Read the beginning of "Forethoughts" from Up from These Hills: Memories of a Cherokee Boyhood by Leonard Carson Lambert Jr. As told to Michael Lambert:

"When I was young my father, Leonard Carson Lambert Jr., told us “poor stories” about his experiences growing up as an Indian on and near the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in the mountains of western North Carolina. He told these stories to contrast the conditions in which he was raised with our comparatively comfortable upbringing. I caught glimpses of the world of his youth during our annual visits to my grandparents who lived on the reservation. I still remember visiting their house in Birdtown in the early 1960s. It was an old small house nestled on a hillside just above the main road. I remember dodging chickens as I walked along a narrow path that went over a stream to the outhouse. I also remember the cove where my grandfather built the family home in the 1930s. It was still standing in the late 1990s, and every so often we would trek over the Oconuluftee River and follow the road up the mountainside to see it. Despite the fact that over the years additions had been made to the original house, it remained a modest structure until it was taken down in the late 1990s, essentially the same as the one my father knew when he was a boy. The home was nestled at the foot of a small cove that gently rose behind the house up the mountainside. You could still see the garden beds that once nourished my father’s family. I could easily imagine my father and his siblings playing on the mountainside while my grandfather tended to cattle in the barn and my grandmother washed clothes in a washbasin in the back of the house.

The authors of this book, my father and I, are both enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. My father assembled the draft on which this book is based because he wanted, as best he could, to tell the truth about what it was like to grow up in his parents’ house. He wanted to set the record straight. After my grandfather died in 1993, stories emerged that the family had succeeded because my father and his siblings were encouraged by their parents to pursue higher education. This ran counter to my father’s memories. As will become apparent from the text that follows, he does credit his parents for the success of their children, but at the same time he remembers his parents as having been indifferent to the education of their children. My father, for example, remembers that his mother did not send him to school until he was eight. Later in his life my father attributed the deterioration of his relationship with his mother, in part, to her inability to forgive him for leaving the mountains of North Carolina to pursue an engineering degree at North Carolina State College. As flattering or not as the picture might be, he wanted tell the story of his parents with as much honesty as possible so that my generation of the family could more fully understand what it was like to grow up in his parents’ household during the first half of the twentieth century."

Leonard Carson Lambert Jr. grew up on and around the reservation of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during the 1930s and 1940s. He earned his engineering degree at North Carolina State College and worked for Alcoa throughout the world. Michael Lambert earned his doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University and is currently associate professor of anthropology and African studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both are enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.