Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears by Diane Glancy, and: The Dream of a Broken Field by Diane Glancy (review)

With the publication of The Salt Companion to Diane Glancy edited by James Mackay in 2010, Diane Glancy's prolific and "restlessly experimental" (1) body of work garnered the much-needed critical attention her writing deserves. In true Glancy style, however, this poet/novelist/ essayist (as well as playwright, screenplay writer, and filmmaker) continues to write on through scholars' assessments of her wide-ranging oeuvre and their attempts to categorize her vast amount of publications.

In the sequel to her 1996 novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, Glancy creates part historical fiction, part creative nonfiction in Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears, fashioning a hybrid narrative of Cherokee removal and survival by starting her story with the Cherokees' arrival at Fort Gibson in Indian Territory. Seen through the lens of a kinship network of an extended Cherokee family, the resettlement in Indian Territory reveals Cherokee removal for what it was: the US government's ethnic cleansing of the Southeast. Physical violence took more than a quarter of the lives of Cherokees, but equally as insidiously, the terror induced generations of Cherokee reeling from the psychological and spiritual trauma, literally numbing some Cherokee into muted, paralyzed states.

If presenting the Cherokee Nation in broken and unbalanced states is Glancy's intent in this novel, so too is her illustration of the dynamic modes of recovery Cherokee individuals and families demonstrated. Throughout the novel Glancy depicts a variety of fractured conditions, characters exhibiting numerous ways their physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological beings adjust to the new landscape. Whether it is through the negotiation of practices directly implemented through the government's paternal and missionizing policies, like farming and Christianity, or whether it is through the Cherokee's own realignment of cultural ways in response to colonial control, like adoption practices and the creation of the Cherokee syllabary, Glancy keenly portrays the Cherokee Nation "speaking their ways into the new territory" (161), from a variety of perspectives.

The novel weaves third-person omniscient narrator (what Glancy terms in her afterword as a "narrator speaking in a daguerreotype style of writing" [190]) with passages lifted from the Baptist Missionary Magazine written by Euro-American reverend Evan Jones (from its volumes published from 1839 to 1850) as well as lists of reclamation and spoliation claims published in the Cherokee Nation Papers. Through this weaving Glancy creates a point of view she characterizes as "communal first-person" (188); more interestingly, however, her point of view allows for several personal narratives of women, men, and elders, forming a story of the aftermath of removal that is dynamic and complicated.

Some of the most powerful moments in the novel are those in which the reader sees the incongruity of the old stories' application to the new place. For instance, in a constant state of uncertainty about her reality, one of the main characters, Maritole, talks to the newly planted corn groping for life in the rocky, uneven fields, telling it the story of Selu. Other moving sections of the novel portray the knotty work of translating and transcribing Christianity into and over Cherokee oral culture and spiritual practices, and what Glancy later calls the "disturbance" that shook the Cherokees' ability to establish their everyday lives:

The new territory rocked as if it was a wagon still jolting over ground. Disturbance came from within and without. Such an upheaval drove things outward that usually stayed buried, but it moved rocks, tore down boundaries. Everything ran loose. The political upheaval. The new division over slaves—keep them, let them go. Scandals. Schisms.

(154)

Despite the diversity of responses and complicated set of realities for the Cherokee Nation, Glancy creates a narrative of hope and rebuilding out of that unsettling...