My Ozarks Documentary Film Series

My Ozarks is a collection of short, intimate portraits of real people, places and experiences in The Ozarks.

Season Two: Reparative History

Honoring the Past to heal the present and dream the future

This season of My Ozarks features the histories of The Ozarks that are lesser known, less visible, and most in danger of being forgotten or erased. Our aim is to bring communities closer together through respectful recognition of our shared past, acknowledging both the proud and shameful pasts that we inherit. We believe this work of metabolizing the past can strengthen the social fabric, build bridges of trust, cooperation, and healing across differences, and help to unify, nourish, and sustain community wellbeing.

Episode 11: Erin Whitson

This episode introduces Archaeologist Erin Whitson, the first in her field to focus on finding and interpreting historic encampment sites along the Trail of Tears to learn what the experience was like for people walking the path westward.

The Film

A film directed by Gabriel Hunter Sheets, Director of Photography Jesse Bader, filmed on location in Crawford County, Missouri. Presented by Ozark Vitality, in partnership with the Steelville Trail of Tears Remembrance Committee. Major funding provided by Missouri Humanities.

The Back Story

Archaeologist Erin Whitson

Growing up in Steelville, Missouri

Erin Whitson’s family arrived in Steelville, Missouri around the time it was founded in 1835. Other than leaving for college, she has lived in Steelville for much of her life. As Erin described her town, “we have people here who would give the shirt off their back if you needed it. They might not have anything themselves. But they know there are people who need help more than they do. We depend on one another in a lot of really intense ways. I think that makes us stronger as a community, but it also sometimes means you might not trust an outsider because they haven't been through hell with you. We can't always depend on the outside world, but we'll depend on each other.”

Erin has experienced the challenges of living in a small town nearly two hours from a major city. As a child, she was rushed to a hospital 30 miles from Steelville, where they discovered dangerously high blood sugar levels. They gave her apple juice for hydration, which nearly put her into a diabetic coma. She had to be rushed by ambulance to St. Louis where she stayed in a hospital for several days. As Erin recalls, “It was earth-shattering. The whole world changed. You don't know much at age seven, but you can tell when your mom starts crying at the doctor's office things are not good. Something scary is happening.”

When she got back home to Steelville and returned to her classroom, she felt weird being treated differently. While most people were helpful, some kids didn’t want to touch her because they thought she might be contagious.

Erin says being away from home for college was tough “because you miss home, and it's so far away that you can't visit much, and even the rocks look different. The sky looks different. The way people act, in some cases, is different. The way people speak is different. I have to code-switch a lot. I have been told in the past, you just don't belong here.”

Each time Erin came home from school, she felt like she didn’t quite fit the same. “I've had people who look at me and say, ‘you went to school to be a ditch digger. You paid for that?’ People don't understand. People have asked, ‘can't you just do something normal, like teach or something?’ which hurt. That's not what I wanted to do, and it felt like I was being asked to cram myself back into a mold that just didn't fit anymore.”

The way Erin sees it now, it's been character-building. “It’s like blacksmithing, making a sword. It takes a lot of beating the hell out of the sword to make it as hard and as sharp as it needs to be to function. That's how I look at all of the hard knocks. I’m just trying to get to a place where I'm sharp. I like operating in Steelville because I get to share the academic part of me with the Steelville part of me in ways that are enriching for me. I get to geek out and it's about stuff from here. And so people here, even if they don't get the archaeology part, they get to geek out about home too, which is special.”

Falling in Love with Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of human beings in the past. Erin says, “There are some things we can never know, but you may be surprised how much we can learn looking at trash. That's the one thing people usually leave behind. Archaeologists have to get creative, finding patterns in pieces of junk that people have thrown out. There are moments where you can see human emotion, or you have moments when you're looking at broken pieces of pottery and you see a fingerprint from thousands of years ago and you're like, oh, sh*t, they're human beings.”

Erin fell in love with archaeology as a history major in college when she first experienced fieldwork. It was muddy and cold, in the middle of winter.  But when she got to touch something that someone else hadn’t touched for hundreds of years, she felt a connection. Even if it was just eggshells that someone cracked open to make food at some point, it felt special.

As a PhD student in New York, Erin was homesick and wanted to do something that would connect her with her hometown of Steelville, Missouri. She knew the Trail of Tears crossed through Steelville. She knew there had been projects on the detainment camps where Native people were held before they went off, and projects trying to trace the roads that they were on. But she had never seen a project focusing on what the experience was like on the Trail. One of her professors told her it couldn’t be done.

As Erin described it, “Suggesting that I'm dumb for even thinking about it makes me grit my teeth and go ‘watch me’. So, I thought through the process. You've got people here and people have stuff, and so they're going to leave some kind of footprint. It might be really hard to find. It might be very ephemeral, but they're going to be here. And if you've got over 10,000 people coming through in the span of a few months, there are going to be things that break. Steelville is about the midway point on the Trail and so things are going to start wearing out. And yeah, they're going to try to repair what they can. But there are some things they can't repair and that's going to be discarded. There are going to be things that fall out of pockets or off coats or things like that. My thought was also, if we can do this for the Oregon Trail or the Santa Fe Trail, why can't we do it for Trail of Tears?”

Erin wasn’t sure where to start, so she began picking apart the problem. She asked herself what the Cherokee might have brought with them, whether they were likely to spread out or stay in family groups, whether there would have been a physical separation between the Cherokee and their enslaved people, and whether they might have kept wagons with the camps.  As Erin described the process, “Anyone who's ever been on vacation knows that you don't take everything out of the car at the end of the day. You just take the things you need right into the hotel. What are the things they need? We don't even know that much because there are no accounts. So I thought, maybe we could start looking at the materiality of removal.”

Learning from the Trail of Tears

Erin describes the Trail of Tears as, “a massive push by the United States government to push all Native peoples out of the Southeastern United States, made up predominantly of five major tribes including the Cherokee, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, the Muskogee, and the Seminole. They had been on their homelands for thousands of years. They were birthed there, their ancestors were buried there, it was in their bones. To be ripped away from it, violently in some cases, it was incredibly traumatic. A lot of times they were taken out of their homes at nighttime, so they couldn't run into the hills. There are stories of children being scared and running into the woods and soldiers not letting parents go after them, of older folks who were so frail they couldn't move, and soldiers telling families they had to leave them.

A lot of these people had been taken in May and June, without being allowed to collect their clothing, without having shoes, without being able to collect their livestock, their personal effects. They were kept in camps in one of the hottest seasons the Southeast had ever seen. It was so hot there were horses tethered in the sun that were reported passing out from heatstroke and dying. That's how hot it was. And the vast majority of people who were in these camps didn't have shelters.

They were forced to cross half a continent in a few months, mostly by foot, crossing creeks and streams that didn’t have bridges, and crossing the Midwest in the dead of winter, at the height of a cholera outbreak. When they got to Indian Territory, they didn’t have the supplies the government promised and had more problems with disease and starvation and not understanding the landscape and the weather patterns. Ultimately, about one-fourth of the population died.”

According to Erin, “The most important thing to understand about the Trail of Tears is that it was perpetuated against human beings. A ton of children lost their lives before their time. There were a ton of older folks who lost their lives before their time. Whole generations weren't born because of this. The scale of things is so enormous that you forget that you're dealing with human beings. When you break it down into individual stories, then it starts to steal your breath and you can't imagine how horrible this would have been…the things this would have left behind in the generations that survived.

There are moments when this work eats at my soul. Staring at death all day will do that to you. But there's something rewarding and something sort of like a quiet activism that you can have by just turning the flashlight onto the problem. This is horrendous. We never want to get to a place where we feel comfortable with things like that. Part of being human is being uncomfortable sometimes.”

Why this Work is Important

As Erin describes the significance of this work, “By the time they got to Steelville, they would have been old hands at setting up and breaking down encampments. So, where they're setting up and the landscape tells us something, and it speaks powerfully to how they kept as many people alive as they possibly could while undergoing this vast journey across the United States. The way their leaders were leading them speaks to some of that, too. There's a fine line between going so fast that people are dying of exhaustion and accidents, and going so slow that people are dying of malnutrition and disease. So, we’re trying to figure out ways to find these places so that we can protect them from things like road work or cell towers going in, or cities expanding. I think it’s really important because these are nonrenewable resources. These are graves. These are encampments that speak to a really important time in our history that need to be preserved as much as we can.”

For over three years, Erin and her team of volunteers have been working under the guidance of partners in the Cherokee Nation and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. Per their guidance, the work has included only non-invasive methods like drone photography, magnetometry, ground penetrating radar and metal detection. Although they had initially planned to shovel-test some of the objects, those plans have been deferred until their Tribal partners are comfortable. As Erin says, “I respect that. I won't ever be able to put myself in their shoes because I'm not Cherokee and not living in the 19th century…As an archaeologist, it's my job to make sure their ancestors who were there are not disrespected any further.”

Like many small towns in the Missouri Ozarks, Steelville was built upon extractive industries, with logging and mining continuing today. Like in other small towns, many families face persistent poverty and food insecurity, and it can hard to prioritize history preservation when you can’t put food on the table for your children in the present. Nonetheless, many townspeople recognize the importance of acknowledging Steelville’s history, even the difficult parts, and have come together to form the Steelville Trail of Tears Remembrance Committee.

The land Steelville was built upon has cultural significance for at least 25 Native groups, including the Osage, Otoe-Missouria, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee, who were all pushed out as a result of colonial, territorial, state, and federal policies. The Remembrance Committee acknowledges and appreciates that these people may have a continued and sincere relationship with the land, and additionally acknowledges that much of our country and institutions were created and built on the backs, blood, and sweat of enslaved laborers, brought to this country against their will and forced to watch their loved ones sold off as chattel. Through this land acknowledgement, the Remembrance Committee hopes to express their recognition of past wrongs and show their hope that we can all do better now and in the future.

Their mission is to honor the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), their enslaved people and all others who were forced to walk the Northern Route of the Trail of Tears through the Steelville area. They are working to implement a monument showing respect to the men, women, and children who died and were buried along the Trail through Crawford County, at the same time recognizing the strength and resiliency of those who made it to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.

Want to help place a Trail of Tears memorial in Steelville?

DONATE TO the Steelville trail of tears remembrance committee with Venmo

The Steelville Trail of Tears Remembrance Committee is raising money to place a permanent monument at a historic encampment site in Steelville. Renowned Cherokee and Pawnee artist Daniel HorseChief has created the conceptual design for a 10-foot bronze statue titled “The Trail”. The statue depicts a falcon rising from tears and flames like an ascending phoenix, with figures representing the diversity of human experiences along the Trail of Tears. The artist is currently working on a related monument, commissioned by the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, representing the Cherokee Nation’s resurgence. The proposed monument in Steelville will have national significance, linking the path through Missouri to the Cherokee’s resurgence in Indian Territory.

The Filmmakers

Photos by DLiNX Media

Gabriel Hunter Sheets, Director. Gabriel is an award-winning director native to St. Louis, Missouri. Gabe has been directing ambitious projects since his teenage years. At 15 years old, he directed an award winning 30-minute short film that was highly publicized for its high production value, which included shutting down city streets to film chase scenes filled with extras and stunts. Since adolescence, Gabe has focused on making projects that are of high caliber and that are always deeply personal.

Jessica Ambuehl, Producer. Jessica hails from the Midwest but has made global impact with her heart to serve. She has traveled all over the world for nearly twenty-five years working in the capacity of a photojournalist, producer, and actress. Jessica comes baring enormous experience from her work with national companies like Mastercard, NBC Universal, United Airlines, Ameren, Ebay, and Marriott. Each of the projects she chooses to work on speaks to her mission to tell stories with purpose that give a voice to the broken. Learn more at JessicaAmbuehl.com and underthetreedesigns.org.

Jesse Bader, Director of Photography. Jesse Bader is an accomplished filmmaker born and raised in the St. Louis region. Jesse has served as the director of photography on nearly a dozen short films and has experience in the camera department on several highcaliber feature projects. With his extensive experience, Jesse also brings a singular eye for capturing the human faces and the environments they inhabit.

Jamison Sweet, Production Sound Mixer. Jamison has been a Production Sound Mixer for nearly 20 years after serving in the Marines for 15 years. Having worked on hundreds of productions from feature films, commercials, documentaries, reality television, corporate videos, he has the experience to capture the best audio possible. Jamison is a member of the IATSE Local 493, Audio Engineering Society, and Cinema Audio Society and brings unmatched talent and experience to the role in the St. Louis region.

Production film crew on the final day of filming

Behind the Scenes Photography by DLiNX Media

Find them at @dlinxmedia on social platforms.

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