Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History

by Daniel Heath Justice

Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm , Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. 

Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. 

Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. 

Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.

Genres: Indigenous, History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published June 6, 2006

About the author

Daniel Heath Justice (b. 1975) is a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ, raised the third generation of his mother's family in the Rocky Mountain mining town of Victor, Colorado. After a decade living and teaching in the Anishinaabe, Huron-Wendat, and Haudenosaunee territories of southern Ontario, where he worked at the University of Toronto, he now lives with his husband in shíshálh territory on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. He works on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam people, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture and Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies and English at the University of British Columbia.

Daniel's research focuses on Indigenous literary expression, with particular emphasis on issues of literary nationalism, kinship, sexuality, and intellectual production. His scholarship and creative work also extend into speculative fiction, animal studies (including badgers and raccoons), and cultural history. He is also a fantasy/wonderworks writer who explores the otherwise possibilities of Indigenous restoration and sovereignty. His newest book is *Raccoon*, volume 100 in the celebrated Animal Series from Reaktion Books.

A few more facts about Daniel:
-he's an amateur ventriloquist with a badger puppet named Digdug;
-he's a lifelong tabletop RPG player whose favoured alignment is Neutral Good and favoured classes are Druid and Ranger;
-his favourite Indigenous writers working right now include Leanne Simpson, LeAnne Howe, Lee Maracle, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Cherie Dimaline, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Joshua Whitehead.
-the speculative fiction writers who had the greatest influence on his imagination growing up include Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and his early pop-culture loves include Masters of the Universe, Ewoks, and Thundercats;
-he's a fierce mustelid partisan with a particular love of badgers--in fact, his favourite tattoo is of the badger symbol used by his character Tobhi from *The Way of Thorn and Thunder*;
-he's a devoted Dolly Parton fan and has seen her in concert three times (but has not, alas, yet been to Dollywood); and
-he is the proud and dedicated human attendant to three very weird and awesome dogs.

In summary, he's a queer Cherokee hobbit who lives and writes in the West Coast temperate rainforest and occasionally emerges to teach and do readings. And he's good with that.

Go to his website, www.danielheathjustice.com, for more information about his published and forthcoming work as well as his irregularly-updated blog.

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A passionate and rigorous scholarly look at Cherokee history/literatures. I've kind of lost my taste for most of these kinds of books since dropping out of my PhD program, but this is an example of the one of the best of these sorts of works. Lots to treasure and think about.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Through an analysis of selected correspondence, literature, and speeches and live performances Justice focused on 3 features of historical and contemporary Cherokee life. The first was the relevant features of their sense of nationhood when the Europeans and Americans invaded their lands. The second was how they tried to cope with forced removal in the 1830’s from their original homeland in what was the southeastern USA to Indian Territory. And the third was their efforts at regeneration of their culture and society in the 20th century after their lands were stolen via allotment and their own national government was dissolved leading up to Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

As one would hope for in a scholarly text the author accomplished this by reviewing a wide array of primary and secondary sources, including unpublished PhD dissertations. At the end of Our Fire there are 34 pages of notes and a 10 page bibliography for those readers who wish to pursue particular points more fully. Quotations, albeit sometimes too lengthy for my tastes, were utilized to provide context and/or support for its in depth analyses. As can occur in academically oriented books the use of complex, compound sentences made the prose a bit unwieldy at times.

To his credit Justice provided a thorough summary of the literary material he was analyzing. On the one hand, this is necessary for one to do the kind of nuanced analysis he was striving for. On the other hand, it got to be slow moving, if not tedious, as I went along through the book.

I did come away with the names of some Cherokee authors whose work I will probably read in the coming months. But Our Fire confirmed a ‘prejudice’ which I have: I generally find literary analysis to be too dry for my tastes. For that reason I will give the book a 3 star rating. Other readers more favorably inclined to this methodology will probably rate the book more highly.

[Kaelyn Ireland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent resource for understanding Cherokee literature through Cherokee history and culture, and Cherokee history and culture through Cherokee literature.

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second reading was an advanced copy of the new second edition. Second edition is even more remarkable than the first. Definitely controversial, but also a more detailed/complex consideration from a mature and legendary scholar of Cherokee Literary Nationalism.

[hh · Rating 5 out of 5]

clear writing, a wide array of textual analysis, focused perspective. an all-around recommended critical work.

[Lex · Rating 2 out of 5]

Um... a bit over my head.