Copyright by Kirby Lynn Brown II 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Kirby Lynn Brown II certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Early Twentieth Century Cherokee Writing Committee: _________________________________ James H. Cox, Supervisor _________________________________ Domino R. Perez _________________________________ John M. Gonzalez _________________________________ Circe D. Sturm _________________________________ Daniel H. Justice Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Early Twentieth Century Cherokee Writing by Kirby Lynn Brown II, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2012 To my grandfather, Henry George Starr and the generations of Cherokees who continue to stoke the fire. And for Katharine, who helped make it all possible. Preface When I first began to think about the issues that have come to define this project in late 2007, my interests rested at the intersection of what I considered a particularly divisive tone of contemporary Cherokee politics and a personal intellectual curiosity concerning the general lack of scholarly attention to the first half of the twentieth century in Cherokee history and American Indian studies more broadly. In 2004, the Cherokee Nation, following the State of Oklahoma and other tribal nations, passed its own “Defense of Marriage Act,” denying legal recognition to same-sex marriages. Three years later, and exactly one hundred and seventy years since writing slavery into the Cherokee Constitution of 1827, Cherokee voters passed a constitutional referendum restricting citizenship to lineal descendants of Indians on the “by blood” Dawes allotment rolls, a move which disenfranchised thousands of Cherokee freedmen descendants as well as a small number of intermarried whites. Framed as acts of sovereignty and self- determination, both moves effectively inscribed prejudice and discrimination as fundamental components of Cherokee national law. As a concerned citizen of the Cherokee Nation, I began to seek out ways in which my scholarship might speak to questions of history, nationhood and belonging. In large measure, such questions remain fundamental to my approach to Indigenous nationhood, the ethics of citizenship and sovereignty, and the responsibility of citizen-scholars to critically engage the Nation both in our work and in public debate. As v I have developed a more complicated and nuanced understanding of Cherokee history, peoplehood, and politics, however, I have also come to see my work as responding to larger histories and experiences of migration, dislocation, exile and homecoming. My own family's history is a case in point. It begins with the marriage of a migrant Pennsylvania Quaker named Starr to a Cherokee woman from a prominent clan from the mother town of Chota in present day Tennessee. It includes not one removal but many, ranging from the forced expulsion from southeastern Tennessee to Indian Territory; a decision to leave Indian Territory for Texas in order to escape the internecine violence engendered by removal and the Civil War; and my Grandfather's own, self-imposed exile from his home necessitated by economic pressures and social circumstances. There are homecomings, too, of course, such as the family's return to the Nation following the Civil War, my grandpa's continual returns throughout his life to his childhood home in Claremore, and my own journeys to northeastern Oklahoma and the southeastern homelands to visit family, renew friendships, recover language and reconnect with geographies and histories from which we were separated long ago. In coming to this sense of my own history, I've begun to see that my focus on how nationhood persists even in the absence of an Indigenous state is as deeply connected to this familial history as it is to contemporary Cherokee politics or my own intellectual projects. While my work doesn't explicitly address this personal history, I have come to realize that it is precisely this history which continues to bring me to the work. The issues facing the Nation today, and the challenges Cherokee and other Indian people confront vi when imagining solutions to them, are not simply products of our contemporary political or intellectual moments. They have material roots in colonial trauma and its histories of violence and dispossession, as well as the almost incomprehensible efforts by Indian communities not only to survive but to grown and thrive. As I recently stood with my sister on a mountain in southeastern Tennessee named after that immigrant Quaker, it hit me that in many ways, we are still responding to and attempting to make sense of our removals—as individuals, families, peoples and nations. vii Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Early Twentieth Century Cherokee Writing Kirby Lynn Brown II, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Supervisor: James H. Cox 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. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Excavating the Cherokee “Dark Ages”..........................................................1 “Renaissance” Scholarship, Literary Nationalism and the Challenge of Secular Criticism..........................................................................................................................4 Nationhood, Peoplehood and a Question of Sovereignty.............................................15 Generational Paradigms and Critical Presentism..........................................................20 Recovery and the Problem of Representative Texts......................................................23 Chapter Summaries.......................................................................................................29 Notes.............................................................................................................................34 Chapter One: Citizenship, Land and Law in John Milton Oskison's Black Jack Davy.....42 Romancing the Nation...................................................................................................49 Writing the Nation.........................................................................................................54 Recovering the Nation ..................................................................................................67 Critiquing the Nation.....................................................................................................74 Notes.............................................................................................................................81 Chapter Two: Negotiating the Archive, Contesting Civilization: Rachel Caroline Eaton's John Ross and the Cherokee Indians.....................................................................93 Reading Eaton's Archive: Civilization, Nationhood and Federal Indian Policy...........98 “Civilization” Seen Through Cherokee Eyes..............................................................117 Critiquing Civilization, Engendering Compassion.....................................................122 Disciplinary Interventions and Narrative Subversions...............................................132 Writing from Home, Telling New Stories...................................................................147 Notes...........................................................................................................................155 Chapter Three: Disrupting Blood and the Politics of Recognition in Lynn Riggs's The Cherokee Night.........................................................................................................160 Cherokee Roots and Modernist Migrations................................................................163 Theatre as Site of Social Transformation....................................................................171 Blood, Generation, and Declension............................................................................175 Race, Violence, and Historical Accountability............................................................188 Surrogate Families, Surrogate Nations.......................................................................198 Disrupting Time, Rewriting Nation.............................................................................208 Notes...........................................................................................................................213 Chapter Four: Ruth Muskrat Bronson,