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Q&A: Making a Home in a Region Founded on Displacement [1]
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Date: 2025-05-02
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Where are we from? For many people, the question is flawed from the outset. Looking back into our family histories, we find that our ancestors moved all over the place. They moved sometimes for work, sometimes for better weather, and sometimes because they had no other choice. Many of us come from migration.
The first account in “Beginning Again: Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia” comes from Claudine Katete, a Rwandan woman who spent twenty years walking to and living in refugee camps in Africa before moving to the United States in 2014. She’s now pursuing a degree at Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, Virginia, not far from the West Virginia border.
“Beginning Again” is an oral history project that gives us 12 stories of people who ended up in Appalachia for one reason or another — all told in their own words. Some, like Katete, come from far away. Others are from the region. But all their stories teach us about movement and migration: why people move, how they adapt, and how they’re treated when they arrive in a new place.
The book teaches us, too, about what makes Appalachia unique, and why someone from the hills of rural Virginia and someone from rural Sudan might have more in common than you’d expect.
Katrina M. Powell is a professor of rhetoric and writing at Virginia Tech, and the founding director of the university’s Center for Refugee, Migrant and Displacement Studies. She edited “Beginning Again” and in this interview reflects on what the book can teach us about each other, and ourselves.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Will Wright, The Daily Yonder: The stories in “Beginning Again” are really incredible. There are people who come to Appalachia from so many different circumstances — people from Rwanda, Syria, Sudan — and there are also people from the U.S. and from Appalachia included in the book. Did you notice any shared experiences, even as people came from such different places?
Katrina M. Powell: Yes, and this is one of the really exciting things about putting these narratives together: you can see them right next to each other. You see the commonality, either with forced relocation or decisions to move in moments of crisis. People who are fleeing from civil unrest or war really want safety and security for their family, and want to work and make a living and contribute to their communities. Folks who are languishing in refugee camps for decades, they want education. In Appalachia you’ve seen displacement from eminent domain law, from flooding, from the closing of coal mines.
Whatever the displacement moment is, people really want to protect their families, educate their children, have healthcare. Those are some of the commonalities.
Once someone leaves a situation, resettling is a whole other story. I think there’s a misconception sometimes that once you get to the United States, everything will be fine, but we see that’s not always the case.
DY: There’s a story about a woman from Syria that illustrates just how taxing the resettlement process is. When she arrived with her family, their housing in the U.S. was terrible. There were mice running around and she couldn’t figure out who to talk to, and no one who was supposed to be helping her was doing anything. But there were people in the community who ended up coming in and helping her, right? One of the themes of the book is understanding who your neighbors are, and what it means to be neighborly.
KP: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely one of the themes. Amal, the Syrian woman, has gone through some really interesting phases. She’s been here since 2017 and now she’s a leader in the community and helps new people resettle, and she’s fluent in English.
There’s another story from a man named Mekyah, whose family has been in Appalachia for generations. He and a lot of young people in Appalachia are working with The Stay Project, trying to figure out how, if there’s not a lot of economic opportunity in the area, how can we make it happen. I think there’s a stereotype that African Americans don’t want to live in Appalachia, and he really dispels that stereotype. He wants to live here. He and his friends want to stay where they grew up, where their grandparents and great-grandparents lived. But being able to find good-paying employment is really difficult. So he’s trying to make those economic opportunities for him and his peers.
DY: The book highlights diversity in Appalachia — in a place where people from the outside sometimes assume that there isn’t diversity. Mekyah tells us about good and bad things as a Black person in Appalachia. There’s welcoming, but there’s also prejudice. I was curious about who you see as your primary audience for this book. Is your goal to allow people from the outside to learn about Appalachia, or do you want people from within Appalachia to learn about themselves and their communities?
KP: I hope people who are not familiar with Appalachia realize how diverse it is, how wonderful it is, and particularly that it has always been a place of mobility. This country was founded on displacement. There’s a lot of press about poverty and strife and the coal mines. And those things aren’t necessarily untrue. But there’s also a lot of joy and beauty and neighborliness and diversity, and I think that doesn’t get as much popular press.
But primarily, I hope that Appalachians see themselves in the book and hear themselves in the book. I hope that people feel seen and heard, and reflected in the stories that are here. These are just 12 narratives of thousands and thousands of people who live in the area who’ve either lived here for generations or have moved more recently.
DY: Let’s talk about the idea of Appalachia as a place of migration. We saw major flooding in North Carolina last year, and before that we saw flooding in East Kentucky that displaced thousands of people. This book shows that someone from rural Sudan and rural Appalachia can have way more in common than you’d think in terms of displacement.
KP: Your question really gets at the impetus of my research generally. I grew up in Virginia near Shenandoah National Park and everything I was hearing in the media or reading in the history books about people who had been displaced from Shenandoah did not match with what I knew to be true from living near and around those people. And so when you talk about the millions and millions of people who are displaced right now, that number is so big. I think people get overwhelmed. There’s this idea of “What can we possibly do?” The millions and millions of displaced people just become a number and a statistic. And so by pointing out this common ground, I hope people can see that, first of all, we are all subject to forced displacement in some way. Then, how might we be able to help even just one person who’s been displaced, either by volunteering or being a neighbor? There’s actually lots we can do. And then hopefully, if we’re ever displaced, someone might return in kind.
I know this to be true, living in a rural area myself. Neighbors look out for each other, and politics are set aside and people help each other out. In a really difficult political moment, I think sometimes that story takes a backseat.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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