Cherokee Phoenix Research Articles

The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray

Reviewed by: The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire by Brandon Mills, and: Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization by Robert Murray Eve Eure (bio) The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire brandon mills University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 254 pp. Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization robert murray University Press of Florida, 2021 282 pp. Studies of the American Colonization Society (ACS) remain an important site of critical inquiry into the scholarship on the African colonization movement. Brandon Mills's The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire and Robert Murray's Atlantic Passages: Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization offer new direction in reassessing the role of the ACS in colonization studies. Brandon Mills's book is an important addition to this robust scholarship on the African colonization movement, an effort led by the American Colonization Society to resettle African Americans in the nineteenth century. Mills demonstrates how a reconsideration of the "decades preceding the formation of the American Colonization Society" reveals that colonizationist ideas about African American resettlement were constantly shifting (5). By drawing our attention to this understudied earlier period, Mills seeks to highlight the "competing visions of the United States' settler state" and to suggest that these debates on African colonization expose how they were "both an extension and reinvention of early American empire" (9). Although Mills is interested in the history of the ACS, he is also concerned with tracing the multiple routes of colonizationist ideas as they were fastened to discussions about race, citizenship, and settlement within the Western Hemisphere. Mills draws on an impressive array of historical and literary archives such as colonizationist pamphlets, newspapers like the Cherokee Phoenix and the African Repository, and the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Martin Delany. Mills presents this history of the colonization movement by sketching a chronological narrative of its emergence in the Revolutionary era and [End Page 234] geographic and ideological circulation in the nineteenth century. The first chapter begins with correspondence between James Monroe, the governor of Virginia, and Thomas Jefferson, president in 1801, about "whether the federal government could help his state create a colony of former slaves somewhere within the western territory of North America" (8). He demonstrates how ideas about establishing a Black settlement circulated before the formalization of the ACS in 1816 and that proposals for a Black colony were in response to fears of slave rebellions and ongoing wars with Indigenous nations. Highlighting the numerous pamphlets written between 1796 and 1805 on the subject of a Black colony in the US, Mills explores a variety of colonizationist pamphlets (authored by St. George Tucker, Moses Fisk, John Parrish, William Thornton, and Lewis Dupré) that imagined not only western territories but also Louisiana as a possible place for a Black settlement. By the mid-1810s, however, colonizationists no longer envisioned a Black colony within North America but in Africa. In one particularly fascinating section titled, "Preventing an 'African Tecumseh,'" Mills suggests that colonizationists looked to Africa because they "viewed African Americans' aspirations for sovereignty within North America as a dangerous prospect when paired with the potential collaboration of Indian allies" (28). What emerges in this discussion is an illuminating reading of the interplay between Native resistance movements, Black freedom, African colonization, and US empire. The World Colonization Made emphasizes the language of "failure" to call attention to the significance of the evolution of ideas on African colonization to later proposals on Black settlements in Africa. Such a framework enables Mills to broaden the historical archive on the colonization movement to include failed attempts to establish an African colony in North America and Africa. The World Colonization Made persuasively suggests that what counts as failure in some respects are the unrealized aspirations of the aforementioned authors of pre-ACS pamphlets. In a footnote, Mills observes that historians have often described these pre-ACS documents as "incoherent and unsuccessful precursors to the formidable organization that would coalesce behind African colonization" (203–4). Instead, Mills argues that they should be considered "an incipient movement" (43). He examines Paul Cuffe's efforts to create a Black settlement in Sierra Leone to...

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal

In this sweeping account of Native American history in the Southern United States, Gregory D. Smithers lets “Native Southerners drive the story through their words and deeds” (11). Each chapter of Smithers’s book presents an overview of a specific era and details multiple case studies of societies and individuals, the identities they created, and the choices they made in responding to the pressures of their world.Smithers follows a chronological arc from the Paleo-Indian period to the Removal era. Chapter 1 addresses questions of origin, from archaeological theories to Native Southerners’ own creation, migration, and origin stories. Chapter 2 describes chiefdom societies like Etowah, Cahokia, and Coosa; while chapter 3 traces postcontact changes to coalescent societies like the Apalachees, Westos, Natchez, and the Creek Confederacy. Chapter 4 details the transformation of petit nations into larger societies like Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Catawbas in the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 analyzes responses to the emerging United States and pan-Indian alliances, while chapter 6 ends with Indian removals. While Smithers argues that neither societies nor geographic borders are static, he ultimately adheres to the South’s borders as defined by the National Museum of the American Indian.Smithers’s use of sources demonstrates the strengths of an ethnohistorical approach. He wrestles with the limitations of European sources when discussing Native American beliefs and cultures, seeking to engage Indian voices whenever possible. He consults oral traditions and stories as well as written accounts, some from colonial and state governmental papers, and others from Native-controlled sources like the Cherokee Phoenix. Both historical and archaeological research inform his nuanced picture of the Native South. In each chapter, he engages with current scholarly debates; for instance, his first chapter summarizes multiple theories of migration into the Americas, arguing that a focus on scientific, European hypotheses downgrades Native American explanations to simple myths. He treats oral traditions as valuable evidence in understanding the world of Native Southerners. This ethnohistorical methodology is the real strength of Smithers’s book, as he seeks to unpack Native Southerners’ identities by using their words, traditions, and physical artifacts. Creation stories helped explain the world’s existence and gave meaning to cultural mores and political structures. Over the centuries, Native Southerners found new ways to explain their changing world and either maintain or tweak their political structures. Large chiefdoms gave way to coalescent societies, and kinship, town, and clan ties became crucially important in explaining life and culture. Near the end of the book, local ties are subsumed into growing national or pan-Indian activities and identities. Through each change, Smithers keeps the focus on Native Southerners’ decisions on how best to navigate their world, exploring the variety of paths they took through multiple case studies. Instead of painting the Native South in broad strokes and generalities, Smithers offers snapshots of particular groups maintaining and creating their identities in a specific era, and later demonstrates how that identity shifted as necessary to meet new challenges.In his introduction, Smithers states his intention to reach a wide audience beyond just specialists in the Native Southeast. He accomplishes that goal by writing a clear, accessible account of dozens of groups across the Native South, stressing that cultural ties and identities remained crucial to the political decisions each person or group made as their world changed, both before and after European contact. While not comprehensive, his is a valuable contribution to a growing scholarship that seeks to understand Native American history through Native American voices.

Samuel Joseph Smith and the Formerly Anthologized

ABSTRACT Samuel Joseph Smith (1771–1835) created poetry brightened by a generally humorous, light, and melodic style. Yet he was, far more often than not, able to avoid trite, forced didacticism, providing us with poetry that truly both teaches and delights. Despite his life as a recluse at Hickory Grove, his family farm, Smith engaged effectively in resisting the early national inebriate character. His “Eulogium on Rum” is one of only six poems to appear in all three of the new nation's first poetry anthologies—The Beauties of Poetry, British and American (1791); American Poems (1793); and The Columbian Muse (1794). It additionally appeared in several periodicals, as did his later poem “The Indian Boy,” an excerpt of which even appeared in the Cherokee Phoenix in 1829 and which dissents from the national notions of the Christian nation and Manifest Destiny, myths that still haunt our politics and conservative media today.

Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck

Reviewed by: Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827 ed. by Richard W. Starbuck John Ellisor Records of the Moravians Among the Cherokees. Volume 7: March to Removal, Part 2, Death in the Land and Mission, 1825-1827. Edited by Richard W. Starbuck. (Tahlequah, Okla.: Cherokee Heritage Press, 2017. Pp. xxii, 3255-3768. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-9826907-9-6.) The correspondence in this volume of the Moravian records continues to reveal the day-to-day efforts of the Moravian missionaries in spreading their religion among Native Americans in a time of great uncertainty and stress for the Cherokee Nation. The missionaries, Johann Renatus Schmidt at Springplace and John Gambold at Oochgeelogy mission, detail a variety of their problems: incompetent assistants, poor finances, competition from the Methodists and Native leaders, and even an overabundance of venomous serpents in their gardens and kitchens. But the men also speak of successes: the building of a mission house and new school for Cherokee youths at Oochgeelogy, the strong support of the nation's two principal chiefs, the new converts, and a wave of religious fervor sweeping the Cherokee country aided, no doubt, by the Second Great Awakening and, more particularly, by the work of Methodist evangelists and their emotional appeals. Nevertheless, the doom "cloud of removal" hung over the Moravian missionaries and the Cherokees during this period (p. xvii). In 1825 the Creek headman William McIntosh, who had close ties to the Cherokees, accepted a $50,000 bribe to cede all of the Creek lands to the United States. Creek leaders executed McIntosh for his treachery, but the Creek country bordered that of the Cherokees, and Natives and missionaries alike knew that if the federal government allowed the treaty to stand and forced the Creeks to move to the West, the Cherokees would be the next targets of fraudulent dispossession. In fact, Brother Schmidt stated that he believed the government's treaty commissioners could certainly find '"Halfbreeds and other Speculators'" willing to take bribes to cede land (p. 3319). But at first, Schmidt seemed to secretly support removal as a cure for the Cherokee Nation's problems. He decried the fact that wealthy slave-owning Cherokees of mixed descent controlled the nation's affairs, while the poor Indians starved in a country depleted of game. He saw murders increasing in the land along with corruption spread by intruding white settlers. All helped convince Schmidt that the movement west would give the Cherokees and missionaries a fresh start and a brighter future. Fortunately, the federal government did not honor McIntosh's treaty and compel the Creeks to move beyond the Mississippi River. Accordingly, the furor over removal died down somewhat in the Cherokee country. In the interim, Schmidt had time to further assess Cherokee public opinion and decided that they were determined to stay where they were and defend their country. Consequently, he changed his view of emigration and, like most Moravians, proclaimed that removal would actually demolish everything the Cherokees and missionaries had built. And, indeed, the Cherokees did continue to build their own republic as a means of holding on to their nation as it existed in portions of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. The Moravian correspondence notes that Sequoyah invented his syllabary in 1825, allowing the Cherokees to read and write their own language and the missionaries to produce Cherokee hymnals and bibles. The Cherokee National [End Page 434] Council also authorized the printing of a national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, as well as building a national academy at New Echota, the Cherokee capital. Then, in 1827, the National Council adopted a constitution similar to that of the United States, adding to all their other accomplishments as a "civilized" Indian nation. However, the Moravians and Cherokees suffered great losses that year. The Cherokees' longtime principal chief, Pathkiller, and his successor and friend of the Moravians, Charles Renatus Hicks, died within two weeks of each other. And following those two men, Brother Gambold passed to his reward after many years of service in the Cherokee country. Moreover, the Cherokees and Moravians had to know that...

The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History by Noenoe K. Silva

Reviewed by: The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History by Noenoe K. Silva Robert Warrior (bio) The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History Noenoe K. Silva Duke UP, 2017, 288 pp. ISBN 978-0822363682, $26.95 paperback. The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen focuses on the lives and works of two Kanaka Maoli writers and editors from overlapping generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing by example an argument for and a methodological intervention in the continuing development of Native Hawaiian studies. Intellectual history is at the heart of Silva's version of Native Hawaiian studies, and this biographically-based study operates as both a much-needed contribution to intellectual historical archival research and interpretation and as an argument in favor of the need for a library of books like it. Joseph Ho'ona'auao Kānepu'u, a Christian schoolteacher from the island of Molokai, wrote and published in Hawaiian from the 1850s into the 1880s. Silva dedicates three chapters to Kānepu'u and his work, first providing an overview of the body of his writings, then a closer look at what she considers to be the most significant and literary of his works, and finally a discussion of his writings that contribute to contemporary discussions of Native Hawaiian geography. As Silva argues of Kānepu'u's literary works, "He intentionally positions himself to act as a bridge spanning the divide between the world of thought and practice of his ancestors and us, his descendants" (52). The second part of the book provides a similar overview and analysis of Joseph Moku'ōhai Poepoe, a prolific and well-known writer and newspaper publisher who wrote from the late 1870s until his death in 1913. In Poepoe's case, Silva provides detailed analyses of mele (songs or chants) from a mo'olelo, or work of Hawaiian history, featuring Hi'iaka, the sister of the volcano (deity) Pele, and a full mo'olelo Poepoe serialized in his newspaper over the course of ten months. The contrast between The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen and Silva's 2004 Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, which members of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association in 2011 voted the most influential book of the first decade of this century, is remarkable. Silva presents the history of Kanaka Maoli resistance she chronicles in Aloha Betrayed on a grand scale, while this new book tightly focuses on two figures. Aloha Betrayed demonstrated how generations of scholars of colonial Hawai'i had not utilized the extensive archive of Hawaiian-language newspapers in writing their histories, effectively ignoring a deeply detailed and complex record of Kanaka responses to settlement and colonization. Silva narrated a history that cut against the grain of Native passivity, showing, for instance, how 95 percent of Native Hawaiians signed an 1897 petition opposing US colonization and many other episodes of defiance against US usurpation of Hawaiian sovereignty. Steel-Tipped Pen also focuses on that era of Kanaka resistance to US [End Page 936] colonialism, but does so through the lives of these two newspaper publisher-editors. Poepoe, as Silva points out in Steel-Tipped Pen, came to be in favor of US annexation and actually wrote derisively of the 1897 petition drive in his newspaper. Poepoe's story is strikingly similar to that of the Cherokee intellectual Elias Boudinot, who in 1827 founded the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, and favored Cherokee Removal even in the face of an anti-removal petition signed by an overwhelming number of Cherokee people. Boudinot, as a member of a tiny minority of Cherokee elites who signed the Removal treaty, was summarily executed under provisions of Cherokee law against signing away Cherokee lands. Poepoe lived to see annexation, celebrating it in his newspaper and eventually serving in Hawai'i's territorial legislature. Kānepu'u died before the unfolding of the major events that led to the US overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, but in Silva's portrayal of his life and work he comes across as a figure whose politics were nothing like Poepoe's, not...

The Press of the Cherokee Phoenix Newspaper as Artifact

The Press of the Cherokee Phoenix Newspaper as Artifact

Practicing Sovereignty: Colonial Temporalities, Cherokee Justice, and the "Socrates" Writings of John Ridge

Practicing Sovereignty:Colonial Temporalities, Cherokee Justice, and the "Socrates" Writings of John Ridge Kelly Wisecup (bio) BETWEEN 1828 AND 1830, a Cherokee writer using the pseudonym Socrates penned four articles for the Cherokee Phoenix. Three pieces appeared in 1828, just after Elias Boudinot began editing and publishing the Cherokee- and English-language newspaper. In a two-part commentary on Georgia's claims to Cherokee land published in late February and early March 1828, Socrates debunked the state's arguments by inserting quotations from books by the Swiss legal theorist Emmerich de Vattel and the colonial historian and minister Alexander Hewatt. In these articles, the pseudonymous writer provides evidence that the Cherokees had long maintained the "right of sovereignty over [their] country" and critiques Georgia's arguments that the Cherokees were savages who could not possess land.1 Later in 1828, in a third article, titled "Intermarriage," Socrates proposes that the Cherokee Nation establish a central office to monitor marriages between white men and Cherokee women. Socrates's final article was published in July 1830, a few months after Congress passed the Indian Removal Act and soon after the state of Georgia passed laws extending state jurisdiction over Cherokee people, events that had one culmination in the Cherokee challenge to these policies in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia in 1831. In this final article, Socrates commented on letters from the War Department regarding the Indian Removal Act, noting that President Andrew Jackson's policies violated treaties and acts of Congress that defined the relationship between Native nations and the United States. Socrates ends this article by envisioning that the Cherokee Nation will outlast this latest attack on their lands, writing, "I believe the people will endure a seige [sic] of all this persecution, and continue to call on Congress for help."2 Scholars have speculated about Socrates's identity for many years but without conclusive results.3 However, archival evidence makes possible an identification of the writer behind the pseudonym. A manuscript version of Socrates's two-part 1828 article titled "Strictures on the 'Report of the Joint Committee on the State of the Republic' in the Legislature of Georgia, on the subject of the Cherokee Lands" is held in the John Howard Payne Papers, at the Newberry Library. It is in the handwriting of and is identified as being [End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. "Strictures on the 'Report of the Joint Committee on the State of the Republic' in the Legislature of Georgia, on the Subject of the Cherokee Lands." Photo Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago. Call # Ayer MS 689. [End Page 31] written by John Ridge, the son of Major Ridge, a wealthy Cherokee plantation owner who was also an influential Cherokee leader in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, both before and after the Cherokees adopted a constitution and tripartite system of government.4 Both Ridges joined a relatively small group of Cherokees who, in the late eighteenth century, adopted Western agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and, in some cases, language and education in response to pressures from the United States.5 John Ridge, for example, was educated at Brainerd Mission School, run by Moravian missionaries in the Cherokee Nation, and at Cornwall Mission School in Connecticut, where he met his wife, a white Connecticut woman named Sarah Northrup. In the 1820s and 1830s, he served as an amanuensis and spokesman for the Cherokees, giving lectures on Cherokee rights throughout the East Coast, often appearing with his cousin Elias Boudinot or other Cherokee young men.6 In 1830, Ridge was elected to the Cherokee National Committee. Shortly thereafter, President Jackson refused to require Georgia to defer to federal authority in its dealings with the Cherokee Nation and thus to uphold the Supreme Court's decision in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Indian policy was under federal jurisdiction. Following these events, the Ridges, Boudinot, and other Cherokees came to the decision that the Nation could best escape threats to its autonomy from states like Georgia by removing to Indian Territory. The Treaty Party, as they came to be called, negotiated with the United States for land in Indian Territory in an attempt...

The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura

Reviewed by: The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura Rochelle Raineri Zuck (bio) KEY WORDS William Apess, Native Americans, Pequot Indians, Religion, Methodists The Life of William Apess, Pequot. By Philip F. Gura. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 216. Cloth, $26.00.) In the more than twenty years since Barry O’Connell published On Our Own Ground: The Collected Works of William Apess, a Pequot (Amherst, MA, 1992), the life and writings of William Apess (1798–1839) have generated a significant amount of scholarly interest. As the first American Indian to publish his autobiography, A Son of the Forest (1829), and the author of frequently anthologized works such as “An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man” (1833) and “Eulogy on King Philip” (1836), Apess’s name often appears in academic books and articles and on college syllabi. Yet, as Philip Gura points out in the prologue to The Life of William Apess, a Pequot, despite commanding the attention of a scholarly audience, Apess has yet to be fully appreciated by the general public, who, he claims, “needs a straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi). Gura’s cultural biography of Apess, which is engaging, well-researched, and accessible, provides such an account, while also speaking to the interests of an academic audience. The eight chapters in The Life of William Apess span Apess’s early years and conversion to Christianity through his career as a minister, author, lecturer, and activist, and conclude with his untimely death in 1839 at the age of forty-one. Along the way, Gura highlights Apess’s participation in major events such as the War of 1812 and the so-called Mashpee Revolt, his interpersonal relationships and professional highs and lows, and the prejudice and racism that he experienced throughout his life. To provide a vivid portrait of Apess, Gura mines official documents such as the coroner’s inquest, court records, town records, financial documents, and newspapers, in addition to Apess’s own writings and select secondary scholarship. Through his readings of these sources, Gura makes a compelling case for ranking Apess among well-known nineteenth-century figures who shared his commitment to what we might now call social justice, figures such as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady [End Page 835] Stanton, Frances Wright, Orestes Brownson, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and David Walker (xiv). For an academic audience that is likely conversant with Apess’s writings and secondary scholarship about him, one of the key contributions of Gura’s biography is to contextualize Apess’s life and work among the rich networks of individuals and communities in which he circulated. Gura opens with a brief discussion of the Pequots in the early nineteenth century and Apess’s childhood and family life in Massachusetts and Connecticut, working from Apess’s autobiography, the scanty records that remain of Apess and his family, and scholarship on Native New England. Later in The Life of William Apess, he details life in communities such as the Hard Scrabble neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, where Apess lived with his wife and children in 1825, and 1830s Boston, where Apess and his work circulated among the African American community in which David Walker and Maria Stewart lived. Gura highlights possible and documented connections, noting that while in Providence, Apess may have met abolitionists such as Nathaniel Paul and Hosea Easton, and in Boston Apess was written up in Garrison’s Liberator and shared a stage with Elias Boudinot, editor of The Cherokee Phoenix. The rich detail brings these communities to life and helps even readers who are familiar with Apess’s published works to map his numerous travels and to more fully understand the literary, historical, social, religious, and economic influences on Apess’s writings. Another strength of this work is its attention to the links between Apess’s experiences and literary productions with larger cultural and social forces. For example, as part of his discussion of Apess’s difficulties obtaining a license to preach, Gura notes how Apess’s experience reveals a broader point about Methodism in the 1820s, “the denomination’s increasing marginalization of the poor and disenfranchised...

Literacy and intellectual life in the Cherokee nation, 1820-1906

Many Anglo-Americans in the nineteenth century regarded Indian tribes as little more than illiterate bands of savages in need of civilizing. Few were willing to recognize that one of the major Southeastern tribes targeted for removal west of the Mississippi already had an advanced civilization with its own system of writing and rich literary tradition. In Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906, James W. Parins traces the rise of bilingual literacy and intellectual life in the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century - a time of intense social and political turmoil for the tribe. By the 1820s, Cherokees had perfected a system for writing their language - the syllabary created by Sequoyah - and in a short time taught it to virtually all their citizens. Recognizing the need to master the language of the dominant society, the Cherokee Nation also developed a superior public school system that taught students in English. The result was a literate population, most of whom could read the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribal newspaper founded in 1828 and published in both Cherokee and English. English literacy allowed Cherokee leaders to deal with the white power structure on their own terms: Cherokees wrote legal briefs, challenged members of Congress and the executive branch, and bargained for their tribe as white interests sought to take their land and end their autonomy. In addition, many Cherokee poets, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists published extensively after 1850, paving the way for the rich literary tradition that the nation preserves and fosters today. Literary and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906 takes a fascinating look at how literacy served to unite Cherokees during a critical moment in their national history, and advances our understanding of how literacy has functioned as a tool of sovereignty among Native peoples, both historically and today.

Native acts: Indian performance, 1603-1832

Laura L. Mielke, Introduction 1. Matt Cohen, Lying Inventions: Native Dissimulation in Early Colonial New England 2. Nan Goodman, The Deer Island Indians and Common Law Performance 3. John Pollack, Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France 4. Olivia Bloechl, Wendat Song and Carnival Noise in the Jesuit Relations 5. Stephanie Fitzgerald, 'I Wunnatuckquannum, This Is My Hand': Native Performance in Massachusett Language Indian Deeds 6. Caroline Wigginton, In a Red Petticoat: Coosaponakeesa's Performance of Creek Sovereignty in Colonial Georgia 7. Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Playing John White: John Wompas and Racial Identity in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World 8. Timothy J. Shannon, 'This Wretched Scene of British Curiosity and Savage Debauchery': Performing Indian Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Britain 9. Phillip H. Round, Performing Indian Publics: Two Native Views of Diplomacy to the Western Nations in 1792 10. Theresa Strouth Gaul, Editing as Indian Performance: Elias Boudinot, Poetry, and the Cherokee Phoenix Philip J. Deloria, Afterword Contributors Index

The Cherokee Phoenix : Resistance and Accommodation

The Cherokee Phoenix : Resistance and Accommodation

Cherokee Independent Press Act of 2000

Prior to the 1997 constitutional crisis of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, journalists working for the tribe’s Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate, then called the Cherokee Advocate, did not have any press freedoms similar to the First Amendment. However, the 2-year crisis led to a revision of the tribe’s constitution, out of which sprang the first Independent Press Act for a Native American nation. Although about 65 tribes in the United States have provisions for a free press in their constitutions, many are prohibited from acting on this provision due to tribal politics or other issues. The Cherokee Independent Press Act of 2000 for the first time guarantees journalists working for the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper the same rights and privileges that their non-Native journalist counterparts have who work under the freedoms granted by the First Amendment. This study examines the conditions that led to both the crisis and the new Act, summarizes the history of federal law restricting Native media, and explains the impact of the Cherokee law on Native American journalism. It also briefly looks at reaction to the law by other Native American tribal leaders and journalists who might be considering similar measures.

Metal Type from the Print Shop of the Historical "Cherokee Phoenix" Newspaper

Metal Type from the Print Shop of the Historical "Cherokee Phoenix" Newspaper

Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America , and: American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s (review)

Reviewed by: Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America, and: American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s Gordon M. Sayre (bio) Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America Edited by Joanna Brooks, with a Foreword by Robert WarriorNew York: Oxford University Press, 2006445 pp. American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s. Edited by Bernd C. PeyerNorman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007401 pp. The covers of both these books feature The Reverend Samson Occom, a mezzotint copy of a portrait painted by Mason Chamberlin (1727-1787) during Occom's tour of Britain in 1765-1768. As was common in eighteenth-century portraiture, Occom is finely dressed and poses alongside emblematic objects. What appear to be arrows hang on the wall behind him, and even as his gaze is focused on the viewer, he points to a passage in an open book. Most assume it is a Bible, although a curator at Dartmouth College, which owns the portrait, told me the words are not legible. The long tabs of his neckcloth make a visual echo of the pages of the book, with shaded rectangular fields that resemble text. Occom's pose resembles the 1828 portrait of Sequoyah by Charles Bird King, in which he points at one of the 86 characters of the Cherokee syllabary he invented. To compare the two portraits is to consider the alternatives of Native Americans who embraced European textuality and those who insisted on retaining their Native language, or textualized it to better compete with colonial languages. A viewer of the Occom or Sequoyah portrait is presented with an individual who directs our attention to a text, as if to instruct us. To contemplate such portraits is to be drawn into a loop between the authority of the text and the influence of the personage, and to wonder which is primary, or whether one is derived from the other. Sequoyah is famous not for creating discourses but rather textuality itself. His syllabary was used in the [End Page 219] Cherokee Phoenix newspaper edited by Elias Boudinot, a bilingual textualist who is among the authors included in Peyer's anthology as well as the subject of Theresa Strouth Gaul's 2005 book To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839. Occom has come to the attention of many Early Americanists because his brief autobiographical narrative was included in Peyer's earlier anthology The Elders Wrote (1982) and, along with his A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772) was selected for the Heath, the Norton, and other major anthologies of American literature. But this was the tip of an iceberg. Joanna Brooks now presents a "'big book' of Native North American writing from the colonial era" (39). With prodigious editorial work, she has transcribed and annotated more than four hundred dense pages of Occom's extant letters, journals, sermons and hymns, mostly from archives at Dartmouth College and the Connecticut Historical Society. The portraitists of Occom and Sequoyah created loops of reference yet remained outside them. One might think of the Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, as a textual portrait, and of American Indian Nonfiction as a series of portraits. The books create for their audiences an image or series of images of learned persons, and create relationships between the personage[s] and texts. The act of creation is one not of a painter but of an editor. Like the portraits, Brooks's editorial apparatus and, to a lesser degree, Peyer's anthology suggest relationships between textual and nontextual sources, between alphabetic and non-alphabetic literacy, and between English, the language of the dominant colonizers, and the multiple native languages of North America. Brooks opens her introduction with an account of a "round wooden box fashioned from the bark of an elm tree and entwined with elaborately carved vines, leaves, and dotted lines [which] was catalogued among the holdings of the Peabody Essex Museum" (3). In 1995, when Mohegan tribal representatives visited the museum to "survey its holdings for possible repatriation," "tribal medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon" explained...

Indigenous Illustration: Native American Artists and Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture

The relationship of Native communities to US print culture during the nineteenth century remains fairly obscure today, some 175 years after the Cherokee Phoenix first saw print in New Echota, Georgia in 1828. In this essay, I would like to focus on one aspect of that history that has received even less notice than movable type—pictorial illustration. The lack of attention paid to printed American Indian illustrations is even more difficult to explain than the lack of critical consideration directed toward early Native books, given that one of the common stereotypes attached to Native utterance is that Indians are image-oriented peoples. The general assumption is that if Native Americans had anything like writing at all, it was “picture writing”—to borrow a phrase from Garrick Mallery's influential nineteenth-century study of pictographic systems in the western hemisphere. Even the spoken forms of Native semiotic production, early ethnographers theorized, were based on object, metaphor, and image.1

Digitizing Cherokee Culture: Libraries, Students, and the Reservation

Anyone who has used the internet in the classroom surely knows that the technological revolution has produced as many pitfalls as it has miracles. From the perspective of multiethnic studies, the World Wide Web's dream of cybertopia must be carefully considered in relation to the corresponding nightmare of erasing racial identity. As Joe Lockard observes in the essay collection Race in Cyberspace, 'Virtual community' is an appeal for a transcendent communitarianism, one where race and ethnicity have been left behind as remnants of an Old World Order (172). And while it is certainly true that faceless interactions on the internet can diminish the importance of cultural identity, I want to argue that the proliferation of digital archives, which make vast amounts of historical material available to a much wider audience, creates new opportunities (and problems) for helping students and teachers understand the complexities of race in America. More specifically, this article will explore the pedagogical possibilities associated with the University of Georgia's ongoing project to archive, preserve, and interpret Cherokee culture in digital form. (1) In the hope that other teachers may be able to learn from our triumphs and tribulations, I will retell the convoluted story of how the flagship university in the state responsible for the Trail of Tears (2) came to undertake the mission of digitizing thousands of documents related to Cherokee culture, building a pedagogical website designed to make these archives more accessible for classroom use, and reaching out to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation on reservations in western North Carolina. (3) While many scholars have noted the tendency of chat rooms, bulletin boards, MUDS, and MOOS to efface racial and ethnic identity, analogous problems associated with digital archives have not yet been as fully explored (see Nakamura, Kolko, Holmes, and Bell). risks are perhaps even more profound given the much broader historical scope of archives. My intent here is to detail the struggle to correct the problematic subtext that was invisibly encoded into two of the largest digital archives related to Cherokee material at the University of Georgia: the Cherokee Phoenix, the complete record of the first Native American newspaper, 1828-1834, and the Southeastern Native American Documents, 1730-1842, a collection of more than two thousand documents related to Indian history in the region. Make no mistake, these archives are a wonderful scholarly resource whose capabilities have not yet been fully appreciated by scholars, students, or teachers. And yet, as I began to work with these electronic resources in the classroom, it gradually became clear to me that, because the materials are limited to the pre-removal period, the archives inadvertently reinforce the Myth of the Vanishing Indian or the idea that the Cherokee disappeared from Georgia in 1838. (4) dangers associated with this tacit erasure of the living Cherokee cannot be ignored, particularly at a university built on land that rightfully belongs to the Cherokee. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the US Supreme Court ruled that The Indian nations ... retain[ed] their original natural rights, as the undisputed possessors of the soil, from time immemorial, and hence Georgia's claim to the land was unconstitutional, void, and of no effect (Marshall 242, 225). My point is not to exacerbate or to assuage the all-too-deep laceration of white guilt; there is no balm in Gilead to heal such a wound. Rather, I want to analyze how digital archives can be incorporated into the classroom to improve the teaching of America's multiethnic heritage. More specifically, this article will detail how the archives were built, the complications of using them in the classroom, and the struggle to identify and correct the narrative of the Vanishing Indian that lies hidden beneath the glossy surface of search engines and hyperlinks. …

Representing Cherokee Dispossession

On February 21, 1828, the Cherokees published the first issue of the first newspaper in America to contain writing in an indigenous native language. The paper was called Cherokee Phoenix—Tsalagi Tsu-le-hi-sa-nu-hi, or something like "I will arise" in the Cherokee language. Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy, 196 On August 1, 1838, Chief John Ross "assembled his Cherokee followers and led them in a pledge that, despite the loss of their homeland, the Cherokee Nation would never die." Hoig, The Cherokees and Their Cheifs, 171 It is useless to attempt to describe the long, wearisome passage of those exiled Indians. Wahnenauhi (Mrs. Lucy L. Keys), "The Wahnenauhi Manuscript," 207 Granma and Granpa wanted me to know of the past, for "If ye don't know where your people have been then ye won't know where your people are going." And so they told me most of it. Carter, The Education of Little Tree, 40 "Grandpa," I said, suddenly excited. "Grandpa, I can hear them. They're singing." Conley, Mountain Windsong, 218 [End Page 16] I regarded this new birth as not just the end of our suffering but also as the dawn of a new day—the first day of our new life in the promised land. Twist, "The Promised Land," in Boston Mountain Tales, 143 "Full Circle: The Connecticut Casino" . . . all the gold stolen from the Cherokees in Georgia seeming to return now to the Pequots in Connecticut, . . . Smith, The Cherokee Lottery Maritole: "The baby who had been born was crying. "Luthy took my arm. 'It's a new voice that won't grieve for our old land in North Carolina.'" Quaty Lewis: "Some night I'd listen to the wind in the pines. Only there weren't pines here. I looked around. They were oaks, a different kind of oak than we'd had in North Carolina, but they would sound the old truth of the pines." Luthy: "As for the trail—it's over—Tanner and my boys are alive." Maritole: "Maybe someday love would come." Glancy, Pushing the Bear, 228, 229, 233 How to represent in writing the dispossession of the Cherokees—in particular, the experience of "Nunna daul Tsunyi . . . 'the trail where we cried,'" the Trail of Tears, on which, from the summer of 1838 until March 1839, of some thirteen thousand people (black slaves and intermarried whites among them), more than a third, perhaps four thousand people, died (Mankiller and Wallis 46)? Difficult as it surely is to represent this climactic event of Cherokee dispossession, it is not very difficult to say how it came about. Even in an age wary of "facts," the facts in this instance are very little contestable. Set out as a "Chronology of the Cherokee Removal," they can be [End Page 17] listed, as Theda Purdue and Michael Green have done, in little more than two pages of text. Except as noted, what follows is based on Purdue and Green (176-79): Around 1700 the Cherokees first encountered Europeans in the persons of British traders. In 1776 the American Colonists invaded Cherokee towns. After the American Revolution, the Treaty of Hopewell (1785) pledged peaceful relations between the new United States and the Cherokee Nation. In 1800 Moravian Fathers from Germany established a mission among the Cherokees to further their Christianization. In 1802 in exchange for a land cession from the state of Georgia, the U.S. government promised to extinguish Creek and Cherokee title to lands in the state of Georgia. From 1808 through 1810, one of the first major migrations of Cherokee people west of the Mississippi occurred. In the Creek War of 1813-14, the Cherokees fought on the side of Andrew Jackson and the United States against hostile Creeks. In 1821 Sequoyah invented a syllabary by which the Cherokee language could be written, and in 1828 the Cherokee Phoenix began publication in English and in Cherokee. Also in 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected President, and in 1828 and 1829, the state...

Print, Cultural Memory, and John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit

LORI MERISH Print, Cultural Memory, and John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit The postindian warriors hover at last over the ruins of tribal representations and surmount the scriptures of manifest manners with new stories; these warriors counter the sutveillance and literature of dominance with their own simulations of survivance. The postindian arises from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real, not the absence of the real in the simulations of dominance. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners I want to write the history of the Cherokee Nation as it Should be written and not as white men will wtite it and as they will tell the tale, to screen and justify themselves. All this I can nevet do unless I get into the proper position to wield influence and make money. . . . Instead of writing for my living [in California] I should be using my pen in behalf of my own people and in rescuing from oblivion the proud names of our race. ... If there ever was a man on earth that loved his people and his kindred, I am that man. John Rollin Ridge, letter to Stand Watie, October 9, 1854 As far back as I can remember, I belonged to a secret society of Indian women, meeting around a kitchen table in a conspiracy to bring the past into the present. I listened, their stories settling forever in my blood, and I knew the stories were told and told not for carrying but for keeping. They heard, and they taught me to heat, the truth in things not said. They listened, and they taught me to listen, in the space between words. Betty Louise Bell (Cherokee), Faces in tL· Moon Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Lori Merish The Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, an 1854 novel by mixedblood Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge (or Yellow Bird, the English translation of his Cherokee name Cheesquatalawny) was the first published novel by a Native American. Ridge was a journalist, poet, and novelist who was born in Georgia in 1827, only a few years before the Cherokee were forced to emigrate to Indian Territory in Oklahoma—an event of tremendous import in his life, and for his work. His was one of the most powerful families in the Cherokee Nation: his grandfather, Major Ridge, was a noted tribal leader, as were his father, John Ridge, and his uncles, Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie) and Stand Watie, and they were centrally involved in the divisive political history of the Cherokee Nation during the 1820s and 30s. In particular, his father, trained as a lawyer, and Boudinot, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, were early leaders in the fight against Removal ; in 1835, aftet President Jackson refused to enforce the Supreme Court decision to uphold Cherokee property and civil rights against illegal encroachment by the state of Georgia and Removal seemed to them inevitable, Ridge and Boudinot drew up the treaty whereby Removal was negotiated. The "Treaty Party's" actions alienated the family from most Cherokees, including followers of the powerful chief John Ross, and led to the execution of Rollin Ridge's grandfather, uncle, and father by members of the Ross faction several years later. (When John Ridge signed the Treaty of New Echota, he reportedly announced, "I have signed my death warrant."1) These events informed, perhaps motivated Ridge's account of the violence that ensued from Anglo landgrabbing and manifest destiny in Joaquin. Focusing on the newly annexed, contested terrain of California, Ridge counters Euroamerican narratives of "discovery" and the Edenic representations of Western "virgin land" (such as those found in John Fiémont's writing), making space for what José David Saldivai terms "an alternative narrative of what can now be called the ethno-iacialized cultures of displacement" (7). In doing so, Ridge, like many other early Native American writers, appropriated the forms, rhetorics, and conventions of Euroamerican print culture, utilizing them as what Michel de Certeau terms...

"Commendable Progress": Acculturation at the Cherokee Female Seminary

PRIOR TO THEIR REMOVAL, the Cherokees' domain east of the Mississippi River included northern Alabama, northwestern Georgia, western North Carolina, and eastern Tennessee. From their association with white Americans, the Cherokees had adopted churches, asylums, schools, and farms of ten to forty acres per family, on which they cultivated corn, cotton, rye, and wheat. Most lived in well-built cabins with chimneys, while a growing class of wealthy planters maintained plantation-style estates and slaves. The Cherokees also took other ideas from the whites, including their form of government, the institution of slavery, the concept of a written language, and the desire to educate their people. In 1828, however, gold was discovered on Cherokee lands in Georgia, and the resulting gold rush brought many non-Indians onto Cherokee lands. Along with this encroachment came the inevitable Treaty of New Echota in 1835, which required the Cherokees to surrender their lands. Despite their adoption of white ways, the Cherokees still lost their homeland to a government which earlier had guaranteed the lands to them forever.' After their removal to the west, the Cherokees pursued their goals of creating an Indian Republic, complete with a constitution modeled in part on the Constitution of the United States. They also brought their tribal alphabet, invented by the brilliant Sequoyah, and their newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix (renamed The Cherokee Advocate in 1844). More importantly, they nurtured a determination to survive as a tribe after displacement from their native lands.2 Intermarriage with whites was a primary factor influencing the Cherokees' desire for cultural and educational advancement. More than any other tribe in North America, the Cherokees had married and associated with white settlers, thereby acquiring customs and viewpoints other than their own. Such acculturation was exemplified by John Ross, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1827 until his death in 1866. Ross was only one-eighth Cherokee, but his predominantly white ancestry proved relatively insignificant as he became an effective spokesman for the rights and welfare of the Cherokee people.3 Even before their arrival in Indian Territory, the Cherokees had manifested an interest in formal education. In 1799 John Barber Davis

Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot

This volume collects most of the writings published by the accomplished Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot (1804?-1839). Founding editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, Boudinot is the most ambiguous and puzzling figure in Cherokee history. Although he first struggled against the removal of his people from their native Southeast, Boudinot later reversed his position and signed the Treaty of New Echota, an action that cost him his life. Together with Theda Perdue's biographical introduction and in-depth annotations, these letters, articles, pamphlets, and editorials document the stages of Boudinot's religious, philosophical, and political growth, from his early optimism that the Cherokees could completely assimilate into white society to his call for a separate nation of civilized Cherokees.