Re-membering Cherokee Justice in Ruth Muskrat Bronson's “The Serpent”

Abstract

This article offers a reading of the little-known 1925 short story “The Serpent” by Cherokee writer and political figure Ruth Muskrat Bronson. Published in the Mount Holyoke Monthly, “The Serpent” challenges federal policy during the allotment era, particularly the unparalleled power of Indian agents as key political figures during and after Oklahoma statehood. Bronson represents the threat of sexual violence during this time, forecasting the jurisdictional crisis that Native communities would continue to face up to the present. In response to these dangers to the Cherokee Nation and its citizens, Bronson’s story re-members Cherokee matrilineal and clan legal systems as her protagonist intervenes in the predatory advances of the Indian agent. The story, I argue, marks a turning point in Bronson’s early career as a powerful indictment of settler injustice. Her interventions are much more measured in Bronson’s more familiar 1944 text, Indians Are People, Too. Nevertheless, reading Bronson’s later nonfiction and early fiction illustrates the complexity of the Cherokee literary tradition theorized by Daniel Heath Justice as Bronson moves from resistant Chickamauga consciousness in her early fiction to Beloved Path writing in her later career, all the while advocating for Indigenous justice and sovereignty. This study contributes to broader debates regarding Native writings from the early twentieth century, when figures like Bronson demonstrated rhetorical savvy by moving between political and polemical writings, using literary fiction and nonfiction as vehicles to deliver powerful critiques of the settler state.