Appalachian Education

The Appalachia Context

Appalachia commonly refers to a mountainous swath of the eastern United States that stretches in a southwestern direction from southern New York state to northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Home to 23 million people, the region's abundance of natural resources, from coal to timber, is among the richest in the world.

American Indians were the original settlers of the Appalachia region, arriving more than 12,000 years ago. European colonizers found their way to parts of the region by the 16th century, where they found agrarian communities controlled largely by Algonquian and Cherokee tribes. By the 18th century, Scotch-Irish migrants began settling in the central parts of the region. Beginning in the late 18th century, a series of colonial treaties and armed interventions drove much of the Indian population out of the region, a process that culminated with the 1838 removal of most of the Cherokee population to what is now Oklahoma.

Between 1840 and the U.S. Civil War, the region was populated, relatively sparsely, largely by subsistence farmers of Scotch-Irish, German, and English descent, and in addition—in central and southern regions of Appalachia—the slaves owned by a small percentage of them. Following the war, which brought many soldiers through the region who had never seen it before, the population began to grow, as did business interest in its resources. By the early 20th century, logging and coal mining companies were arriving en masse, often swindling large amounts of land from people who had been there for generations but who were unable to provide proof that they owned the land on which they resided. Thus continued a history of concentrated exploitation of Appalachian peoples and ecologies through land theft and extractive industry that continues today, ironically pressing upon a predominantly White community who, themselves, had been party to the exploitation of the region's original settlers.

These cycles of exploitation have resulted in a context of scarcity in many parts of one of the world's most natural-resource-rich regions: a scarcity of employment opportunities and living-wage work, a scarcity of local control of the region's resources, a scarcity of basic technological communications infrastructure, and a scarcity of equitable educational opportunity. They have led, as well, to a history of civic engagement and social action on the part of Appalachian peoples determined to respond to repression. Among the many forms of activism that have, in part, characterized the region since the 19th-century encroachment on Appalachia by extractive industry, the most prevalent have included movements for labor rights, environmental justice, and locally controlled liberatory education.

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