Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 ed. by Theresa Strouth Gaul (review)

Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818–1823 offers to Americanists and Native Americanists alike a versatile collection of perhaps the earliest published Native American woman author in the United States. Until Theresa Strouth Gaul gathered and recontextualized Catharine Brown's (Cherokee) letters and diary alongside other nineteenth-century representations of Brown in Cherokee Sister, scholars had remembered Brown largely through an 1825 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions publication, Memoir of Catharine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1825). As its title suggests, Memoir narrates Brown as unilaterally assimilated into white Protestantism and celebrates her as a model Christian convert. As a result, contemporary scholarship has likewise often reduced Brown to narratives of isolated assimilation rather than placing her either within her specific Cherokee community or within broader conversations with such now-canonized contemporaries as William Apess (Pequot), Elias Boudinot (Cherokee), and Black Hawk (Sauk). By privileging Memoir's oversimplification of Brown over the inherent complexities and contexts of Brown's own writings, scholars have so far, albeit unintentionally, disconnected her from such critical contemporaneous and contemporary issues as Native American sovereignty, land, kinship, and the ongoing epidemic of sexual-colonial violence against Native American women. As Gaul suggests in her carefully constructed editor's introduction, Cherokee Sister responds to the ongoing reduction of Brown by "put[ting] the pen back in her hand" (2). By doing so, Cherokee Sister not only restores autonomy to Brown's writings, it also reasserts Brown's articulate agency as an early Cherokee woman who interpreted, taught, exhorted, and wrote toward her stated goal to "be useful to [her] people" (73).

Beyond republishing the writings of yet another important early Native American woman writer within the growing body of Native American literature, Cherokee Sister will prove valuable to a wide range of college classrooms. Brown's writings directly address issues central to American literary studies, Native American studies, Cherokee studies, religious studies, and gender studies. Gaul's collection also offers ample analytical opportunities for classroom studies of nineteenth-century biography, autobiography, epistolary writing, and diary writing. While Gaul gracefully places Cherokee Sister at the "nexus" of each of these disciplines, however, she places the responsibility onto teachers and students to construct the more comprehensive context(s) necessary in order to situate Brown in a more direct relationship with any one of these disciplinary frameworks (5). In terms of Brown's place within current discussions of Native American or Cherokee studies, for example, Gaul places Brown's writing in conversation with Cherokee scholars Daniel Heath Justice and Jace Weaver in order to emphasize her place within the Cherokee literary tradition. Yet Gaul has not fully reconstructed the relationships between Brown and such contemporaneous Cherokee women writing and community-specific literary activism as the 1817 Cherokee women's petition against Indian Removal. It is likewise up to the teacher or student to analyze Brown in conversation with such broader contemporary currents in indigenous feminism, indigenous literary nationalism, and transindigeneity.

Although Gaul could have claimed a greater significance for Cherokee Sister by situating Brown's writing more overtly within the long tradition of Cherokee women writing or within specific branches of current Native American and indigenous studies, Cherokee Sister's ability to speak to so many interconnected contexts and issues will service a range of college classrooms toward a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of agency and adaptation in nineteenth-century Native American literatures. I am eager to work alongside my students to (re)connect Brown further to the intricate networks of early and contemporary Native American women writers as part of my indigenous and American literature classes.