Cherokee History Research Articles

Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene

Reviewed by: Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene Noel E. Smyth Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. By Lance Greene. Indians and Southern History. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Pp. xvi, 184. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2112-3.) In Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, historical archaeologist Lance Greene investigates a community of Cherokees that evaded the Trail of Tears by absconding to Welch’s Town, North Carolina, from 1839 to 1855. A mixed-descent Cherokee man named John Welch and his wife, Betty, a white woman, owned a plantation there, and in 1838 they offered land and resources to nearly one hundred Cherokees who settled in the mountains on their property. Greene argues that the “hybrid space” of the plantation enabled the Welches to conceal and protect their community (p. 133). He shows how this hybrid [End Page 140] community was able to maintain a traditional Cherokee emphasis on localism and town-centered politics even as some individuals also practiced European-derived chattel slavery. The book is organized chronologically, with the first and second chapters providing a narrative overview of Cherokee history from the early republic to the Trail of Tears. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters offer an analysis of the material remains excavated by Greene at the Welch plantation site in 2004 and 2006. From the material remains, Greene reconstructs the political economy of Welch’s Town, which included the use of slave labor to grow surplus grains, and describes how this production was supplemented with subsistence farming and traditional gathering and hunting activities practiced by Cherokees residing in the hills behind the Welch plantation. Betty Welch ran the plantation’s outward-facing business, which allowed her and her husband to accrue wealth and to have some limited influence in southern American society. Betty and John Welch held at least nine enslaved African Americans in bondage, and Greene argues that “their success and the associated success of Welch’s Town depended upon the enslaved community on the plantation” (p. 134). This book adds to the growing literature on slavery in Cherokee country and the ways in which some Cherokees adopted chattel slavery to secure liminal spaces for themselves as Native peoples in the ante-bellum South. Greene is also interested in answering the question, “What was life like for the enslaved people, mostly women and children, held captive by the Welches?” (p. 105). The book, however, does not offer many satisfying answers. Furthermore, Green argues, “Ironically, those African Americans held in bondage enabled a small number of Cherokee families to challenge white hegemony.” He does not explain how “establishing plantation estates” defied “the ideology of white supremacy” (p. 21). The adoption of slavery by some elite Cherokee families seems to be another example of cultural hybridity, rather than a rejection of white supremacy. At the heart of this book is a marginalized community of Cherokees that resisted ethnic cleansing and also adopted chattel slavery in order to secure their survival. This fundamental dynamic could have been more deeply and productively analyzed, but the book leaves this critical tension underexplored. To Greene’s credit, he is careful to point out that Cherokee slaveholders could be just as cruel as white slaveholders, but in other areas of the book there are claims that are jarring and out of step with current arguments about slavery. Overall, this book is an important addition to our understanding of both Cherokee survival in North Carolina after 1838 and how the adoption of chattel slavery was used by some Native Americans to secure the survival of their communities in the antebellum South. The book does not offer much that is new about the history of chattel slavery or the specific experiences and lives of those enslaved at Welch’s Town. However, despite this limitation, the book provides a detailed and extensive account of Welch’s Town and of how Cherokee identity and localism remained strong among those communities through the nineteenth century and beyond. [End...

Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Green

Reviewed by: Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Green Adam Pratt (bio) Keywords Cherokee, Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, North Carolina, Trail of Tears, Indian removal, Slavery Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. By Lance Green. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Pp. 200. Cloth, $54.50.) Lance Green unearths a compelling and complex story in Their Determination to Remain, one that forces readers to reconsider seemingly concrete notions about identity, community, and cultural change. His subject is a small community of Cherokees who resided in western North Carolina after Indian "removal," centered on the plantation home of Betty and John Welch and the nearby Welch's Town, where enslaved Cherokee and Black individuals lived. This "small community's successful subversion of military occupation and subsequent challenges of racial hegemony" (3) is at the heart of Green's book, as he uncovers how Cherokees [End Page 659] who remained maintained cultural practices in the face of U.S. control. To tell this story, Green relies on archival and archaeological sources. This entwined approach allows him to fill in "archival silences" that, in particular, erase women, slaves, and Cherokees from the historical record. Green's analysis unfolds in five succinct chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of Cherokee life and society in the mountains of western North Carolina during the antebellum period. Next, he demonstrates strategies employed by Cherokee communities to resist and evade removal efforts. Chapter 3 highlights the new community that reformed along the Valley River after removal, and the strategies employed by the Welch family, and the residents of nearby Welch's Town, to accommodate themselves to the new U.S. regime. Chapter 4 demonstrates the syncretic culture, including altered foodways, continued enslavement, and changing gender norms that emerged in Welch's Town, while the last chapter deals with government schemes to relocate unwilling Cherokees. Most interestingly, perhaps, is Green's inclusion of a fictional vignette situated between the Introduction and Chapter 1 that takes John Welch's perspective in 1850 as he reminisces about his life. This fictional account incorporates the thematic material as well as historical and archaeological evidence Green compiled to paint Welch as a man who had persisted through profound changes. The book starts off as a mostly conventional story about Cherokee history and society that slowly focuses its attention on the Welch family. In this reckoning, Green shows that much of the post-contact period, Cherokee society was organized around "clan and town structures in the mountainous region," which "continued to organize daily life and formed the basis of behavior within and between communities" (57). Green carefully lays out the importance of town life and its centrality for "traditional" Cherokee customs. That community-centered lifestyle was already under assault by the time forced relocation commenced. Decades of economic exchange and social interactions, along with constant pressure by white land-seekers, forced Cherokee leaders into land concessions and political centralization as a way, some acculturated Cherokees believed, of stymying further American encroachment. John Welch entered the historical record when he took a reserve outside of the Cherokee Nation after the Treaty of 1819, thereby renouncing Cherokee for American citizenship and a 640-acre reserve near the traditional town of Cowee. However, constant encroachment meant that Welch and other reservees had few legal protections, [End Page 660] so he fled back into the Cherokee Nation near the Valley River, a localist stronghold far from the Cherokee central authorities (60). During removal, however, Welch encountered federal forces, was arrested and confined for nearly three months. During his captivity, his health failed and his home, with Betty now forced to act as head of household, was looted by numerous interlopers. With this new role, Betty was thrust into an entirely new set of circumstances that did not relent, even after John was released from captivity. Miraculously, the Welches recovered their property, when their son-in-law purchased their land at auction and then transferred the property to Betty's name. This meant that she was now the owner of the plantation home and...

Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough

Reviewed by: Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country by Fay A. Yarbrough Clarissa W. Confer Choctaw Confederates: The American Civil War in Indian Country. By Fay A. Yarbrough. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) This slim volume traces the Choctaws’ wartime experience in a few chapters, which are book-ended by other chapters covering traditional Choctaw culture and the Reconstruction period, including an unpersuasive foray into the imagined effect of war on masculinity. The author’s research entails a fairly standard use of available sources—tribal nation papers, the Indian-Pioneer Papers collection at the University of Oklahoma, W.P.A. narratives, and government records—that I, Mary Jane Warde, and others have also used in analyzing the nations of Indian Territory in the mid-nineteenth century. In this case, Fay Yarbrough looks at the material through the lens of slavery and race relations. Her expressed intent to connect this past to issues of the present sets the tone for her work. The book begins with a standard history of the Choctaw people, explaining traditional aspects of social structure, such as matrilineal descent and the role of clans. Like so many Native groups, the Choctaws experienced extensive change in the nineteenth century, brought on primarily by White expansion westward. One example is gender roles. As the century progressed, Native women lost their status as agricultural producers. Although the author attributes this entirely to the development of slavery, this change actually stems from a wide range of factors, most notably White male expectations. In that and many other ways, Choctaw society began to look more like White southern culture. The Choctaw were one of the five Native nations removed to Indian Territory from the southeastern United States who practice slavery; however, because enslaved people made up only 14 percent of the Choctaw population by 1860, a much smaller percentage than in any of its neighboring states, there are marked differences between Choctaw culture and the Deep South. Unlike in slave states, the Choctaw nation had a path for citizenship for slaves through blood ties to a Choctaw. Deep South plantations would have looked very different had White masters offered citizenship to blood relations among their slaves. Like their slaveholding neighbors, however, the Choctaw also tightened the legal structure governing bondage in the post-Nat Turner period of the 1830s. Although Choctaw citizens’ engagement in this slave economy influenced their decision to participate in the Civil War, this was only one of several such influences. The question of how and why Indian nations chose sides in the national conflict has been examined and debated in many books, and Yarbrough revisits that question. The core principle for all the nations was tribal sovereignty, and the attractive alliance package offered by Confederate leaders seemed the best way to preserve it. The Choctaw followed a path [End Page 124] similar to the Cherokees, seeking neutrality first, eventually allying with the Confederacy, and then forming armed mounted units for the Confederate army. The author leans heavily on Cherokee history to flesh out the story of the Choctaw, but the problem with this strategy is that the Cherokee were uniquely divided by the removal experience, and those fissures shaped their responses. In contrast to the Cherokee, the Choctaw remained loyal to the Confederacy throughout the war, despite breeches of treaty promises. The Confederacy, for that matter, did not adequately support any of its Native allies, resulting in poor wartime conditions, desertions, and leadership lapses among them. The Civil War in Indian Territory, as scholars have been arguing for decades, devolved into an internal civil war. No Native nation gained from the experience. The Choctaw location on the southern edge of Indian Territory made that area a popular destination for a flow of refugees from the war, which put corresponding pressures on the nation, although that is not discussed here. Even so, the Choctaw maintained their unity throughout the war. Unfortunately, the chapter about Reconstruction focuses only on the Choctaw freedpeople and does not examine the intriguing situation in which Choctaws negotiated a more favorable peace treaty than the other nations who fought the United States. The...

The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar

Reviewed by: The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire by Kate Fullagar Eric Hinderaker The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire. By kate fullagar. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. 320 pp. ISBN 97803000243062. $40.00 (hardcover). Scholars once separated the history of eighteenth-century Britain from that of its colonies, placing each in its own silo and paying relatively little attention to the linkages connecting them. This book argues in favor of connections. In an "experiment in New Biography," Kate Fullagar yokes the lives of three very different men to a meditation on what she calls "the moral legacy of empire" (p. 5). The three men are the Cherokee warrior-diplomat Ostenaco, who traveled to Britain in 1762; Joshua Reynolds, the portraitist who painted his likeness during the visit; and Mai, from the Pacific island of Ra'iatea, who went to Britain in 1774 and stayed two years, during which time he, too, was painted by Reynolds. Other than the fact of these two portraits, there is little that explicitly joins these figures, but in telling their stories, Fullagar hopes to capture the possibilities, limits, contradictions, and ambivalence inherent in Great Britain's far-flung, loose-knit, and often shambolic imperial undertakings. Ostenaco crossed the Atlantic in a fraught era of Cherokee history. His visit to London came on the heels of Cherokee participation in the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War and the destructive Anglo-Cherokee war that punctuated its conclusion, and he returned to his Overhills community in a time of deteriorating relations that culminated in the American War of Independence. After serving for more than a decade as a leading voice in the effort to preserve peace with the neighboring colonies through accommodation and concession, Fullagar argues that—as an aging and increasingly irrelevant figure in the turbulent politics of the Cherokee communities— Ostenaco withdrew from his public role, moved west to the new Cherokee settlements near Chickamauga Creek, and accepted the aggressively defiant leadership that led those communities into the era of the American Revolution. Ostenaco's death is not marked in the surviving documentary record, but Fullagar suggests that he died, as he lived, supporting the interests of Cherokee culture and values. Reynolds, a decade younger than Ostenaco, apprenticed as a portrait painter and gradually rose to prominence in London as a result of hard work and the patronage of well-placed clients. His early portraits focused on imperial figures like the naval officer Augustus Keppel. Fullagar emphasizes two strains in Reynolds's thinking: first, a [End Page 177] conservative neoclassicism that defined his artistic principles; and second, an ambivalence toward empire that was exemplified in his close friendships with both Samuel Johnson, an anti-imperial Tory, and Edmund Burke, a pro-imperial Whig. He was able to balance those friendships, and the values they implied, through his diffident affability, which made Reynolds eminently likeable but also hard to pin down. The book turns on the two portraits at its center: one of Ostenaco, which Fullagar characterizes as a failure and which Reynolds never displayed or sold, the other of Mai, which worked because it abstracted Mai's specific qualities into a more universal, less particularized depiction. This was in keeping with a set of principles Reynolds articulated in a 1776 speech to the Royal Academy of Arts, a body he served as president for more than two decades, in which he discussed and compared the two paintings. Mai—a full two generations younger than Ostenaco—came of age on Ra'iatea at about the same time that it fell to enemies from neighboring Bora Bora and became a dependency. Mai's father was killed, his relatives lost their land, and he ended up in a refugee community on Tahiti. When James Cook visited that island on his second Pacific voyage in 1773, Mai sailed back to London on the Adventure as an able seaman. During the course of a prolonged stay in England, Mai nurtured a plan to return to Ra'iatea with the support of British arms to defeat the Bora Borans and repatriate his home...

Choreographic Revisions: The Eagle Dance as Historical Hallmark of Unto These Hills

Choreographic RevisionsThe Eagle Dance as Historical Hallmark of Unto These Hills Heidi L. Nees (bio) Over the past few decades, there has been an upsurge in Native and Indigenous performance arts to revisit and remember—to tell through retelling—stories of the past and how they have shaped Native and Indigenous identities and knowledges as those stories, identities, and knowledges have struggled to survive continued expropriation, abuse, and erasure. Native dance, specifically, has experienced revitalization through a number of Native artists' endeavors to interweave the traditional with the contemporary. —Shay Welch This is a story of a dramatized version of the Cherokee Eagle Dance. Or perhaps what follows are snapshots of a (hi)story of a dramatized version of the Cherokee Eagle Dance as performed in the outdoor historical drama, Unto These Hills. This essay, then, explores the ways past moments of choreographic design circle each other and enact perceptions about Cherokee culture and history. One purpose in writing these histories is to preserve them, an act that I recognize is not unencumbered, especially when discussing an embodied, Indigenous cultural practice. In doing so, I do not intend to commit these performances to the past, nor do I intend to lock down a meaning for these performances. Rather, I call attention to a particular incarnation of a long-running dance in order to consider what this signature element of a decades-old production says about this drama, modes of artistic and cultural creation, and Cherokee culture.1 By interpolating context regarding two of the show's past choreographers—Foster Fitz-Simons, the show's original choreographer, and Larissa FastHorse, who served in this [End Page 107] capacity from 2007 to 2011—in accounts of Unto These Hills, this essay explores the aesthetic styles and their mentors' legacies in their choreographies. These predecessors' histories contribute to the palimpsestic nature of the Eagle Dance, within which modern dance history, theatre history, and Cherokee history commingle. Another layer to this exploration concerns the modes by which Unto These Hills depicts the historical past while also featuring a traditional Cherokee dance, the Eagle Dance, that is not temporally confined to the past.2 That is, the traditional version of this dance enacts culturally specific epistemologies in the present. And yet, historically, the dramatized version of the dance was detached from that function. I consider the ways that Larissa FastHorse's 2011 version of the dramatized Eagle Dance called upon the past and present in its invocation of repertoire-based and intergenerational knowledge and identity transfer. I argue that FastHorse's choreography commingled styles of movement in manners that captured the tension and inextricable interdependencies of various incarnations of the dance, which reflected shifting notions of authenticity for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and its history. To connect these various points, I turn to artist Daystar/Rosalie Jones, who simultaneously ponders and affirms the future of Native modern dance: "Be assured it will not be in a straight line, as in western thinking, a projectile speeding into the vast unknown. As in all things cyclical, the 'dance of the people' will continue naturally to circle, as ripples in a pond, filtering through history and ancestry and sacred story and back again, moving ever outward but taking meaning and substance in remembering the original source."3 The variegated visions of dance's expressive potential and the ways in which Unto These Hills' Eagle Dance has manifested those expressions circle each other, with the ripples of influential pasts infusing subsequent understandings of the ways in which notions of "traditional," "modern," "contemporary," and "history" commingle. I begin with information about outdoor historical drama as a genre, and dance's role therein, drawing on primary source materials published in the mid-twentieth century, when the form first emerged. I then provide information about Unto These Hills before addressing the Eagle Dance and tracing the dramatized version's stylistic lineage. My attention to the 2011 version of the Eagle Dance is framed by scholarship on Indigenous epistemologies and dance, as well as by anecdotal reflections by FastHorse. I locate FastHorse's dance influences within modern dance contexts related to those of Fitz-Simons, demonstrating the intermingling of...

Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black

Reviewed by: Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960 by Liza Black Jennifer L Jenkins Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941–1960. By Liza Black. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 327. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, filmography, index.) Picturing Indians examines twenty years of U.S. film history, post-Stagecoach, in the so-called Golden Age of the Western. Distinct from many film histories of the period and of Native representation in the period and beyond, Picturing Indians examines the economics of what might be called settler-colonial lenses. By disaggregating the production processes from the film narratives, Black exposes the embedded structures within Hollywood's studio system that did much to reify racist views of indigeneity from behind, around, and in the margins of the scenes. Chapters deal with script issues, labor of Native and non-Native actors, the role and race of extras, and the construction of "Movie Indians" upon both Native and non-Native bodies through makeup, costume, and the iconography associated with both. The focus on the labor dynamics of the industry is a clever choice, for it foregrounds typically unseen labor (even now)—doubly unseen when done behind the scenes and by people of color. Every chapter merits careful reading and rereading, but I found the chapter on Indigenous performativity, "'Not Desired by you for Photographing: the Labor of American Indian (and Non-Indian) Extras," particularly resonant and thought-provoking. Black is adept at weaving together close readings of film narratives, granular details about productions, details from Native-produced revisionist documentaries such as Reel Injuns (Diamond, 2009), and firsthand responses from Native viewers to fully deconstruct—and I mean that in the strictest Derridean, not colloquial, [End Page 98] sense—Hollywood's construction of Indianness. Her reportage of coeval and latter-day resistance to such "picturing" is a model of critical storytelling practice as well as of applied decolonizing methodologies. This is film history as activism. As Black argues, this is a project dedicated to Native sovereignty. It is interlaced with critical Indigenous theory, and draws heavily upon Native scholarship, including her wide—and not deferential—reading in Euro-American film studies. Indeed, the literature review should be (and will be in my courses) required reading and a model for how to decolonize academic research. The volume includes an extremely useful filmography in two parts: Hollywood fiction films containing Indian characters from 1941 to 1960 and a broader list of global films with Native characters, many Native-directed or -produced, from 1914 to 2019. Numerous needed courses in film history and theory, economic history, American Indian Studies, regional studies and beyond could be built from these two lists. Liza Black frames this history of "the hyperreality of filmic Indians" (xi) from Cherokee positionality. Black explains that her identity is grounded in Cherokee history but that she presents as White and grew up off-reservation in Southern California. In most cases an author's biography would be irrelevant to an academic study, but American Indian personhood is central to this work. Life details here are an authorizing impulse as well as a respectful means of introducing one's storytelling position. As her final chapter's subtitle indicates, "The Search for Authenticity" is ongoing and urgent. In both method and content, this book charts a new movement in Indigenous film studies in particular and film studies in general. It is welcome, indeed. Jennifer L Jenkins University of Arizona Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Psychosocial aspects of Historical and Cultural Learning: Historical Trauma and Resilience among Indigenous Young Adults.

The purpose of this manuscript is to evaluate the impact of the Remember the Removal (RTR) program, with specific emphasis on participants' experiences learning about and reacting to Cherokee history, including historical trauma. Two cohorts of intervention participants (1984 and 2015) participated in focus groups. An exploratory analysis was performed to categorize themes around the effects of historical training. Results yielded two themes and subsequent sub-themes: 1) Reactions to Historical Learning: confronting misrepresentation and erasure, mixed emotions, looking backwards, looking forwards, strengthening Cherokee identity; and 2) The Effects of Colonization: emotional sides of historical loss, empowerment, resilience, and belonging, and addressing contemporary discrimination. Teaching tribally-specific historical events was related to increased thoughts about historical loss, an increased awareness of non-Native people's lack of historical knowledge about Native people and subsequent experiences of discrimination, but also an increased sense of tribal identity, resilience, and belonging.

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Unweaving Colonial Frames, Restorying Indigenous Potentialities

Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp

Reviewed by: Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee by Courtney Elizabeth Knapp Mary Rizzo Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By Courtney Elizabeth Knapp. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 245. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3727-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-3726-6.) Second-tier cities, from Baltimore to Cleveland to Chattanooga, have experienced the cycles of boom and bust occasioned by the move to an industrial and then a postindustrial economy. Manipulating how they are seen in order to draw tourists and upwardly mobile people looking to relocate, these cities have become traders in the symbolic economy, competing with each other in the process. As an urban planner, Courtney Elizabeth Knapp is well aware of this trajectory. What she asks, in her book Constructing the Dynamo of Dixie: Race, Urban Planning, and Cosmopolitanism in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is how this move toward urban placemaking has ignored the needs of Native Americans and African Americans in Chattanooga. She notes that placemaking is in vogue with planners. Rather than empowering marginalized communities, it focuses on quality-of-life issues, such as pedestrian access and arts and cultural amenities, which are thought to appeal to wealthy visitors and possible residents. But place is made not only through these official channels. Knapp coins the phrase "diasporic placemaking" to describe "the everyday practices, the collaborations and conflicts, through which historically uprooted and migratory populations—Native Americans, African Americans, whites, Jewish immigrants, Latinos, and others—forge new communities of security and belonging out of unfamiliar, and oftentimes stratified and unequal, yet shared local environments" (pp. 1–2). Knapp traces the history of Chattanooga back to the Cherokee people who built villages there. She continues with the story of the black diaspora in the city, particularly focusing on the spatial segregation that created black neighborhoods. In engaging with five hundred years of history, Knapp necessarily has to move speedily through this historical backdrop in order to arrive at her intended destination: postindustrial urban planning efforts at revitalization. This book joins a growing literature, including P. Nicole King's Sombreros and Motorcycles in a Newer South: The Politics of Aesthetics in South Carolina's Tourism Industry (Jackson, Miss., 2012) and Julio Capó Jr.'s Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Chapel Hill, 2017), that examines the racial dynamics of the South beyond a black and white binary. Perhaps the most direct influence is the extensive work of Tiya Miles, who has examined the relationships that existed between Native Americans, enslaved black people, white immigrants, and white native-born southerners. [End Page 735] Knapp raises an intriguing dichotomy. Chattanooga grew because its leaders dispossessed Native Americans of their land and built an economy on the backs of enslaved black people. Jim Crow ensured the social and economic marginalization of people of color into the mid-twentieth century. But by the early 2000s, Chattanooga seemingly embraced its Native and African American histories through the incorporation of Cherokee history in riverfront revitalization efforts and signage about a Civil War–era free black settlement. But, as Knapp shows, these were not primarily attempts at reconciliation, taking into full account the needs of these communities, but projects designed to draw tourists. History had merely become another spur to postindustrial economic development. But for historically marginalized communities, history is a key aspect of their diasporic placemaking efforts. Knapp details how community-based organizations used storytelling and participatory research to "exercise community self-determination" (p. 16). Unsurprisingly, since Knapp teaches urban planning, her book is most successful in its discussions of the ways that urban planning has led to uneven geographical development that privileges elites. Through her participatory action research and work with community organizations, she offers a counterpoint that suggests that placemaking can be more than a trendy phrase. Grappling honestly with difficult histories with the affected communities may "produce dissonance and even discomfort among locals and visitors instead of anesthetized narratives of racial harmony and urban progress" (p. 193). She suggests that this approach may be the only way to heal the wounds of racism and dispossession in...

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson

Reviewed by: Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson Christina Snyder (bio) Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory. By Andrew Denson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 304. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $29.95.) Cherokee removal is perhaps the most well known episode in Native American history. In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson explores how and why this came to be by exploring public commemorations of Cherokee removal, focusing on the American South and Oklahoma from the 1920s to the present. This multivalent study highlights a diverse range of white and Indian heritage workers, business professionals, politicians, and activists. Other scholars of memory have pointed out that “white heritage workers in the South generally excluded the histories of people of color from public commemoration until after the civil rights movement” (2). Denson, however, demonstrates that white southerners zealously commemorated removal beginning in the 1920s and continue to do so now. The reasons why have shifted over time, but heritage workers and the general public agreed on one basic premise: removal was a tragic injustice. Cherokees engaged in public commemorations for their own reasons and, as Denson argues, seized on whites’ critical view of removal to cultivate political and economic change in subsequent periods. White commemorations of removal began in southern Appalachia in the 1920s. Buoyed by the rise of the automobile and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tourism boosters highlighted the culture and history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This group had managed to evade removal and still lived in western North Carolina. In some ways, boosters described the Eastern Band and white Appalachia similarly: as “colorful primitives” whose supposedly premodern cultures offered a respite from industrialized America (7). But boosters also touted the Cherokee story as exceptional owing to their status as the most “civilized tribe” and their tremendous suffering during removal. Acknowledging such [End Page 167] injustice complicated public commemorations like Chattanooga’s 1938 Chickamauga National Celebration. Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one hundredth anniversary of the Trail of Tears, Chattanooga’s civic leaders linked the memory of removal and the Lost Cause (the historian John P. Brown, for example, described the anticolonial Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe as “Tennessee’s first secessionist” [98]), while denying African Americans a role in the celebration. Such commemorations drew on Cherokee history, but they also distorted it to heighten dramatic effect and to please predominantly white audiences. While problematic, white commemorations of removal also opened a path to Eastern Band Cherokees seeking to retain their separate, sovereign status during Jim Crow. The 1950s and 1960s brought a new wave of commemorations. In Georgia, the state government restored—and reimagined—the old Cherokee capital, New Echota, while businessmen and politicians in southern Appalachia championed the hugely successful outdoor drama centered on removal, Unto These Hills. Denson explains that as white southern elites confronted the civil rights movement, they embraced the memory of removal while continuing to shun African American perspectives and experiences. This may seem like a paradox, but it made sense to white leaders seeking a “politically safe way to consider their region’s heritage of racial oppression” without discussing slavery or Jim Crow (9). Their rationale gets to the heart of Denson’s title; whites framed removal as the tragic end of Native history in the South. Monuments to absent peoples were politically cheap, allowing southern elites to claim moral authority in crafting a narrative of progress. Commemorations often included Eastern Band Cherokees who were very much alive, but the dominant removal narrative cast them as a notable exception, ignoring the many other Native peoples who remained in the region. Eastern Band Cherokees found jobs in heritage work and, more important, leveraged their visibility to ward off the federal government’s termination policy, which sought to extinguish tribal sovereignty. The Oklahoma Cherokees, subject to an earlier policy that terminated their sovereign status and allotted their landholdings, also launched public history projects during this period. In his most fascinating chapter, Denson explores how a diverse Oklahoma Cherokee populace debated how best to deal with...

“Our Hands and Hearts are Joined Together”: Friendship, Colonialism, and the Cherokee People in Early America

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries proved transformative for Cherokee people. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Cherokees lived in towns and nurtured strong regional affiliations that were overlaid with the sacred obligations associated with membership in one of seven matrilineal clans. But all this changed. The encroaching Anglo settler frontier from the east and pressure from the Spanish, the French, and hostile Native warriors from the north all prompted changes in how Cherokee people represented themselves to outsiders. This article draws on colonial archives, missionary records, ethnographic travel writing, and the written and oral traditions of the Cherokee people to explore the importance of friendship among Cherokees in the Native South. What did friendship mean to Cherokees? How did Cherokees represent friendship? And how was friendship performed (and those performances interpreted) in diplomatic, social, and cultural contexts? These questions frame this essay's analysis as it seeks to enrich our understanding of friendship in Cherokee history and to highlight what Cherokee Chiefs meant when they declared Our Hands and Hearts are Joined Together.

Gregory D. Smithers. The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity.

In this remarkable study, Gregory D. Smithers tackles the formidable topic of examining Cherokee diaspora. He frankly considers the intersecting concepts of Cherokee migration and resettlement, memory, and identity with the “aim of peeling back the layers of Cherokee history and revealing an even deeper, more complex, and richer past” (7). Smithers accomplishes exactly this in his treatment of Cherokee movements, voluntary and forced, from the 1760s to the 1940s. Smithers divides The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity into two parts, “Origins” and “Diaspora.” He organizes the first part into four chapters that address Cherokee origins and colonialism, the formation of a distinct Cherokee identity, the forced removal of the largest segment of the Cherokee population to the trans-Mississippi West, and the antebellum era. The weakest link in the flow of this otherwise strong study is Smithers’s cursory treatment of Cherokee movements in the colonial era. He pays little attention to the loss of their entire southeastern Lower Towns region, which resulted from their struggle to maintain individual town sovereignty and regional solidarity in the wake of epidemics, warfare, and colonial land cessions. Smithers does acknowledge that many of these displaced Cherokees found homes in other regions or soon became part of a movement to establish a new Lower Town region of five towns from which to conduct an armed resistance against intruding white settlements. Again, the author’s treatment of this incredibly important event is surprisingly not given more weight. The loss of an entire region (along with one of the Cherokee dialects) and the later establishment of another region deserve more consideration, particularly with respect to Cherokee identity, since the label the resistance took, the Chickamauga, was as new as the region itself.

The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity by Gregory D. Smithers

Reviewed by: The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identityby Gregory D. Smithers Jay Precht The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity. By Gregory D. Smithers. Lamar Series in Western History. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 358. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-300-16960-7.) In The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity, historian Gregory D. Smithers attempts the ambitious feat of providing a history of the Cherokee people from their origins to the twentieth century that considers multiple Cherokee communities, families, and individuals dispersed throughout the United States and occasionally the world. Smithers employs diaspora as the central theme that holds his narrative together. He deftly uses the secondary literature on Cherokee history, indigenous identity, race, and migration combined with his primary research in archives around the world to outline Cherokee patterns of migration and resettlement and to argue that the people's memories of these experiences are central to their Cherokee identity. The importance of the Trail of Tears to Cherokee identity is well established, but Smithers expands on this idea by arguing that voluntary relocations before and after forced removal also played a role in defining what it means to be Cherokee. Through his analysis, Smithers effectively demonstrates Cherokee agency by highlighting the various ways that individuals and communities changed in innovative ways to ensure their cultural survival. The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Smithers begins with the migration and coalescence that resulted from the dissolution of the Mississippian chiefdoms in the fifteenth century and highlights the importance of migration narratives to Cherokees' sense of identity during the colonial period. In exploring Cherokee migration, the author outlines the disruption of land loss and connects early relocations within the original Cherokee homeland to early-nineteenth-century relocations that established new communities farther west. He concludes by considering forced relocation to Indian Territory through the thematic lens of diaspora. The [End Page 410]second part of the book focuses heavily on the impact of the Civil War, with chapters on war refugees and Cherokee freedpeople, before bringing the narrative through the allotment and World War II eras. The epilogue appropriately brings the themes of relocation, memory, and identity to the present. Smithers ultimately makes a convincing case for the significance of diaspora to Cherokee identity. His contention that the Cherokee community in North Carolina provided a territorial homeland, while the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma provided a political homeland for people living throughout the world, helps the reader understand how people maintained their Cherokee identity outside these communities. This analysis should prove valuable not only to students of Cherokee history but also to anyone hoping to better understand Native peoples in the South, many of whom faced similar circumstances historically. Jay Precht Penn State Fayette Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Settlement, and Identity. By Gregory D. Smithers

The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Settlement, and Identity. The Lamar Series in Western History. By Gregory D. Smithers. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. vii + 358 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.) In The Cherokee Diaspora , Gregory D. Smithers places the experience of migration and resettlement at the center of Cherokee history. Focusing on the period between the Seven Years War and World War Two, Smithers charts the myriad ways in which American settler colonialism put Cherokees in motion, from the travel enabled by trade and diplomacy to the disruption of whole communities by war and coercive American policies. He asks how Cherokees responded to migration, both forced and voluntary, and how they defined and redefined themselves … andrewdenson{at}earthlink.net

A Cherokee Epic: Kermit Hunter’s Unto These Hills and the Mythologizing of Cherokee History

A Cherokee Epic: Kermit Hunter’s Unto These Hills and the Mythologizing of Cherokee History

Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation. By Rose Stremlau (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xiii plus 320 pp. $24.95)

The federal government's allotment of Indian reservations into privately owned tracts of land at the turn of the twentieth century dispossessed native communities of most of their holdings and embedded arcane complexities in law and administration that have endured to the present day. While scholars recognize allotment's significance in the history of nearly every tribe in the United States, few have undertaken study of the allotment process and its consequences. Stremlau's close analysis of allotment's impact on Chewey, a community in the Cherokee Nation that now falls within Adair County, Oklahoma, is thus a valuable addition to the historiography. Stremlau's effort to situate this legislative disaster within the history of the family also makes her book noteworthy, since the family in native history has received even less scholarly attention than allotment. The first half of Stremlau's book provides a general overview of Cherokee history in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book contains most of the new material that Stremlau has diligently gathered from the vast bureaucratic storehouse of records listing Cherokees, individually and in various family groupings. These lists include several important censuses that the Cherokee Nation conducted before the 1898 Curtis Act called for its dissolution. The federal government also generated lists in the form of the regular decennial U.S. census, special rolls of Cherokees produced during the 1830s removal period and at the turn of the twentieth century when the descendants of those removed in 1838–1839 received some compensation, and lists of Cherokees compiled by the Dawes Commission during the long and complicated implementation of land allotment: the Dawes Rolls and its accompanying applications, petitions, maps, correspondence, hearings, probate records, and Indian account case files. Using the methods of a genealogist to reconstruct Cherokee kin connections and residence patterns, Stremlau had no choice but to restrict her study to a small segment of the Cherokee population. The book's many photographs add greatly to bringing to life the individuals affected by allotment policies.

The Animals' Ballgame

The Animals' Ballgame Geary Hobson (bio) The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, together with the nearby university in the capital city of Tahlequah, is gearing up for what has long been billed as the Nation's (Tsa-la-gi; Tsa-ra-gi; Ji-lo-gi; Chi-la-gi; Chalaque; Cholukee; Ani-yun-wiya; or whatever variant one prefers) "First Ever Cherokee Writers' Gathering." Word has gone out far and wide for more than a year, advertising and proclaiming it, and at the same time beseeching all who are writers to come and take part in it. Web pages have glowed about it; the blogosphere is filled with information about it; mass mailings have ensued; and word-of-mouth is trumpeting it all far and wide. It promises to be, so the Nation's own website declares, the greatest get-together of Cherokee writers ever assembled. And in the magnificent auditorium in the W. W. Keeler complex on the university campus in Tahlequah—the town "set like a jewel among gently rolling hills" (as a noted scholar once wrote)—the writers, the would-be writers, and wannabe writers are assembling in vast hordes and precipitous multitudes. At last the day of assemblage dawns, and the vast entourage of Cherokeeness comes forth into the auditorium like a fleet of unleashed Achaean warships upon the besieged Trojan city and plain. First, there are the hordes of CNO-identified writers and artists surging onto the scene in all their beastly prominence, coming forward in vast accompaniments, in virtual clutters and clowders and nuisances and destructions and kindles and litters and pounces (as in cats of all sorts and varieties), in warrens and droves and buries and traces (as in rabbits), in gazes and nurseries and rafts (likewise of beavers) and bevies and romps (ditto for otters), in drays and scurries (of squirrels), and gangs and herds (the many-hoofed majesties in all their varieties). In a word, the scribblers are coming! [End Page 83] The symposium's premier topic—l ong decided on and thereby duly appointed—i s to be a panel in which several differing versions of the justly famous and well-known tribal story of "The Animals' Ballgame" will be presented—most prominently, that of the famed non-Cherokee and non-Indian anthropologist James Mooney, as well as later versions by the eminent Cherokee storytellers Lloyd Arneach and Kathi Smith Littlejohn. There are to be readings of these versions, as well as renditions of still other variants. Already, quite a gaggle of volunteers have advanced themselves as commentators and elucidators. The enduring question: which of the three—and possibly more?—variants is the correct one? Once, in the long-ago time, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and all other Cherokees spread far and wide spoke the same language and almost, at most times, thought the same thoughts, as only an extraordinarily unified people tend to do. However, with removals, expulsions, exiles, schisms, and wanderings far afield, they had all been scattered like so many wind-blown leaves, mainly through the American Southland, of a diaspora that occurred at the time of The Road Where the People Cried northwestwardly out of the southwestern portion of the traditional Cherokee homeland of the Alleghenies and Appalachians, across rivers and creeks of Tennessee, then across Kentucky, and over the Ohio River and into Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and then into Missouri and then southwestwardly into Arkansas and on into eastern Oklahoma—leaving not only the dead and buried, but also the runaways from the caravans and all to be counted by the enumerators as part of the four thousand lost. Most visible and preeminently recognizable of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is Professor Jonah Erskine, renowned Cherokee scholar and novelist, author of nearly sixty books on Cherokee history and lore, emeritus professor (self-retired at the early age of forty-five) from prestigious Cherokee Nation University, father of ten Cherokeelets, uncle to two dozen more, tribal elder of seventy-one now, slow-moving (but oh, so deceptively so in his comportment), a man at ease with himself and his world—the perfect Cherokee attainment—and an everyday habitué of the très stylish Inn of...

The Payne-Butrick Papers (review)

The Payne-Butrick Papers. Edited and annotated by William L. Anderson, Jane L. Brown, and Anne F. Rogers. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 2 vols. Pp. xxx + 363, viii + 561. Cloth, $150.00.)Reviewed by Daniel K. RichterThese two handsome books bring into print the contents of six manuscript volumes from the Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection at the Newberry Library in Chicago. How those many pages of ethnographic material on Cherokee people during the removal era came into the possession of turn-of-the-twentieth-century collector Ayer is unclear. But they are what survives of an extraordinary effort to document the Cherokees in the 1830s and 1840s undertaken by John Howard Payne, a New Englander perhaps best known as the man responsible for the lyrics of Home Sweet Home.After a modest international career as an actor and an undistinguished stint as ajournalist, and before being appointed as U.S. counsel to Tunis, Payne found himself almost by accident in Cherokee country as a guest of Chief John Ross in 1835. What began with a journalistic interest in Native American resistance to Federal and state removal policies became personal when Georgia troops crossed not only into Cherokee Nation territory but across the line into the state of Tennessee to arrest Payne and Ross on trumped-up charges of obstructing a census. Payne also stood accused of being an abolitionist and a French spy. After his release from imprisonment, Payne made it his business to publicize nationally the illegality of his arrest and the treatment of the Cherokees more generally, particularly in the Treaty of New Echota, which provided the legal basis for removal. Payne spent a few weeks in Cherokee country before his arrest in 1835, four months in Indian Territory after removal in 1840 and 1841, and some additional time with Cherokees in 1842. On that last occasion, he was employed by the U.S. government to investigate the results of the New Echota Treaty; his honest report got him fired.Along the way, Payne not only became deeply interested in Cherokee history and religion but met a man who probably knew those subjects more thoroughly than any other Euro-American. Presbyterian missionary Daniel Butrick lived with Cherokees for more than thirty years, from his arrival at the Brainerd Mission in Tennessee 1818, through the horrors of the Trail of Tears, until his death in what is now Oklahoma in 1851. The first of the six bound volumes at the Newberry is the result of Payne's collaboration with Butrick, a polished but never published manuscript of what Payne hoped would be the first of three books. An overview of Cherokee religious beliefs and ceremonies, the text is heavily - at times nearly fatally - infused with Payne's and Butrick's then common-place theory that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The third Newberry manuscript appears to be a rough draft of one of the subsequent books Payne envisioned. These compilations are valuable not only for the many nuggets of Cherokee traditions that peek through the interpretive scheme but because they attribute particular stories and pieces of information to individual Cherokee informants, and thus allow glimpses of distinct persons and perspectives.But in many ways the remaining manuscripts - which in this edition occupy the middle of volume 1 and all of volume 2 - are far more interesting. The second Newberry manuscript consists of miscellaneous notes that Payne compiled during his visits to the Cherokees. Sprinkled through lists of clans' and chiefs' names, transcriptions of laws and magazine articles, and other bits of information are biographical sketches of such well-known figures as Ross, Shoe Boots, and Sequoyah; notes on interviews with Native leaders; and accounts of the machinations of U.S. officials. Manuscript four, which opens volume 2 of the printed collection, consists of letters written to Payne about the Cherokees. …

"To Look upon Thousands": Cherokee Transnationalism, at Home and Abroad

"To Look upon Thousands":Cherokee Transnationalism, at Home and Abroad Daniel Heath Justice (bio) "They are welcome . . . to look upon me as a strange creature. They see but one, and in return they give me an opportunity to look upon thousands." — Oukanekah/Ada Gal'kala1 Remembering Our Strengths The last few years have been trying ones for the Cherokee Nation, which has seen an alignment in its political orientation toward the troubling exclusivist politics of the United States: racially, through the disenfranchisement of the Cherokee Freedmen, the descendants of black slaves held by Cherokee citizens and granted citizenship through a coerced treaty following the U.S. Civil War; and sexually, through the banning of same-sex marriage and the rhetorical erasure of queer Cherokees through evangelically inspired historical revisionism. (Recently there has been movement toward the surveillance of and punitive action against nonenrolled people who assert [End Page 169] Cherokee ancestry.2) In spite of various arguments affirming the "traditional" foundation of these various shifts toward neoconservative social mores and the ethnic essentialisms of the multicultural, neoliberal state, the shared supposition between these politics is one of shrinking perspective, the closing off of difference through the imposition of an imagined cultural uniformity.3 Such moves sadden me for many reasons, but one of the most significant is the fact that they seem to undermine what has historically been one of our most important traditions: a perspective that is inclusive of difference through the active engagement of our diversity. In other words, our nationhood and tribal specificity has, in many ways, been built upon a transnational foundation that has incorporated difference to assert more firmly and powerfully our distinctiveness as a people. Through the invocation of a specific event in Cherokee history, these comments offer a historical reminder of that tradition of Cherokee transnationalism, with the hope that such a reminder invigorates the confidence and compassion at the heart of Cherokee people-hood rather than the limiting and sometimes resentful anxieties that seem to undergird our current political atmosphere. Strangers in a Strange Land On June 5, 1730, seven young men were the first Cherokees to set foot upon English shores. Brought to England by Sir Alexander Cuming, an erratic, social-climbing aristocrat who sought to curry favor with King George II by presenting the Cherokees as ambassadors who offered homage (and land rights) to the Crown, the visitors were a fascination to gentry and commoner alike. Yet, as the above passage notes, it wasn't only the English who took the opportunity to observe the customs, costumes, and manners of strangers. The visit was perhaps more educational for the Cherokees than for the English, to whom the Cherokees were a curious spectacle of savage finery that reinforced their own sense of superiority. For the Cherokees—and especially for the youngest member of the group, Oukanekah, who would become famous in later years as Ada Gal'kala, or the Little Carpenter—this three-month visit would be an opportunity to observe the diversity and divisions of English [End Page 170] life from a unique and theretofore unparalleled perspective.4 The experience would have a profound influence on subsequent politics and diplomatic efforts in the Cherokee lands of southeastern North America, and it offers an instructive perspective on "transnational" questions of today's "shifting world order" as they relate to the Indigenous nations that still endure in the lands claimed by the United States. It's important to note that indigeneity—the constitutive lived relationship and kinship of a people to a particular land, its histories, and its other-than-human inhabitants—is, in many ways, inextricable from definitions of the transnational, even though both categories are often assumed to be oppositional. Placing indigeneity and transnational at opposite ends of relationality is, in large measure, a Rousseauian inheritance of fossilized noble savages trapped in atemporal isolation from both change (cultural and biological) and other peoples.5 Whereas Christopher Columbus heralded a dramatic (and catastrophic) level of transnational and intercultural interaction between Indigenous American and European peoples, Native realities in the Americas were, by necessity, transnational, for vast and complex relations of diplomacy, trade, conflict, and kinship connected diverse Native peoples long...

"Circular Reasoning": Recentering Cherokee Women in the Antiremoval Campaigns

In 1829-1830 Catharine Beecher, Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, and numerous white women across the Northeast and Midwest launched a successful petition campaign against Indian removal that has been called the first organized political action undertaken by American women. This article repositions the New England women’s campaign within a longer trajectory of American women’s activism, namely, Cherokee women’s political organizing. In the early 1800s, Cherokee women recognized the threat of removal and rose in defense of themselves and their communities. The Cherokee women’s antiremoval campaign was not only impressive at the time, but it also was likely to have had an impact on the New England women’s later effort. This story introduces Margaret Ann (Peggy) Scott Vann Crutchfield—a Cherokee nationalist, Christian convert, slaveholder, and activist—as a complex yet important figure in Cherokee history, Native American women’s history, and U.S. women’s history.