Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 312 Pp

ALH Online Review, Series XIX 1

Kirby Brown, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 312 pp.

Reviewed by David Stirrup, University of Kent

In the years since the provocations of “American Indian literary nationalists” such as Craig Womack and Robert Warrior forced a turn in Native literary studies—falsely, or at least overstatedly described as a divide for over a decade afterward—there has been a slow but steady growth of writings dedicated to tribal-specific literatures. I say surprisingly because, as Jace Weaver has subsequently eloquently argued, few of the charges levelled against the literary nationalists held water. Their “separatism” was a justified, largely rhetorical position while accusations of essentialism were overblown. In fact, in recent years, the positive interests of so-called cosmopolitanist and nationalist literary approaches have increasingly converged. Adam Spry’s monograph Our War Paint is Writer’s Ink (2018) is one such excellent example. Monographs such as Penelope Myrtle Kelsey’s Reading the Wampum and edited volumes such as Doerfler, Sinclair, and Stark’s Centering Anishinaabeg Studies contribute in no small part to the development of Haudenosaunee studies and Anishinaabeg studies respectively.

So too Kirby Brown’s Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970. Exploring what the author himself identifies as an underexamined era in Cherokee literary studies, Brown adds to the earlier work of Weaver, Joshua Nelson, Daniel Heath Justice, among a burgeoning body of Cherokee scholars. Each, in turn, inherits an incredible legacy from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Cherokee writers and intellectuals. Most importantly—and excitingly for the field, perhaps—Brown notes an abundant archive that, his own work notwithstanding, still awaits further excavation. The future for Cherokee literary studies, in other words, is bright.

The bookends to Brown’s period of study, as many in the field will immediately recognize, are the admission of Oklahoman statehood and the dissolution of the Cherokee Nation by the US Congress in 1907 and the Nation’s political reorganization in the early ‘70s, beginning with the popular election of a chief in 1971 (having had a federally appointed leader since 1946). In turn, he focuses on four writers whose work, contrary to popular misperception that this period represents a “dark age” of Cherokee national history, engages with the political and ethical concerns of Cherokee citizenship, sovereignty, and nation. John Milton Oskoson, Rachel Caroline Eaton, Rollie Lynn Riggs, and Ruth Muskrat Bronson have each been subject to scholarly intervention to greater or lesser degrees, but Stoking the Fire is the first study to focus specifically on the ways that these four writers, collectively, articulate, engage, and critique Cherokee identity and Cherokee sovereignty in the period. In doing so, Brown eschews conventional attitudes toward this period, too. Those attitudes tend to designate intellectuals according to assimilationist or accommodationist paradigms—

a landscape that admits resignation and/or ambivalence but little in the way of the articulation of positive cultural and political resurgence. In the case of each of these individuals—the novelist, Oskison; historian, Eaton; playwright, Riggs; and educationalist, Bronson—Brown makes meaningful interventions at the level of reputation, recovery, and revision. To that end, he draws readings from the works of Oskison and Riggs that counter the notions that they were either disengaged from Cherokee politics or that they espoused a defeatist view of Cherokee futures. In the case of Eaton and Bronson, meanwhile, Brown intervenes in the historical record to add two powerful female voices to the burgeoning record of female leadership in a period in which men disproportionately dominate the scholarship.

Making that move is no token effort on Brown’s part. Indeed, giving over half of the monograph to important women is only part of the story. In writing about both Oskison and Rigg, he pays close attention to the representation of gender and to female characters, in all of the works he scrutinizes. More to the point, in addressing Eaton he also brings to bear the fruits of her own labor—what we would once have understood as a domestic preserve of oral history, letters, family records, and local archives “held by fireside storytellers” (17)—in centering not only female voices in the dark age narrative but in the incorporation of sources once considered outside the official, even legitimate historical purview. Just as he factors gender in centrally to his discussion, so too does he pay close attention to class and, as obvious as it may seem to say so, to race and ethnicity, producing a study that is as intersectional as it is transnational in its reach.

Confronting how the texts he addresses are bound up in narratives of assimilation and accommodation that attend the aftermath of the Trail of Tears and the advent of allotment, Brown nevertheless contends that “Cherokee nationhood exists in these texts as both a concrete literary presence and a conceptual framework through which the past, present, and future of the Nation is recollected . . . and reimagined” (16). Although certain kinds of refusals of popular misconceptions and hegemonic will are foregrounded in these texts, Brown also eschews any simplistic (and narrow) anticolonial/resistance reading. Cherokee nationhood as a “conceptual framework” proposes a tribal-based focus in which the needs and concerns of the nation are centered in and of themselves, not merely as tactical counters to external forces. Thus, the encounters and contests with the settler state Brown inevitably finds in, say, Bronson’s nonfiction, bring light to the shadows of Indigenous transnationalisms, thus offering an important Indigenous intervention in the discourse of transnationalism more broadly. Such interventions, as Warrior discerned in 2009, have been few and far between, but Brown joins a growing number of scholars directing discussion of Indigneous mobilities through such paradigms and against settler-centered and asymmetrical frameworks such as mediation and contact zone.

Across four chapters and an afterword (in which he returns to a second text by Oskison), then, Brown confronts some of the more difficult questions facing scholars of the post-Native American Renaissance, apparent challenges to contemporary positions of empowerment, survivance, and revitalization. What Brown does particularly deftly, however, is bring out the fine grain of the nuances of those positions his subjects took up. Acknowledging the ways in which Bronson has been and can be read in terms of mediation and accommodation, for instance, his argument demonstrates not that these lenses are invalid but that there are, in addition, elements of her work that complicate them, that mitigate against discounting shifts in her politics, as well as her understanding of herself in relation to the Nation. Thus, Brown’s refusal to ignore “the political implications of a life’s work of Cherokee trans/national service” admits to a consideration of the ways those earlier experiences and positions would come to inform later understandings of resurgent sovereignty (173, my italics). Put simply, the subject positions of the writers Brown examines, under his treatment, richly and compellingly reflect the complexity of Cherokee national history in the course of the twentieth century, picking up the legacy of the nineteenth century and throwing it forward to ongoing challenges and controversies in the twenty-first.