Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00141801-4260757

1527-5477

Jane Dinwoodie,

Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights

In Monuments to Absence, Andrew Denson takes an innovative approach to the subject of Cherokee removal by exploring how and why people have commemorated it. In highlighting the long, and often surprising, history of memorializing the Trail of Tears, Denson makes an important contribution not only to the history of the Native South and to traditionally black-and-white studies of Southern memory, but also to the study of commemoration, memory, and public history in general.The book begins with a robust overview of Cherokee removal and immediate memorialization. Denson then charts three phases of commemoration. In the 1920s and 1930s, newfound interest in Appalachia highlighted the region’s indigenous history. As southern boosters tempted tourists, they presented dramatic, tragic, and romantic tales of removal. North Carolina’s Eastern Band of Cherokees played a central role in much of this commemoration, yet this memory work did not encourage white communities to think differently about Indian persistence. As visitors lamented removal, they reinforced their belief in indigenous erasure from the region; commemoration ultimately bolstered white supremacy.The Cold War saw a “more substantial” (9) phase of commemoration. In 1962, amid an era of civil rights struggles, white southern politicians constructed the New Echota historic site and formally apologized for removal legislation. Denson argues that these actions “granted some white southerners a politically safe way to consider the region’s heritage of racial oppression,” while apologies for removal allowed some leaders to publicly affirm a commitment to “an American ideal of equality at a time when civil rights activists condemned the segregated South as profoundly un-American” (113). Yet these decades also saw Cherokee communities strategically reinterpret removal. The Eastern Band of Cherokees drew on earlier commemorations to resist federal termination policies. In Oklahoma, Cherokee leaders also used memories of removal and their ancestors’ nineteenth-century greatness to restore the Nation as a political entity.Finally, Denson focuses on efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to create the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The project sprung from National Park Service efforts to commemorate “negative” histories across America. But, unlike interpretations of slavery or Japanese internment, the Trail remained largely uncontroversial. Denson argues that this lack of controversy explains the popularity of removal commemorations, past and present: from indigenous communities to government officials, most people commemorating Cherokee removal “concur upon . . . [its] basic meaning” (211) as a tragedy resulting from an unjust policy. Denson finds this disconcerting. He is troubled that “many sites along the contemporary national Trail still act as monuments to absence” (219), which ultimately stress indigenous disappearance and present removal as an “aberration” (220), a tragic departure from American values, rather than part of a longer process of dispossession that created the modern United States. Denson concludes by suggesting that modern-day commemorators might problematize removal narratives by incorporating further indigenous voices and evidence of indigenous persistence. The book’s epilogue shows how indigenous communities have begun some of this work, adding their own interpretive touches that reclaim spaces and point visitors to more complex narratives about removal and indigenous endurance.In exploring the political and racial motivations behind memorialization, Monuments to Absence chronicles competing impulses to remember while also highlighting the legacies of those decisions for the present. Future scholars will, one hopes, build on this work to explore the motivations for commemorating (or ignoring) other groups’ removal experiences, while also paying greater attention to the depiction of the Indian past in public memory within the South and beyond. This deeply researched, informative, and powerful book should open many new directions for the study of removal and the Native South, as well as of public history and memory throughout the United States.