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

In Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory, Andrew Denson makes a significant and timely contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the Native South. With a carefully constructed argument, he demonstrates that "memorializing Cherokee removal is a southern tradition" that has its roots in the early twentieth century and has been manifested in the creation of memorials, the designation of historic sites, and the establishment of tourist attractions spanning at least seven states and continuing into the present (p. 3). Public memory surrounding the forcible removal of thousands of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland in the 1830s, popularly referred to as the Trail of Tears, offers a lens through which to better examine the roles of race and identity in heritage work and memory construction.

One of the prevailing themes of this book is the complex manner in which Cherokee removal entered the collective memory of white southerners. Denson argues that for "non-Indians," remembering removal served an emotional and political need that helped them "fulfill their obligation to recognize injustice and trauma in the nation's past" (p. 11). However, "the memory remained politically innocuous" given both its historical distance and its predication on the belief that Indians vanished from the region and ceased to have claims to the land(p. 11). The continued presence of Cherokees in places like western North Carolina did little to challenge these beliefs, as they were deemed an anomaly and even became an asset in bolstering tourism. The civil rights era saw a surge in Cherokee removal commemorations "as the acknowledgment of Native American dispossession granted some white southerners a politically safe way to consider their region's heritage of racial oppression" while continuing to deny the violence and injustice toward African Americans, whose history had been largely excluded from heritage projects (pp. 112–13). Removal memorials, Denson argues, reinforced white authority in defining the South.

Denson describes how commemoration is a form of "place making,""an act of possession" where meaning is assigned, values are imposed, and interpretations are always shifting (p. 12). Cherokee removal commemoration efforts have largely been carried out by white southerners who claimed personal connections to Cherokee history and historic sites, seeing them as part of their own community's heritage and, therefore, as infused with meaning that was significant to their own history. Denson offers one example, the memorialization of the grave site of Nancy Ward, a Cherokee "'Beloved Woman'" who is recognized as a significant character in Tennessee's colonial history (p. 91). As a result, Denson argues, the "commemoration emphasized Ward's significance to Tennessee and the United States, while all but erasing her Cherokee identity" (p. 91). One of the book's biggest strengths is its attention to how Cherokee people interacted with, benefited from, and were sometimes at odds with "heritage tourism" (p. 10). While removal commemorations sprang up across the Southeast, Denson states, "Cherokees proved capable of repossessing this history and applying it to their own purposes" (p. 10). Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, and other Cherokee communities scattered throughout the Southeast used removal memory to assert and shape their identities during critical shifts in U.S. Indian policy.

Monuments to Absence is an important book that draws from an impressive array of sources to offer a series of cases that span the region. It tells a multidimensional story that makes a significant contribution to several areas of scholarship. Most notably, it directly engages with modern discourse on public memory and reminds historians and heritage workers of the power they wield and the responsibilities they have in how they put "history to work in the present" (p. 17).