Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Kimberly L. Becker has five poetry collections: Words Facing East and The Dividings (WordTech Editions), The Bed Book and Bringing Back the Fire (Spuyten Duyvil), and Flight (MadHat Press). Her work appears widely, including Indigenous Message on Water, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits, Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging, and 23 Tales: Appalachian Ghost Stories, Legends, and Other Mysteries. Poetry Daily featured “Rivering,” the title poem from her sixth manuscript. Her seventh manuscript in progress is based on the Cherokee Uktena story. www.kimberlylbecker.com

I am mixed heritage, including and identifying Cherokee, although not an enrolled member of a sovereign nation. I am from the Southeast (born in Georgia, raised in North Carolina) and have always had a mystical relationship with water. I both fear and revere it. I was caught in an undertow at the Atlantic Ocean as a child. I caught my first trout in a mountain stream. Years later, I would taste trout caught fresh from the Oconaluftee River in Cherokee, NC. I canoed the northward-flowing New River. In Cherokee spirituality, going to water is an important prayerful tradition.

Blue Hole Spring is located in what is now Red Clay State Historic Park, site of the last seat of Cherokee government before the 1838 enforcement of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 by the U.S. military, which resulted in The Trail of Tears. It is the source of water for the Councils of 1832-1837. The Cherokee believe that the streams that come from mountains are the trails by which we reach the underworld and the springs at their heads are the doorways by which we enter it, but to do this one must fast and go to water and have one of the underworld people for a guide.  https://tnstateparks.com/parks/info/red-clay