Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of Southern Fiction

3. Gendering the Nation - Caroline Gordon’s Cherokee Frontier

3 Gendering the Nation  Caroline Gordon’s Cherokee Frontier Again, were we to inquire by what law or authority you set up a claim, I answer, none! Your laws extend not into our country, nor ever did. You talk of the law of nature and the law of nations, and they are both against you. —Corn Tassel, Cherokee, 1785 From Andrew Lytle, Caroline Gordon picks up the European colonial trace leading into the American South during the Revolutionary period.1 Like Lytle, Gordon was inspired by New Deal archaeology in the South of the 1930s, which brought to the fore the rich archaeological and historical sediments of her home state, Kentucky. Gordon’s literary excursions to Kentucky’s prehistoric sites were prompted by WPA excavations in progress at the time of her writing and also by archaeological books that brought to the surface the deep strata of history. In 1928, archaeologists William D. Funkhouser and William S. Webb published Ancient Life in Kentucky, an important book surveying major archaeological¤ndings in Kentucky, including some of the houses of cliff dwellers (“rockhouses ”) that feature prominently in Gordon’s captivity narrative.2 Between the 1932 publication of Gordon’s little-known narrative “The Captive” and her frontier novel Green Centuries (1941), WPA archaeologists undertook major excavations in Kentucky, particularly after 1937 when Webb “organized a major federal archaeological program in Kentucky using WPA support” (Lyon 95). During this time, Webb and other chief archaeologists recovered thousands of artifacts and hundreds of human remains and burials. At Indian Knoll, for example ,where in 1915 C.B.Moore recovered 298 skeletons,a much more extensive two-year WPA excavation yielded “more than 55,000 artifacts and 880 burials” (Lyon 99). Many of these excavations occurred at sites that Gordon chose as settings for her ¤ction, such as the Big Sandy River in eastern Kentucky where 65 “The Captive” takes place and the many salt licks that she describes in Green Centuries which furnished much paleontological materials and evidence of the era of the mammoth and the mastodon. In her ¤ction, Gordon digs into these historically remote sites connected to “prehistoric” Native American life and into the more recent layers of America’s colonial and national history. In her multi-layered narratives, which work as palimpsests, Gordon recovers the Native American signi¤er in three archaeological layers: the distant past of the Mound Builders, the modern colonial era, and the early national period. Looking back at the colonial con®icts among European and Native American nations, Gordon describes in her narratives the social and legal mechanisms of race and gender differentiation that contributed to the rise of a burgeoning American nation-state. It is no coincidence that during a time of major national inquiry into the cultural and historical resources of the country, Gordon was inspired particularly by questions concerning America’s national heritage. WPA archaeology during the Roosevelt administration participated in the political enterprise of American nation-building and contributed to the cultural climate Map 3. “Map of the Former Territorial Limits of the Cherokee Nation of Indians.” C. C. Royce. 1884. Published for the Smithsonian Institute, Bureau of Ethnology. Detail showing the Holston and Watauga area. Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History  gendering the nation 66 of what Alfred Kazin called an era of “new nationalism.” By helping to mine the nation’s rich historical materials, New Deal archaeology in the South of the 1930s served to boost the importance of this region to the nation and simultaneously to ¤rm a narrative of American nationalism. Archaeologists readily admit to the long-standing historical relationship between archaeology and nationalism . Kohl and Fawcett, for example, observe that “the nation-building use of archaeological data even occurs in countries, like the United States, that lack an ancient history or a direct link with the prehistoric past; the concept of ‘ancient-ness’ is relative and ‘may lie in the eye of the beholder,’ making eighteenth-century Monticello or Mount Vernon for U.S. Americans of European descent or the nineteenth-century Little Bighorn Battle¤eld for both European and Native Americans as emotionally satisfying and time-honored as much older remains from Europe or Asia”(4). Since archaeology is crucial to the effort of constructing national roots, the recovery of the Native American past becomes particularly important for the narrative of a relatively new country like the United States. Gordon was not...