Two Books about Cherokee Removal

Our grandfathers followed a stick to northern Georgia. It was an old migration. The Great Spirit led us here. How can the soldiers drive us from our land? Maybe it was because we worshiped the Earth instead of God, Reverend Mackenzie preached. Maybe it was because some of us had black slaves, Reverend Bushyhead said. Maybe it was because of gold and our cornfields, the men said.

Maybe the Great Spirit just calls us to the beyond where he lives. Maybe he's going to show us another world.

But who wants another world?

The Trail of Tears looms large in our memory as one of the country's greatest moral crimes: thousands upon thousands of Native Americans, uprooted from their homes in the Southeast, and forced to march for months to what is now Oklahoma. And yet, I think Diane Glancy's novel Pushing the Bear is the first time I've seen anyone try to show, in art, what the trail was like for those who underwent it, how they suffered to leave their homes behind, how they became sick and weak and died, how they had to hurriedly bury their own before being rushed off to the next unfamiliar place. Glancy's novel, which focuses on a group of Cherokee from North Carolina, takes a multivocal approach, trading first person narratives at a half-page clips. By taking a wide view, Glancy shows a fundamental diversity among the Cherokee, who brought with them their resentments and rivalries with other bands, who brought traditional religions and Christianity, who brought different ideas about how best to respond to the forced removal. It's not not a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, but the Cherokee of Pushing the Bear do not manage to come together in inspiring ways. A crisis, Glancy tells us, has a way of prying open all our divisions.

The two central voices of the novel are a married couple, Maritole and Knobowtee. Maritole loses everything and everyone on the trail, beginning with her cabin: she is allowed to return briefly to fetch a few items and finds, chillingly, a white family has already moved in. On the trail, she gives birth to a baby who dies, and then loses her mother and father; her brother fled to the woods and will never be seen again. When she needs Knobowtee the most, he abandons her, failing to provide any comfort or companionship. We learn that Knobowtee, a widower, has married Maritole for her farm, and now that Maritole no longer owns a farm, what is the foundation of their relationship? Maritole becomes close to a white soldier, who shows a puppyish interest in the Cherokee in their ways, but their relationship invites the scorn of the other Cherokee, driving her further to the margin of the march. "I gave him my life in the dark," Maritole says of her first sexual liaison with the soldier, "I let him feel my hurt. My wounds inside. I would always be cut in two. Part of me in North Carolina. Part of me in the new land. I held open my wounds for him to soothe."

It's Maritole who coins the title phrase: in periods of madness and distress, she feels as if she is pushing away a giant bear that nibbles at her. The bear is a symbol of the march itself, a beast that would devour her whole if she let it, and which requires constant effort and attention to push away, though of course, it always comes back. Over the course of the march, Maritole and the marchers begin to approach a zen-like resignation, not of defeat, but of openness to the possibility that their lives can be rebuilt anew. "Maybe that was the Great Spirit's lesson," one Cherokee writes, "I could receive and lose in the same breath. The burden the white man carried was that he didn't know the lesson yet." This, to me, may be the central truth of Pushing the Bear: that those who are unable to believe that history might work on them, rather than others, are in a dangerous place.

We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.

Diane Glancy's Cherokee find themselves, at the end of the novel, facing a new life at Fort Gibson in modern-day Oklahoma. The characters in Brandon Hobson's The Removed may be their descendants, Cherokee living in an Eastern Oklahoma town called "Quah" (a lightly fictionalized version, one might guess, of the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah). As its name suggests, Hobson's novel asks the question: is Indian removal a historical process that is completed and over? Or does it live on, in some form or another, to today?

The Removed centers on the Echota family, whose name evokes the Treaty of New Echota, made between the United States and the Cherokee prior to the Trail of Tears. Sixteen years prior to The Removed, the eldest Echota brother, Ray-Ray, was shot and killed by a white police officer. In the present, we see through alternating first-person narratives--a method that recalls Pushing the Bear, though without Glancy's brisk switching--how the murder continues to effect each member of the family today. Mother Maria has agreed to serve as an emergency foster parent for a young Cherokee boy whose wisdom and sense of humor remind her of Ray-Ray. The boy, Wyatt, makes an even stronger impression on her husband Ernest, who becomes convinced that Wyatt really is Ray-Ray reincarnated, and it's hard to say he's wrong. The arrival of Wyatt reverses the symptoms of Alzheimer's in Ernest, who suddenly finds himself reconciled to his memories and whole for the first time in years. Daughter Sonja spends her time seducing a single father named Vin, a pursuit of singular and baffling obsessiveness that makes little sense--until it's revealed that Vin is the son of the cop who killed Ray-Ray.

The most interesting section, though, belongs to son Edgar, whose disillusionment and despair have led him into a life of addiction. Edgar imagines--or perhaps is--followed around by an aggressive "red fowl" whom he nursed as a chick and who has turned against him. A symbol of drug addiction, maybe? Edgar decides at the last minute to return home for a yearly bonfire in Ray-Ray's memory, but he finds himself waylaid with his friend Jackson in an eerie town known only as the "Darkening Land." Is this a real place, or a limbo-like place where, it's suggested, suicides live? Edgar's friend Jackson says he's making a video game about Jim Thorpe, and keeps wanting to capture Edgar's "Indian" likeness as a reference. This, we learn later, is a lie; Jackson has designed a video game that allows players to hunt Indians, and the line between the holograms who are the targets and real Indians like Edgar is frighteningly blurry. It's a bit of a groaner when we learn that Jackson's last name is Andrews--Jackson Andrews, get it?--but I think that, through the skillful creepiness of the setting, Hobson earns it.

How many ways can one be removed? Ray-Ray's death gives us one way. Addiction, provoked by poverty, might be another. There is a suggestion, too, that the foster system encourages a kind of removal; Hobson brought his longtime professional experience with the Oklahoma foster system to bear in his (excellent) novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, and does so again here. All of this suggests that Indian Removal is a process that plays out again and again, when Native Americans are ground out of the systems that identify them as dependents or threats. And yet, the novel gives us visions of reconciliation and restoration, too, in the arrival of Wyatt, the living memory, and in the way that Sonja is forced to abandon her quixotic and half-baked plan of revenge. The final voice threaded with Maria's, Edgar's, and Sonja's is that of Tsala, a 19th century Cherokee folk hero who fought against removal and saved the Eastern Band of Cherokee (and who appears briefly in Pushing the Bear as "Tsali"). Tsali, like Ray-Ray, was a martyr, but his spirit could not be conquered.