Cherokee Historical Fiction and Indigenous Science Fiction in Riding the Trail of Tears

Pulitzer Prizes and Hugo Awards of the 2010s brought a great deal of critical and commercial attention to historical and science fiction about multi-ethnicity in the United States. Hamilton (2015), lauded as “the landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father” who arrives as a Caribbean immigrant and ascends to fame in the early United States, swept the Tony Awards and won the Pulitzer for Best Drama in 2016 (“Hamilton ”). Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), a novel about an enslaved black woman who escapes the pre-Civil War US South by riding a subterranean railway that literalizes the Underground Railroad, won the Pulitzer in 2017 for its “shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share” (“Underground ”). Meanwhile, Rebecca Roanhorse’s “Welcome to Your Authentic Native American Experience™” (2017), a science fiction short story about a Native American man who is betrayed by a white customer while working as a tour guide at a Native American virtual reality theme park in Arizona, won the 2018 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. Considering that Blake M. Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) told a story of national founding, escape from white settlers, and Native American virtual reality before these multi-ethnic works of historical and science fiction rose to fame, it is remarkable that the novel has received scant attention or acclaim.

Riding the Trail of Tears is a novel about a Cherokee woman who works as a lead designer and tour guide at a virtual reality theme park for the Trail of Tears in North Georgia. Like many hybrids of science and historical fiction, the novel employs tropes that often appear in popular fantasy films and speculative television shows: it has Indigenous body simulations, for example, such as those seen in Avatar (2009), and artificially intelligent characters and theme parks, such as those seen in Westworld (1973 and 2016). The novel’s premise asks readers to imagine what might happen if people could project themselves into Cherokee bodies at a twenty-first-century Georgia theme park, where guests and hosts alike try to survive a virtual reality experience of the Trail of Tears. Balancing Cherokee history and science, the novel offers a provocative, historically specific, and satirically corrective account of Cherokee Removal. This account is given, quite literally, through the eyes of Tallulah Wilson, the novel’s Cherokee protagonist. Tallulah is the granddaughter of the man who invented the virtual reality technology used at the Trail of Tears theme park, known officially as Tsalagi Removal Exodus Point Park (TREPP). Inside Tallulah’s tear duct resides the novel’s narrator, a Nûñnë’hï, who has escaped the ride and wryly asks that we call him “the Nunnerator” (10).¹ With the Nunnerator’s narration, readers “sense the world through Tallulah’s body” (1) and experience the final of her more than “eleven hundred trips on the Trail of Tears” (37). During this final ride, Tallulah and her tour group experience a disruption of the ride’s usual Removal cycle. The ride’s sentient Cherokee hosts, called “the Misfits,” engineer a hack to enhance the ride’s violence toward guests, break the ride’s Removal loop, and release themselves into a virtual version of their ancestral Cherokee homeland. With the Misfits’ help, Tallulah and all but one member of her tour group emerge from the ride psychologically shaken but physically unscathed.

A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Hausman considers the novel a “work of science fiction” that falls into the category of “Indigenous Futurism” (“Interview”). Yet while Riding the Trail of Tears appears to operate primarily as a work of science fiction, it operates equally as a work of historical fiction. The connection between science fiction and historical fiction has long been discussed by scholars such as Frederic Jameson, who notes that science fiction “is the exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history itself” (66). Historical motifs and characters within science fiction, such as the intergalactic, Romanesque, Asgardian empire of Marvel Comics, and the robot-fighting Robin Hood...