<i>Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History</i>, and: <i>The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, and: The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative Drew Lopenzina Daniel Heath Justice. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 296 pp. Paper, $20.00. Thomas King. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 184 pp. Cloth, $24.95. Our Fire Survives the Storm is Daniel Heath Justice’s contribution to an emerging edifice of Native literary criticism that builds upon the ground most recently cleared by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack—that triumvirate of contemporary Indigenous scholarship whose works call for Indigenous writers to forge a productive critical engagement with their own intellectual traditions. Borrowing most strongly from Womack’s aesthetic of identifying and paying homage to a tribally centered literature, Justice presents a “Cherokee literary history” that, as the subtitle suggests, grounds itself exclusively in the perspectives, culture, and textual productions of the Cherokee. While one might argue that there is no shortage of works that focus on Cherokee history or literature, few prior to Justice have considered “Cherokee literature” as a discrete entity worthy of its own study. This alone makes it a worthwhile project. In this book Justice covers a period from the pretextualized era of Cherokee narrative to the more contemporary works of authors such as Thomas King, Robert J. Conley, and Diane Glancy. It is not, however, a preliterate-postliterate binary that is important here. Like Womack in his book Red on Red, Justice is not so much concerned with the ruptures of forced assimilation as with the continuance of Cherokee tradition and community that delineates itself in the overall literature. He begins by establishing a critical paradigm rooted in Cherokee epistemologies and that is perhaps best represented in the histories of Nanye’hi and Tsiyu Gansini, who embody, respectively, what Justice identifies as “the Beloved Path” and “Chickamauga consciousness.” [End Page 356] Both figures were active leaders in their communities, and both resisted the forces of violent colonial appropriation that were tightening around them in the mid-eighteenth century. But while the one-time woman warrior Nanye’hi ultimately opted for peaceful resistance, or the Beloved Path, Tsiyu Gansini’s Chickamauga consciousness led to armed confrontation. Both, in their own manner, are seen as helping to clear a path for the slender generation of relative peace that ensued, Tsiyu Gansini by forcing the colonists into making treaties and Nanye’hi by seeking peace and cultivating life-sustaining strategies. According to Justice, the two are “champion[s] for Cherokee survival” and represent the necessary balance that lies at the heart of traditional Cherokee belief systems. Far from creating a binary opposition, Justice finds the forces represented by these two figures as working, if not in cooperation, then in tandem with one another, creating a “necessary tension” that is vital to the preservation of Cherokee community and identity. He suggests that this paradigm can serve as a “guidepost” for comprehending other significant stops in the literary history of the Cherokee. Disentangling oneself from colonial paradigms and locating an Indigenous literary history from within a tribal matrix can be a difficult enough project, even for someone firmly rooted within that matrix. Justice does a particularly good job of revisiting the scene of the Cherokee removal and freeing it from the relentless narrative tropes by which this history has so often been related. He notes that removals have been an historical reality for many peoples, and the Cherokee, like most Indigenous nations, have their own “migration stories” that speak of earlier such upheavals. This is not in any way to minimize the trauma and inherent violence of the widespread ethnic cleansing campaign that took place in the American Southeast during the mid-nineteenth century but to remember that this is neither the defining historical moment for the Cherokee nor the beginning or end of political upheavals, the uprootings of Cherokee lives, in our transient modern world. By working within the Beloved Path–Chickamauga consciousness paradigm, Justice attempts to reconsider the difficult dynamic between the opposing parties of the nation during the time of removal, noting how John Ross as well...