Browsing by Subject "Cherokee"
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Item Stoking the fire : nationhood in early twentieth century Cherokee writing(2012-05) Brown, Kirby Lynn; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Perez, Domino R.; Gonzalez, John M.; Sturm, Circe D.; Justice, Daniel H.My research builds upon interdisciplinary trends in Native scholarship emphasizing tribal-specificity; attention to understudied periods, writers, and texts; and a political commitment to engage contemporary challenges facing Indigenous communities. My dissertation examines the persistence of nationhood in Cherokee writing between the dissolution of the Cherokee government preceding Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and political reorganization in the early 1970s. Situating writing by John Milton Oskison, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs and Ruth Muskrat Bronson explicitly within the Cherokee national contexts of its emergence, I attend to the complicated ways they each remembered, imagined, narrated and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning state. Often read as a transitional “dark age” in Cherokee history, this period stands instead as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory capable of informing contemporary debates in the Cherokee Nation and Native Studies today.Item Writing a way home : Cherokee narratives of critical and ethical nationhood(2014-05) Russell, Bryan Edward; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; González, John MoránWriting a Way Home examines ways that Cherokees in the latter half of the 20th century who have been marginalized through the privileging of state narratives have deployed literature as a way to challenge narratives of state domination and to imagine and work toward more critical, ethical Cherokee nationhood. I examine the ways that Robert K. Thomas and Natachee Scott Momaday used literature during the federal Termination and Relocation programs to imagine functioning tribal nations against the United States' assimilation narrative of the time. I further delve into how the Cherokee Nation's state narrative of the Cherokee Freedmen has denationalized Freedmen descendants and how, by using the WPA narratives of former Cherokee slaves and Tom Holm and Thomas' Peoplehood Matrix, we can re-narrate the Freedmen descendants into a more ethical Cherokee Nation. Finally, I close the study with an examination of Daniel Heath Justice's Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy that uses storytelling to re-imagine a place of reverence for gay and queer-identified Cherokees at a time when the Cherokee Nation passed a ban on same-sex marriage, claiming that such relationships defied what the Cherokee state narrates as tribal tradition. I aim to show in this study the danger of uncritically accepting the state model for tribal nations and the importance of periodically challenging tribal nations when leaders behave unethically. Likewise, this study demonstrates the power of story to not only check the excesses of state sovereignty that marginalize people based on their history, politics, race and sexuality, but also the power to re-imagine a nation -- a home -- that welcomes all its relations.