Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture by Joshua B. Nelson (review)

Joshua B. Nelson’s study of Cherokee culture and literature joins a growing list of Native- authored books that approach their subjects from the point of view of insiders who nonetheless acknowledge that their perspectives are not necessarily shared by everyone in their home communities. Situating his readings of four Cherokee writers and intellectuals (Catherine Brown, Sequoyah Guess, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross) within current debates over identity politics in Native studies, Nelson puts forward a new perspective on interpreting Indigenous texts that he calls “Anarchism.” It is an approach that allows him to tack between the nationalist criticism of scholars like Craig Womack, who advocate somewhat “traditionalist” nation-centered interpretive strategies, and “cosmopolitans” like Scott Lyons, for whom Native literature reflects an emergent Indigenous “modernity” that must draw on materials and practices from outside the authors’ specific nation.

Thus Progressive Traditions frames its two main sections of literary criticism (“We Worship” and “We Argue”) with a great deal of methodological deliberation that may or may not engage casual academic readers unfamiliar with the terms of the debate. Still, the book’s main concept—how to account for the Cherokee peoples’ simultaneous embrace of “progress” and “tradition”—is worthwhile, and Nelson’s Cherokee-centered literary hermeneutics offers much to scholars in the field. Part 1, for example, invokes the Cherokee concept of the “White Road,” a set of ethical imperatives involving reciprocity that have steadied the nation in specific moments of social rupture. Neither unchanging nor timeless, the way of the White Road is exemplified in the actions of Christian converts and traditionalist Keetoowah society members, treaty- and non–treaty party proponents alike. For Nelson, the posthumous memoir of Cherokee convert Catherine Brown (1800–1823) and the twentieth-century self-published novel of master storyteller Sequoyah Guess articulate two very different approaches to the White Road that still enunciate “how people might live together and govern themselves without a state” (36).

In the case of Catherine Brown, Nelson uncovers a Cherokee-centered dynamism sustaining her Christian faith. Although Nelson admits that Rufus Anderson’s editorial manipulation of the memoir muted many of Brown’s critiques of the US and Cherokee nations, he finds in her letters and her brother’s speeches, in verse and prose asides, a version of Christianity that operated as a new form of Cherokee social activism. Nelson charts a similar path in his reading of Sequoyah Guess’s Kholvn (1992), uncovering a leitmotif of White Road ethical order within a novel that employs alphabetic rendering of Cherokee in important dialogs between Cherokee speakers who come from both sides of the so-called traditionalist-progressivist divide.

The book’s second section takes up the well-worn argument over the nature of principal chief John Ross’s “traditionalist” stance against removal and Cherokee Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot’s reluctant advocacy of emigration in the 1830s. Nelson manages, however, to enliven a potentially stale subject by showing precisely how similar the two men were. Both were literate and educated in Christian mission schools. Both employed rhetoric drawn from deep within Cherokee culture to make their respective cases. Thus Boudinot, who would later be labeled an assimilationist, and Ross, the supposed traditionalist in most histories, become in Nelson’s account exemplars of a Cherokee society that, like most human communities, reflects a mix of “messiness and contradictions” (198). This persuasive revisionist argument supports Nelson’s final chapter, a passionate plea for flexibility and consensus in contemporary Cherokee life. It is a lesson he has learned, he notes, from reading Cherokee history and literature with the progressive traditionalism that has always characterized his peoples’ lives.