By: Emily Sinclair Montague

I’m a storyteller. If you’ve seen any of my work or look at my resumé, that might seem like an obvious statement - but it goes much deeper than that. When I call myself a storyteller, what I mean is that I am alive through stories.

Sometimes, those stories are waiting for me in the most unexpected places.

Creek beds and riverbanks are a great place to find artifacts - here is the author in one of her favorite spots! (photo cred. to author)

I have always been in love with storytelling. I was reading before I was speaking, and even today my imagination has a tendency to run away with itself. Most of the time my creative process is fairly simple; I decide where a story will begin, and I follow it through until it ends. The most visible way I do this is through the written word. For a long time I didn’t bother to look beyond that surface-level aspect of who I am as a teller of tales, a weaver of details into something living, something more than itself.

I didn’t see the other half of it until I became an unwitting character in a series of stories that have been unfolding for millennia.

It starts like this. One day, I opened up a dusty, forgotten old Birkenstock shoebox. Not the beginning you were expecting, right? But many of the very best stories start with a small, secret moment just like this. Inside of that forgotten (and rather musty) box, I found a collection of arrowheads that had been found or dug up in the garden my great-grandfather kept on the land we still own and love in the Shenandoah mountains of Virginia.

At first, I didn’t think much of those little pieces of history - I was too busy being a young woman in her 20s, aka a very self-focused human being trying to figure out who and what I want to be. Why would I find any answers in a bunch of pointy old rocks? My attitude was cavalier, and outwardly disinterested. On some deeper level, however, I think I felt a spark the moment I looked at those artifacts. And, like so many new experiences, it scared me. Some long-forgotten corner of my soul perked up and filled with the sudden, exuberant passion we often attribute with childhood, and I didn’t want to go backwards. Stories have a linear direction, after all. Point A to point B, right?

Jasper arrowheads are often reddish in color - heat treated jasper has more depth. (photo cred. to author)

As if it’s ever that simple. The arrowheads haunted me, and finally after a couple of months I went back to the faded old box and opened it up again. This time I took the objects out and held them in my hands, and strangely enough, time and direction seemed to float away and become unimportant as my eyes traced the intricate, often-missed details of each piece. I didn’t know anything about the history behind them yet, but these little messengers of the past were so clearly more than practical tools to my eyes. They were beautiful, living works of art crafted with the utmost care and attention. The people who had made them would have looked nothing like me. Our worlds would have been utterly alien to one another, and yet when I held the things they had crafted in my own hands, I felt a connection to them that I cannot adequately put into words. The feeling is simply too much for me to describe.

As is typical of me, I dove into researching North-American indigenous history with religious zeal. I devoured articles, books, youtube videos, and forum posts like a woman possessed. I burned my eyes out looking over other peoples’ artifact collections. I read up on laws, ethics, and the dangers of amateur archeology. I quite literally began dreaming about arrowheads and other lithics (stone tools). I still dream about them, months later, almost every night. I spent hours and hours learning how to properly identify, date, and keep records of projectile points so that I was both accurate and responsible about preserving the historical context surrounding each piece. In short, I became obsessed.

Looking back, this is the fanaticism of someone falling deeply in love. Before long I was out looking for arrowheads on my family’s property - I had no tools besides my manicured hands and a decent pair of hiking boots. One of my best friends, trooper that she is, decided to dive in with me. We spent hours using sticks and rocks to dig and search through piles of mud and dead leaves looking for something, anything, left over from a time when indigenous peoples hunted and farmed and foraged, lived their stories, on the land beneath our feet.

Most seasoned arrowhead hunters will tell you that you will pretty much always find something when you least expect it. It can take weeks, months, even years to find a single complete artifact. People who are passionately in love will tell you that love makes absolutely no sense, and it bends the laws of fate, physics, and sanity. Which is why it felt pretty natural when I casually pulled out a near-perfect, white quartz Rowan Point arrowhead from a completely random chunk of clay in an extinct creek bank down the mountain from my family’s house. It dates to about 7,000-9,000 B.P. (before present, which in artifact lingo means before the year 1951). Holding, for the first time, an incredibly beautiful piece of art made somewhere in the range of 5,000 - 7,000 B.C. is not an experience I’ll ever forget.

I turned that arrowhead into a necklace for my beautiful mother, who supports this and all of my other passions wholeheartedly. She listens to me talk about lithic tools and projectile points with astounding patience - through her I was able to make my thoughts coherent enough to realize that what I was discovering, more than artifacts, were stories. Very old, very powerful stories. And whenever I find or touch an artifact, I am adding my own story to those ancient ones. I am becoming a tiny part of a living narrative spanning the full range of our human experience.

Some of the artifacts found in North America, including in the areas I hunt, are 12,000 years old. They are Clovis and Dalton points used to hunt megafauna that don’t exist anymore, mammoths and giant sloths that roamed a land that looked very different than it does now. Projectile points span the full course of human history on this continent, right up to the arrival of white conquerors and colonizers on indigenous lands. Being white myself, it can feel strange to connect so deeply to people whose way of life was overrun by interlopers who look a lot like me. But stories don’t really care about details like that - they tell themselves precisely the way they want to, when they want to. Sometimes they tangle timelines up until you can hardly make sense of them. At other times, they preserve a single quivering, poignant moment under layers of soil, releasing that little pinprick of time in a burst of emotion and sensation that is gone as quickly as it emerges.

Quartz arrowheads are common in Maryland and Virginia, but not in most other states. (photo cred. to author)

I learned, through these stories in stone, things that nothing else in my life could ever have taught me. I learned that storytelling is as much about listening to the stories hiding in the clay and dirt of silent creek banks as it is weaving them out of thin air. I learned that humanity, the human experience, is a story, and that it continues to tell itself in the most wonderful and unexpected ways for each of us - if we’re willing to stop and listen. I learned that growing into myself is far from a linear process. There is no point A or point B, but rather thousands of small moments which combine themselves into a breathing web of experience. Getting caught up in this web is often the only way we slow ourselves down enough to recall precisely who we are and what we truly value in this life.

When I say I am a storyteller, I am saying that yes, I write books and articles and blog posts. That isn’t even the half of it. I am also saying that I find stories, I trip over them whenever I look at the world around me, and I breathe them in whether I’m sleeping or waking. I am stories, stories are me, and I am engaging with them through so many incredible experiences that I would be a fool to try and list them all in any semblance of order.

Arrowheads taught me that, to be a storyteller in more than name alone, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty and dig down into the mud of life. You never know what you’re going to pull out of it.

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How Arrowheads Pointed Me Toward Myself