I have a doctorate in American studies. My coursework and research for that degree involved learning about many different American people and phenomena — from the pilgrims to “Amos ‘n’ Andy” to the War in Vietnam.
I am sorry to say that nowhere did my studies touch on the history of Native Americans.
I am now slowly beginning to learn about our country’s Indigenous history. I found “A History of the Cherokee Nation” by Rachel Caroline Eaton (University of Oklahoma Press, 382 pages, $45) enlightening and moving.
The author, who lived from 1869 to 1938, is thought to have been the first Native American woman to receive a Ph.D. The book went unpublished in her time; it was deemed too “pro-Cherokee” by the publishing industry of the day. Eaton left the manuscript to the nephew who lived with her in Oklahoma.
Last year, the book was finally published, edited by three of Eaton’s descendants: her great-niece, Martha Berry; Berry’s husband, David Berry; and the author’s great-great-niece, Patricia Dawson. I discovered it because Dawson lives in our area and teaches at Mount Holyoke College.
The book briefly describes the Cherokees’ society before Europeans came to this continent.
It moves on to the founding of the Cherokee Nation in the 1700s and takes the reader through the nation’s history until it was dissolved in 1907 when Oklahoma gained statehood and Cherokee autonomy was no longer allowed by the U.S. The Cherokee Nation was subsumed by the new state.
Eaton uses a number of techniques in her history. Sometimes she narrates straight chronology. Sometimes she provides testimony, either from people she interviewed or from her own experience. She even resorts to poetry from time to time.
The result is a unique form of storytelling. Eaton makes no effort to be dispassionate about the history she is relating. Her story invites — forces, really — the reader to respect the accomplishments and government of the Cherokee people.
It also invites the reader to grieve as the Cherokees are betrayed repeatedly by an American government that signs treaty after treaty with them and then breaks every treaty as white settlers cast covetous eyes on Cherokee land.
Particularly poignant is the section about the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokees from their Southeastern ancestral lands in the 1830s to what is now Oklahoma. Eaton’s grandmother traveled that trail, and the author quotes a first-person account of it extensively.
The old man who recalls the Trail says in broken English, “Days pass and peoples die very much … Long time I am live in hills of new country and much good peoples what lives close by me say, ‘why not some time laugh?’ Look like I never smile in lifetime. No man has laugh left after he’s made long march from old country.”
I spoke with Dawson about the work of editing the book and her own feelings about the author.
“I was super young when my parents told us about her, and we were always proud of ‘Aunt Callie,’” recalled Dawson. “She was a strong Cherokee woman … She was part of my reason for becoming a historian.”
Dawson herself studies the ways in which Cherokee women used textiles and clothing as tools of diplomacy.
She told me that that editing the book was a labor of love. “When I was getting my Ph.D., there was some renewed interest [in the manuscript],” she said. “I told my family, ‘When I get my Ph.D., I will work on this project.’”
She said the editing she and her fellow editors performed was light. “We wanted to make sure we kept it close to what Aunt Callie would have wanted it to be,” she explained. “It was really great to have the intergenerational experience.”
She explained that when Eaton was working on the book, archival research rather than personal or oral history was the go-to historical tool. Eaton, as a Cherokee, worked differently.
“She included a lot of oral history because that’s how we share history. We include archival sources but also oral history,” said Dawson. “She also went around to other community members and talked about individual elder stories. She kind of had to justify that.
“But now those are the things that we [as historians] are interested in. So she was really ahead of her time. She was using Indigenous and Cherokee methodologies, and at the time academia wasn’t really getting it.”
Dawson thinks that her Aunt Callie would be pleased at the book’s publication after 90-odd years. “I think that although she didn’t live to see it published, she knew that future generations would,” said Dawson. “I think she would be happy to see that it’s finally here.”
The editor expressed her own joy that the book is finally coming out after all this time. “I have no words,” she enthused. “Our family is just really pleased.”
She sees the book as a fulfillment of her own obligations to her relatives and her culture. All of the royalties are being donated to charity; her own share will go to the Cherokee Nation Foundation.
Patricia Dawson noted, “We always have the responsibility to make our voices heard in the present moment … and to make sure that future generations do so as well.
“All of our work is intergenerational projects. It’s not just those of us here today. It’s also our ancestors who poured a lot of themselves into work so that future generations could stand here today.”
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning writer and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.