Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs: An Indigenous Nation’s Fight against Smallpox, 1518–1824 by Paul Kelton (review)

in 1972 alfred crosby shed light on the biological consequences of the European invasion of America. The invaders, he explained, brought with them a number of devastating pathogens. Perhaps most deadly was Variola major—better known as smallpox—which carried a mortality rate as high as 40 percent. Curiously, Europeans seemed not to die from the disease as frequently as did their Indigenous counterparts. For Crosby (and many scholars since him) the explanation was simple: centuries of exposure to the disease meant they had developed a level of immunity. Lacking that advantage, Indigenous peoples could only watch as Variola rampaged across the “virgin soil” of the American continents.

Paul Kelton reminds readers that there are significant problems with this virgin soil thesis. Most obviously, immunity to smallpox is impossible regardless of one’s ethnic background. Europeans were not as affected in the Americas because many of them contracted the disease as children and were “inoculated” from further outbreaks. More substantively, says Kelton, the virgin soil thesis turns Indigenous people into passive (and impotent) recipients of disease, thereby dismissing their attempts to respond and adapt to biological realities. Perhaps most problematic, however, is that the thesis provides Europeans with absolution for the pathogen’s spread. After all, it was beyond their power to handle. They did not willfully disseminate it, and thus they were not culpable for its devastation.

A rebuttal is needed for these assertions, and Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs provides it. Kelton’s story evolves over five chapters. The first tracks the violent establishment of disease vectors in the Indigenous world generally and, after 1670, Cherokee country specifically. Chapter 2 explores the eighteenth-century emergence of the Cherokee rituals and ceremonies used to confront smallpox. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the disease’s impact on the Anglo-Cherokee War (1759–1761) and subsequently on the American Revolution. In the former, smallpox hit Cherokee country when towns were economically strapped, and diplomatically and militarily undermined by British duplicity and violence. It was a lethal combination, which notably depleted the population. During the Revolution the endemic violence of colonialism was more directly responsible for Cherokee desolation, although smallpox lurked in the shadows because the population had not recovered from the epidemic a decade earlier. Kelton’s concluding chapter focuses on how the nineteenth-century American republic used inoculation as another form of civilization policy. Cherokees continued to adapt, however. Protestant missionaries may have brought vaccinations to the Nation in 1824, but conjurors incorporated Euro-American medical advances into their beliefs and rites.

Kelton’s nuanced analysis of the meaning and evolving application of Cherokee medicinal practices makes this book a valuable contribution to the literature. He sheds light on the creation and employment of purification ceremonies as well as the ritual separation of infected community members. Meant to keep Cherokee medicine strong and maintain good reciprocal relations with the spirit world, separation in effect served as a de facto quarantine. So, far from helplessly lamenting their decline, in other words, Cherokee conjurors actively developed forms of treatment. Their efforts were no worse—and arguably much better—than those employed by Europeans in the era.

Cherokee medicinal practices can also provide a means by which to re-think the Cherokee experience broadly. For example, it is notable that ritual separation emerged in a period when Cherokee political/diplomatic identity revolved around towns, or at best regions. Quarantines protected against epidemic outbreak, but they also would have inhibited the development of “national” bonds. It is a point that pushes scholars to consider biological impacts on the process of nation building, although Kelton himself does not take that step. Instead, his narrative rests on older stereotypes of an extant, monolithic Cherokee polity that only meaningfully engaged with the British Empire. Dismissing other diplomatic/economic options—both European and indigenous—leads to an acceptance at face value of the symbolic language employed by headmen to chastise the British (Cherokees...