 I am Parks Lanier, Professor of English Emeritus at Radford University in Virginia, happy to salute Mary Lou Aweyachta on the occasion of establishing her archives at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. It is her alma mater and mine, but Knoxville is also her birthplace. From there with her parents and sister, she went to live in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on the atomic frontier, where thousands of men and women, modern pioneers worked on a project that would help end the Second World War. She distilled that childhood and that world of not so long ago, and worlds even further back among native peoples and Appalachian pioneers into a volume of poetry entitled Abiding Appalachia where Mountain and Atom meet. Its publication has spanned eight editions from 1978 to 2006. Her volume is the archive of an era. So it is fitting that records of its creation are now archived close to where it all began. One of the central motifs of Aweyachta's life and poetry is Awe Yuzdi, Little Deer, the sacred white deer of the Cherokee. She wears his emblem on a necklace, the deer leaping in an atomic symbol. In the 37 years Aweyachta and I have been friends, we have celebrated many little deer moments, moments when there is an alignment or a conjunction of people and events which bless our lives. This moment of archival significance is truly a little deer moment. I would like to tell you a few things about Aweyachta, the teacher. In 1978, I was fortunate to be able to help Radford University establish a program designed to bring writers and community together. The Highlands Summer Conference. It had poetry fiction and Appalachian culture as its components. Over time, these blended beautifully. Its 40 years plus history is now being celebrated in 2021 in a new collection called Writers by the River. Aweyachta's chapter is one of its most significant. Mary Lou Aweyachta first came to the Highlands Summer Conference in the summer of 1984. A five year old daughter and I met her at the airport and helped her settle in for two weeks of reading, teaching and performing. It was a little deer moment. The class was magical. Aweyachta organized the enthusiastic students into seven clans like the Cherokee. She invited them to design mandalas, displaying their aspirations as writers, and got down to a serious explorations of the realms of poetry. She had had previous experience with poetry in the schools, but this opportunity challenged her to new levels of growth as teacher and writer, and the students responded eagerly. In the class was Rebecca Hancock, a Pulaski County High School English teacher. Becky had just begun her own exploration of her native Appalachian history and culture. She says with the poems of abiding Appalachia, blending her upbringing in Oak Ridge with the history, legends, and myths of the Cherokee. Aweyachta reinforced what I had recently learned. In the fall, I created the first Appalachian studies class for our English curriculum. My students excelled in collecting oral histories and delighted in storytelling. They soon formed a club and learned Appalachian jack tales to tell and perform. By March of 1985, less than a year after Becky Hancock had had her little dear moment with Mary Lou Aweyachta. The Apple Kids were formed. That's a P P a L as in Appalachia. They said it also stood for American people presenting Appalachian life through kids in dramatic skits. They turned it into an acronym. I believe they had their first public appearance over the next nine years. The group would present music folk tales oral histories and original drama designed to promote a positive image of the Appalachian region in six states with 203 performances, reaching nearly 30,000 people. Lit the fire, Becky Hancock, fan the flame. The students did the rest. Aweyachta returned to Radford in 1988 to give the keynote address to the annual conference of the Appalachian Studies Association. About that time, a generous donor and his family had given the university a 375 acre nature conservancy, farmland and woodland bordering the Little River. The donor was seeking a name suggestive of the land's Cherokee associations, and someone suggested Mary Lou Aweyachta name it. The donor had no idea that she even knew where Radford was another little dear moment. Aweyachta suggested it be named for the Cherokee corn mother, the Seleu conservancy. You can read more about that in her book Seleu seeking the corn mother's wisdom, which appeared in 1993. In 1989, Aweyachta and her husband Dr. Paul Thompson came to celebrate the dedication of the Seleu conservancy retreat center. The building still in its early progress had taken shape enough for the seven sided council room at its heart to be visible in raw form. The seven sides evoked the ancient Cherokee clans. Sensitive to the place and to the history and cultural diversity it represented, always so important in her own poetry. Aweyachta asked me to go with her to seek a special blessing for his preservation. Another little dear moment. In 1990, Aweyachta returned to lead her second Highland Summer Conference. Unaware of her impending return, the Apple Kids had created for the 1989 season, a new program titled Celebrating Appalachia. It was directly inspired by Aweyachta's work. How thrilled they were to be able to perform in the presence of their inspiration. Another little dear moment with artists from different generations celebrating their mountain heritage and their work together dispelling negative stereotypes. It was a story to be repeated across the United States from Boston to Sonoma and across Appalachia itself. For that she would be honored in 2020 as one of Tennessee's 10 significant women chosen by USA Today to honor the centennial of women's suffrage. By the time Aweyachta returned to be a Highland Summer Conference featured also and read to the community in 2007. She was reading to friends who had become family, to students who had become teachers themselves, and to new fans who were just hearing her for the first time. She would begin a reading before any introductions had been given by quietly moving through the audience, placing into each person's hand, a grain of colorful native corn. This would make them curious. By the end of the hour, through her vivid imagery, her compelling symbols, the sheer beauty of her words, and her abiding love for her native region, they would understand. They would have heard the transforming stories of Aweyachta, of Seleu and the Trail of Tears, of the Prophet of Oak Ridge, the building of a secret city, and the harnessing of atomic energy, and of the yearnings of a child growing up in a world yet to define itself. They would have had their own Little Deer Month. This story of the Cherokee that teaches the law of respect, and it's the story of Little Deer. I'll tell just the spine of the story. It's quite a long story, but it's very important. It's central to my work. The Cherokee hunters were killing too many deer, so a council was held, and the Little Deer, the Little White Deer, the chief of the deer, said, I will make a ceremony if the hunter kills and takes with respect. Thanks the deer for taking his life for his to go on. I will bless the hunt, and if he does not do that, I will track him to his home and cripple him so he never can hunt again. And thus the law of respect for nature is incorporated in that law, but it's also the law of respect for people, for life in general, that if you take, you must take with respect and give back, or else there will be a repercussion. So I had come back to Oak Ridge for a research trip at the age of, let's see, I was 40 years old. I had had three children, was married, served in the military in France as an interpreter, and had come back. I was in the Science Museum of Science and Energy. There was a huge mock-up of a uranium atom with the orbits, the electrons, little intense lights going around, and I stood there and I had the experience of seeing a vision, and what I saw was the white deer leaping in the atomic orbit. And instantly I knew that this was the keystone to my work. All future work would come from this respect. The law of respect used generally and all the way down to the atom. If we do that, we might be able to balance the world and our society in time, and I was just going to contribute the best way I could with points and stories.