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.

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