March 2024 Intern Insights: Rachel Poteet

Rachel Poteet

Rachel Poteet serves as a Community Engagement Intern for MAAV, where she works closely with Forest Botanicals, one of the Round 1 projects funded by MAAV.

When I graduate this May, I will have been with Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia for a little over a year. Aside from a summer stint as a communications intern, most of that time has been spent working as the forest botanicals intern with Dr. Shannon Bell’s planned project in Norton, VA.

I’ve been working with Dr. Bell for almost two years. I took Appalachian Community Research with her my junior year. Dr Bell’s work with the monument in Norton is part of her wider work trying to learn about and empower Appalachian wild harvesters. The Appalachian forest is one of the most biodiverse regions in the country, and it provides the source for a great quantity and diversity of the medicinal plants and wild herbs that America produces. The forest is the livelihood of thousands of wild harvesters, and that same forest is still unfortunately considered nothing more than a barrier between us and a coal seam by the powers that be. The task of trying to bring equity to this situation is a daunting one because both the herbal market and governmental measures protecting the forest commons are stacked against harvesters.

During my time with MAAV on this project, I’ve gotten to continue doing work that I was previously doing with Dr. Bell, like transcribing interviews and organizing notes after onsite visits, as well as some new and exciting things with the Norton monument like working with outdoor signage companies, learning about Appalachian indigenous sculptors, and meeting with the advisory board as the project progresses. I’ve also gotten to work on the monument audit, cataloging preexisting monuments across Appalachian Virginia, and on understanding and communicating feedback from the communities that MAAV works with.

The part of this work that has had the biggest impact on me has been sitting and listening to Dr. Bell’s interviews, working on the transcripts. I get to hear the stories of herb dealers working in Kentucky, ethnobotanists studying cohoshes, and multi-generational harvesters making efforts to steward the forest. It’s been so exciting to get to learn about the forest I grew up in in completely new ways through the eyes of people who work in it full-time. MAAV’s mission is to bring the world more mountain stories, and it’s certainly brought more mountain stories into my life. Moreover, I’ve gotten to be a part of putting mountain communities and mountain people first in the process of telling those stories.

The Norton project will be finished after I graduate, although I’m hoping to be able to visit it once it’s been opened. I can’t wait to be able to see it for myself. It’s an important milestone in the work of bringing equity to mountain harvesters, a task that will need many hands to complete, and I’m so grateful that two of them have been mine.