Print, Cultural Memory, and John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit

LORI MERISH Print, Cultural Memory, and John Rollin Ridge's The Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit The postindian warriors hover at last over the ruins of tribal representations and surmount the scriptures of manifest manners with new stories; these warriors counter the sutveillance and literature of dominance with their own simulations of survivance. The postindian arises from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real, not the absence of the real in the simulations of dominance. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners I want to write the history of the Cherokee Nation as it Should be written and not as white men will wtite it and as they will tell the tale, to screen and justify themselves. All this I can nevet do unless I get into the proper position to wield influence and make money. . . . Instead of writing for my living [in California] I should be using my pen in behalf of my own people and in rescuing from oblivion the proud names of our race. ... If there ever was a man on earth that loved his people and his kindred, I am that man. John Rollin Ridge, letter to Stand Watie, October 9, 1854 As far back as I can remember, I belonged to a secret society of Indian women, meeting around a kitchen table in a conspiracy to bring the past into the present. I listened, their stories settling forever in my blood, and I knew the stories were told and told not for carrying but for keeping. They heard, and they taught me to heat, the truth in things not said. They listened, and they taught me to listen, in the space between words. Betty Louise Bell (Cherokee), Faces in tL· Moon Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Lori Merish The Life and Adventures ofJoaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, an 1854 novel by mixedblood Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge (or Yellow Bird, the English translation of his Cherokee name Cheesquatalawny) was the first published novel by a Native American. Ridge was a journalist, poet, and novelist who was born in Georgia in 1827, only a few years before the Cherokee were forced to emigrate to Indian Territory in Oklahoma—an event of tremendous import in his life, and for his work. His was one of the most powerful families in the Cherokee Nation: his grandfather, Major Ridge, was a noted tribal leader, as were his father, John Ridge, and his uncles, Elias Boudinot (Buck Watie) and Stand Watie, and they were centrally involved in the divisive political history of the Cherokee Nation during the 1820s and 30s. In particular, his father, trained as a lawyer, and Boudinot, editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, were early leaders in the fight against Removal ; in 1835, aftet President Jackson refused to enforce the Supreme Court decision to uphold Cherokee property and civil rights against illegal encroachment by the state of Georgia and Removal seemed to them inevitable, Ridge and Boudinot drew up the treaty whereby Removal was negotiated. The "Treaty Party's" actions alienated the family from most Cherokees, including followers of the powerful chief John Ross, and led to the execution of Rollin Ridge's grandfather, uncle, and father by members of the Ross faction several years later. (When John Ridge signed the Treaty of New Echota, he reportedly announced, "I have signed my death warrant."1) These events informed, perhaps motivated Ridge's account of the violence that ensued from Anglo landgrabbing and manifest destiny in Joaquin. Focusing on the newly annexed, contested terrain of California, Ridge counters Euroamerican narratives of "discovery" and the Edenic representations of Western "virgin land" (such as those found in John Fiémont's writing), making space for what José David Saldivai terms "an alternative narrative of what can now be called the ethno-iacialized cultures of displacement" (7). In doing so, Ridge, like many other early Native American writers, appropriated the forms, rhetorics, and conventions of Euroamerican print culture, utilizing them as what Michel de Certeau terms...