The Sentimentalist Terrain of Ora V. Eddleman Reed’s Twin Territories Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article grapples with the messy legacy of Ora V. Eddleman Reed, editor of Twin Territories magazine in the Muscogee Nation, Indian Territory, at the turn of the twentieth century. Twin Territories vocally opposed US statehood in Indian Territory and furthered the literary careers of many Native writers. It was an important and influential venue of Native literary expression in the early twentieth century that deserves greater attention from Indigenous literary and print culture studies. However, the magazine’s ambitions and how we make sense of its legacy are complicated by Eddleman Reed’s racial politics, her own (non)citizenship, and the contents of her short sentimental fiction, all of which did as much to reinscribe racialized notions of Indigeneity as they did to challenge prevailing settler assumptions about Native people. Reed has been hailed as a recovered Cherokee writer, but her family’s rejected Cherokee Nation enrollment applications and recent genealogical research raise critical questions about framing her in this way.