Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory by Andrew Denson (review)

Cherokee removal is perhaps the most well known episode in Native American history. In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson explores how and why this came to be by exploring public commemorations of Cherokee removal, focusing on the American South and Oklahoma from the 1920s to the present. This multivalent study highlights a diverse range of white and Indian heritage workers, business professionals, politicians, and activists. Other scholars of memory have pointed out that “white heritage workers in the South generally excluded the histories of people of color from public commemoration until after the civil rights movement” (2). Denson, however, demonstrates that white southerners zealously commemorated removal beginning in the 1920s and continue to do so now. The reasons why have shifted over time, but heritage workers and the general public agreed on one basic premise: removal was a tragic injustice. Cherokees engaged in public commemorations for their own reasons and, as Denson argues, seized on whites’ critical view of removal to cultivate political and economic change in subsequent periods.

White commemorations of removal began in southern Appalachia in the 1920s. Buoyed by the rise of the automobile and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tourism boosters highlighted the culture and history of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This group had managed to evade removal and still lived in western North Carolina. In some ways, boosters described the Eastern Band and white Appalachia similarly: as “colorful primitives” whose supposedly premodern cultures offered a respite from industrialized America (7). But boosters also touted the Cherokee story as exceptional owing to their status as the most “civilized tribe” and their tremendous suffering during removal. Acknowledging such injustice complicated public commemorations like Chattanooga’s 1938 Chickamauga National Celebration. Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one hundredth anniversary of the Trail of Tears, Chattanooga’s civic leaders linked the memory of removal and the Lost Cause (the historian John P. Brown, for example, described the anticolonial Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe as “Tennessee’s first secessionist” [98]), while denying African Americans a role in the celebration. Such commemorations drew on Cherokee history, but they also distorted it to heighten dramatic effect and to please predominantly white audiences. While problematic, white commemorations of removal also opened a path to Eastern Band Cherokees seeking to retain their separate, sovereign status during Jim Crow.

The 1950s and 1960s brought a new wave of commemorations. In Georgia, the state government restored—and reimagined—the old Cherokee capital, New Echota, while businessmen and politicians in southern Appalachia championed the hugely successful outdoor drama centered on removal, Unto These Hills. Denson explains that as white southern elites confronted the civil rights movement, they embraced the memory of removal while continuing to shun African American perspectives and experiences. This may seem like a paradox, but it made sense to white leaders seeking a “politically safe way to consider their region’s heritage of racial oppression” without discussing slavery or Jim Crow (9). Their rationale gets to the heart of Denson’s title; whites framed removal as the tragic end of Native history in the South. Monuments to absent peoples were politically cheap, allowing southern elites to claim moral authority in crafting a narrative of progress. Commemorations often included Eastern Band Cherokees who were very much alive, but the dominant removal narrative cast them as a notable exception, ignoring the many other Native peoples who remained in the region. Eastern Band Cherokees found jobs in heritage work and, more important, leveraged their visibility to ward off the federal government’s termination policy, which sought to extinguish tribal sovereignty. The Oklahoma Cherokees, subject to an earlier policy that terminated their sovereign status and allotted their landholdings, also launched public history projects during this period. In his most fascinating chapter, Denson explores how a diverse Oklahoma Cherokee populace debated how best to deal with...