Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture
296
Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture
296eBook
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Overview
According to a dichotomy commonly found in studies of American Indians, some noble Native people defiantly defend their pristine indigenous traditions in honor of their ancestors, while others in weakness or greed surrender their culture and identities to white American economies and institutions. This traditionalist-versus-assimilationist divide is, Joshua B. Nelson argues, a false one. To make his case that American Indians rarely if ever conform to such simplistic identifications, Nelson considers the literature and culture of many Cherokee people.
Exploring a range of linked cultural practices and beliefs through the works of Cherokee thinkers and writers from the nineteenth century to today, Nelson finds ample evidence that tradition can survive through times of radical change: Cherokees do their cultural work both in progressively traditional and traditionally progressive ways. Studying individuals previously deemed either “traditional” or “assimilationist,” Nelson presents a more nuanced interpretation. Among the works he examines are the political rhetoric of Elias Boudinot, a forefather of American Indian literature, and of John Ross, the principal chief during the Removal years; the understudied memoirs of Catharine Brown, a nineteenth-century Cherokee convert to Christianity; and the novel Kholvn, by contemporary traditionalist Sequoyah Guess, a writer of peculiarly Cherokee science fiction.
Across several genres—including autobiography, fiction, speeches, laws, and letters—Progressive Traditions identifies an “indigenous anarchism,” a pluralist, community-centered political philosophy that looks to practices that preceded and surpass the nation-state as ways of helping Cherokee people prosper. This critique of the common call for expansion of tribal nations’ sovereignty over their citizens represents a profound shift in American Indian critical theory and challenges contemporary indigenous people to rethink power among nations, communities, and individuals.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806147390 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 07/24/2014 |
| Series: | American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series , #61 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Progressive Traditions
Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture
By Joshua B. Nelson
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4739-0
CHAPTER 1
PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
To help contextualize the next chapters' readings of Catharine Brown's memoirs and Sequoyah Guess's Kholvn, this chapter introduces traditional Cherokee religious beliefs and practices that pertain to some of the less conspicuous cultural presences in their works, particularly regarding harmony and cooperation, righteousness and charity, continuity and education, and purity and cleansing. I describe several other communal principled practices, such as gaining knowledge, which closely resemble those of anarchism and are found among religious communities (apparently unaware of the tensions between anarchism and religion). I specifically look to social and religious developments that have been underemphasized in much scholarship on Cherokee religion, which has instead been more often interested in exploration of an alternative, if not romanticized, harmonious relationship with the natural world. Without discounting such ecological worldviews or the insightful theorization that Cherokee cosmology extends kinship relations to the nonhuman world, I want to explore how spiritual beliefs also inform right relationships to other humans, not only as a feature of a loose-knit cultural spirituality but also as concrete religious edicts that kept local communities running smoothly. To keep things anchored, it is also important to position this Cherokee sacred humanism in relevant historical moments, especially during the decline of the traditional priesthood at separate times. These include the anarchistic rebellion against a priestly caste as recounted in oral history and priests' later separation from the polity. The introduction and spread of Christianity and the gendered transformation occasioned when men moved to political from religious leadership roles provide further context. In many ways women became religious leaders as Christianity spread, setting the stage for Brown's and Guess's narratives and offering an example of women's innovation mobilized out of the habitus.
This chapter's selection of principled practices by no means intends a comprehensive or even middling representation of Cherokee religion but only a map of a few routes through various dispositions at particular times. Despite my constricted scope—perhaps even because of it—I hope that the chapter might nevertheless illustrate the wealth of innovative intersections of traditional and progressive practices and beliefs available along even a single path through the frontier of the habitus. Much of the traditional Cherokee religion I discuss concerns stomp dance societies, which have their roots in oral histories that proclaim the ancient town of Kituhwah as the original nucleus of the Cherokee. The modern religious incarnations of the Keetoowah were developed near the turn of the twentieth century through Redbird Smith's direction of the communal recovery of ancient traditions. I offer nothing revelatory about Cherokee religion or the Keetoowah Society. I have relied on sources long publicly available or offered publicly by religious leaders, for several reasons: (1) to respect traditional practitioners' right to privacy and the protected nature of much religious knowledge; (2) to acknowledge my own position as an outsider to these traditions, without authority to speak representatively or definitively; and (3) to keep the lines of discourse open, using the plentiful information already at general disposal. If traditional religious leaders want to gain more exposure or to make more information available, they will do so, as they have in the past. In the meantime, interpreting what they have already offered can keep us busy for some time, if we are open to new ways of approaching, understanding, and applying it.
THE WHITE PATH: HARMONY, RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND COMMUNITY
The traditional Cherokee principle that has received the most critical attention is that of harmony, according to which a Cherokee maintains positive "relationships with his fellow Cherokee by avoiding giving offense, on the negative side, and by giving of himself to his fellow Cherokee in regard to his time and his material goods, on the positive side," as anthropologist Robert Thomas has it in an early discussion. Drawing on Thomas, Fred Gearing emphasizes the former injunctive dimension: "The single focus which created pattern in Cherokee moral thought was the value of harmony among men.... This principle of harmony appears to direct those Cherokees today, cautiously and virtually at all cost, to avoid discord. The emphasis in its application is negative—thou shalt not create disharmony—rather than positive." Gearing elevates harmony from a "basic principle" as in Thomas's formulation to a supreme, singular guiding principle, even as he admits, "This Cherokee ethos cannot be demonstrated directly by the historical record." I understand this disclaimer to mean that, while Cherokee actors endeavored to maintain harmony, they did not enunciate it as a principle per se, and also that proving a negative like avoidance or nonaction, by showing how a disrupter of harmony might have been shunned, say, cannot be accomplished with the historical record. These anthropological considerations of harmony mainly confined themselves to interpersonal relationships in a community. Theorists have begun to spot the harmony ethic's influence, first seen mainly in the social sphere, in literature, religion, politics, cosmology, epistemology, and elsewhere.
Mary Churchill's 1997 dissertation, Walking the White Path, offers an influential example of this expansion of the harmony principle to literary studies. For her, harmony exemplifies the socially oriented synthesis of forces in (typically) dialogic, nonantagonistic opposition, but the forces' equality results in a binary more durably static than in a Hegelian system of conflict and conquest of one element by another. This codependent tension defines for Churchill the concept of balance, which is connected to harmony but refers specifically to the opposition she identifies between, for instance, genders, directions, color symbology, war and peace, and other paired complements. Like harmony, the concept of balance has taken center stage in studies of Cherokee religion and features prominently in the literary theoretical perspectives of Churchill and Daniel Heath Justice. Both also appear in the voluminous writings on American Indian religion not specifically focused on the religion of the Cherokees, although most authors tend to treat the two more synonymously than does Churchill, with harmony extending to relations with nonhuman realms. I will return to Churchill's formulation later in this chapter, following discussion of some of the other principles, practices, and historical circumstances impacting Cherokee traditionalism that will help contextualize the ideas of harmony and balance.
Without attempting to dislodge harmony from its privileged place in indigenous religious studies, I would like to suggest that it is not so original a concern in Cherokee morality as the critical literature suggests. Ample evidence in oral and written history and in literature testifies that harmony and balance are guiding principles, necessary dispositions for keeping the peace in an indigenist anarchist community to be sure, but overly focused attention to them as such seems relatively recent and may reflect internalization of a discourse concerned more with broad "Indian" questions rather than close study of Cherokee or other tribal cultures. Pan-Indian influence does not necessarily mean the Cherokee theorizing of Churchill, Justice, and others is contaminated or anything like that; if anything, it suggests that Cherokees have affirmed those values as broadly consonant with their other concerns. Locally oriented philosophies focused on other principles predate the obsession with harmony and balance, however, and these have received little scholarly treatment. While pervasive, dispositions maintaining harmony are inseparable from the broader conditions in which they arose and that get replicated by the habitus to keep the world recognizable and functioning. Those conditions are assessed not simply on the basis of an absence of discord but on the extent to which they provide the same sorts of happiness any people seek: some measure of love, liberty, security, creativity, and so on. The Cherokee religious concept of the White Path symbolizes some of the principled practices thought to enable these goals in conditions that make possible a harmony worth preserving.
Though the White Path, also called the Path of Peace, is discussed somewhat spottily in oral histories and secondary literature, several characteristics recur in speeches and writing that take it up explicitly or metaphorically. Thomas offers a useful summary: "[God's law] is the 'Law' or 'Rule' which God laid down for the Indian to follow. It consists not only of 'following the White Path,' that is being peaceful, friendly, and observing the rest of the moral virtues; but also of keeping up the old Cherokee customs, such as the fire, stomp dancing, etc." He emphasizes here the White Path's social dimension, which is inseparable from its culturally preservative function. Foremost a religious concept, the idea of the White Path urges peace and harmony in social, natural, and cosmological relations through language, hunting, doctoring practices, and more, all governed by an idea of "righteousness" as a means of achieving "a good mind" or "becoming right-minded." Anthropologist Albert Wahrhaftig argues that harmony is more an effect of righteous living according to the law symbolized by the White Path than it is a causal force itself. This is because social and individual contentment work more like evidence, providing "the ultimate sign that [the Cherokees] are living according to sacred design."
In more figurative terms, Keetoowah Society leader Crosslin Smith in a 1986 speech given at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, described the White Path as "a white righteous road" that connects the four peoples across the four corners of the earth via a "white road, the first cross of extreme, deep religious meaning. It is the same law that was passed on in to the Bible—this is pre-history time." He clarifies the law's fundamental precept: "'Love one another and love me': this was the first law. The same law gives full complemence [sic] to the new law called Ten Commandments." Here and elsewhere, the connection between righteousness and divine law is made explicit. While the Keetoowah divine law is plainly not as codified as, say, the Bible, it similarly and foundationally concerns the proper attitude humans should have toward the Creator and toward each other. Ceremonies, dances, and prayers all reinforce these attitudes as do the instructions for living, which are related in oral histories.
Even as Smith emphasizes the injunctions to love the Creator and others, we see the law presupposes certain entities (you, one another, the divine "me") and right ways of treating them (with love, which may be of a different sort for the human and the deity) that are not explicitly defined and can only be understood by reference to other laws, habits, principles, beings, and so on. Upholding this law will require reference to a great deal else in order to find its own "complemence," to borrow Smith's word. If upholding the primary law, itself a social principle, may be taken as practicing righteousness, the plurality of the attitudes constituting it reinforces the sense that it, too, is not a monistic foundation of the Cherokee cosmology or worldview but rather another forceful principle among many in the web of the habitus, perhaps more influential or far-reaching than others but still not sufficient unto itself.
To help clarify the primary law, Keetoowah traditions retain and impart others—the laws of the Seven Clans. Citing Janet Jordan, Churchill recounts six:
Be peaceful and loving, they say.
Have a white, a pure and cleansed heart, they say.
Do not falsely judge another, they say.
Do not do people harm, they say.
When people make demands upon you, fulfill them.
Love thy neighbor as theyself [sic].
In personal conversations with stomp grounds members, I have also been told of four other guidelines for interpersonal relations, here paraphrased: love each other unconditionally; treat every person as a sacred creation; cling to each other; and be stingy with one another (that is, don't use each other up). The categorical differentiation of humans and the attention focused on them specifically in these traditional religious teachings are often overlooked in scholarship on the Cherokees and other American Indians. Many scholars are attracted to the cultural components of Indian beliefs and practices that promote less consumptive environmental dispositions, but few investigators have seen—or they have declined to see—the religious connections that lend the beliefs and practices their force, divorcing ecological beliefs and behaviors from the spiritual, social, and material emphasis on taking care of other people that traditional practitioners themselves profess to be at the heart of their philosophies. This concern for others shows itself in principled practices like charitable giving, ready hospitality, and community labor, all practices that give shape to an indigenous anarchism that requires compassion, inclusiveness, and widespread participation.
A focus on community takes center stage for two important Cherokee theorists of Indian identity and literature, sociologist Eva Marie Garroutte and Native American studies theologian/lawyer/literary critic Jace Weaver. Garroutte's Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America surveys the most common ways American Indian identity is reckoned in legal, biological, cultural, and personal discourses and, in its latter chapters on defining community, proposes an alternative set of criteria based on kinship. Garroutte writes that "a definition of identity founded in kinship responds to at least two themes that one encounters across a range of tribal philosophies. One of these reflects a condition of being, which I call relationship to ancestry. The second involves a condition of doing, which I call responsibility to reciprocity." The first may be seen in genealogical or ancestral connections, although Garroutte hastens to point out that those she imagines do not concern bloodedness or pedestrian, racialized identity markers. If this hereditary state of being still suggests an essentialism, it is a well-qualified, Native version open to alteration through adoption, communal vetting, and other processes.
Garroutte's second criterion is more germane to consideration of traditional religious dispositions, both in its emphasis on doing, which I see as closely linked to principled practices, and in her insistence that others' social concerns are also of paramount concern to the individual's comportment and constitution, in voluntary behaviors that "contribute to tribal survival" through generosity of time, resources, and spirit. The interview respondents she quotes severally underline the importance of helping behaviors that maintain "the People—those who understand themselves as bound together in spiritually faithful community," again emphasizing the religious aspects of community-mindedness. The behavioral responsibilities they point to as embodying or enacting Garroutte's idea of reciprocity often concern the immediate, this-world, material well-being of the community by providing for others' food, safety, labor, or economic needs in accordance with spiritually understood "Original Instructions ... sacred stories, and historic practices." Each of these, Garroutte argues, helps constitute tradition, which she defines as "fundamentally a sacred concept." She affirms a Cherokee/Choctaw respondent's definition: "Tradition is what is passed on orally, and it tells you the way you are supposed to be. It has to give us good. It has to give us growth. It is the lessons that were taught us by the ancient ones and the elders to help [each of] us be a better person, and closer to the Creator. And we have to use it in the way it is intended.... It's spiritual." This progress-oriented expression of traditional values urges the development of good relationships (righteousness, perhaps) with the Creator, with the self, and with the "us" of community, which encompasses the present community and also the past-in-present community of elders and "the ancient ones."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Progressive Traditions by Joshua B. Nelson. Copyright © 2014 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
PART ONE: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (WE WORSHIP),
1. Paths of Righteousness,
2. Gaining Knowledge and Religious Improvisation in Catharine Brown's Memoir,
3. Gathering Strength in Sequoyah Guess's Kholvn,
PART TWO: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (WE ARGUE),
4. Deliberation in Town and Country,
5. The Removal Rhetoric of Elias Boudinot and John Ross,
6. Conclusion: Strangers and Kin,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,