land. The stories Cowney heard about Removal impact him, and they lead him to feel empathy for others who suffer, notably Japanese Americans who the government places in concentration camps during the war. He tells us that this feeling comes from his own lineage which stirs emapthy within him. He says, “Empathy is fossilized in our bones.” The past, that has been relayed to him from generation to generation, makes him who he is and allows him to see the injustices being committed against others and to place those stories on paper for subsequent generations, ensuring that we will continue to tell the stories.

There is so much more to say, including the fact that Sequoyah’s last name is a reference to Sequoyah, the creator of the Cherokee Syllabary. However, I will leave it here for now. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.