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Ll LIBRARY
zoo: Michigan State
University

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

BMW? .9659 13‘ZI'YI. 6TI§SRI
YELESALEHE HIWAYONA DIKANOHOGIDA NAIWODUSV/
GOD TAUGHT ME THIS SONG. IT IS BEAUTIFUL: CHEROKEE

PERFORMANCE RHETORICS AS DECOLONIZATION, HEALING,

AND CONTINUANCE

presented by

QWO-Ll DRISKILL

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

__D__octorial degree in Rhetoric 8. Writing

 

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H H a...... . ...

some? .9659 Jszryt. OTIISSR/
YELESALEHE HIWAYONA DIKANOHOGIDA NAIWODUSV/

GOD TAUGHT ME THIS SONG, IT IS BEAUTIFUL: CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE
RHETORICS AS DECOLONIZATION, HEALING, AND CONTINUANCE
By

Qwo-Li Driskill

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Rhetoric and Writing

2008

ABSTRACT

3036'? .9669 IS‘ZI‘YII GTdSSR/
YELESALEHE HIWAYONA DIKANOHOGIDA NAIWODUSV/

GOD TAUGHT ME THIS SONG, IT IS BEAUTIFUL: CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE

RHETORICS AS DECOLONIZATION, HEALING, AND CONTINUANCE

By
Qwo-Li Driskill
This dissertation examines the importance of performed and embodied rhetorics

to Cherokee survival and resistance and argues for performance as a primary site of
Native cultural continuance and rhetorical production. Two historiographic studies are
central to making this argument. The first, Indian In The Archive: Performance
Historiography as Cherokee Ghost Dance (Chapter Three) looks to the Cherokee Ghost
Dance and the Redbird Smith movement as models for radical, decolonial, performative
historiography. With a particular focus on recovering a history of nineteenth century
Cherokee theatre, this chapter focuses on how archives are and can be used by Cherokee
people to re—establish dormant and/or obscured Cherokee performance traditions and
histories. The second study, On The Wings Of Wadaduga: Towards the Performance of
T wo-Spirit Critiques (Chapter Four) focuses on revising both archived and embodied
records through the development of an historiographic performance with Two-Spirit,
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer-identified Cherokees. This chapter
examines performance as historiography and argues for performance as a means to revise

both archival and embodied cultural memories. Both studies are grounded in the

methodological concepts of SGAO“ (duyuk’ta, "balance") and SS? (gadugi,

"cooperative labor") as a way of conceiving decolonial scholarship, practice, and

pedagogy within the field of rhetoric and composition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing is an act of cooperative labor, of 583' (gadugi). There is no way that I

would have completed this work had it not been for the sweet folks that create my

communities. I want to say GV (wa'do) to everyone who helped make this work

possible.

GV to the People of the Three Fires, whose land this work was written
upon.
GIV to my parents, Paul and Jeannie Driskill, for their constant support of my

life and my work. My parents' central hope for me is that I create and live a life in which
I am happy. Sadly, I think there are few people who can say that. While writing this
dissertation, my father was nearly killed in a hit-and-run incident. There is no way to
express how deeply grateful I am that he survived. Among the many gifts my mother has
given me are patience, an ability to laugh through racism and oppression, a grounded
sense of what it means to be Cherokee, and a very deep love of words. Both of my
parents have also gifted me with a commitment to learning. Mom and Dad, I love both of
you very, very much.

CV to Colin Kennedy Donovan, Platonic Homosexual Life Partner, for hir

ongoing love and support, for hir willingness to aid me in editing numerous versions of
this work, and for hir unwavering friendship. There are few people in this world who are
lucky enough to have a friendship like the one Colin and I have with each other. Colin,

I'm so honored to be sharing this very queer life with you. EPG so much.

iii

GV to Angela M. Haas, Cherokee Wonder Twin, for her fiiendship and
love. Angela and I were fortunate enough to be in the same cohort during our
work at MSU. Angela, I feel so blessed that we were both together in this place
and time. EPG, Goal.

GV to Malea Powell for her mentorship and friendship. There is no doubt
that that my work here could not have happened in the same way had Malea not
been my mentor and chair. Malea, I am so grateful for all your guidance and

support, for practicing what it means to be a radical Native scholar, and for

weaving us into kin. EPG.
GIV to Kimberli Lee for her friendship, sillyness, songs, and for joining my

dissertation committee at the last minute.

GV to Jill Chrobak for her friendship and for the baby monkeys. (Welcome to

the world, Lucas!)

GV to Jeff Grabill and Terese Guinsatao Monberg for their mentorship and

work on my dissertation committee.

GV to all my friends, colleagues, and mentors who have helped me through this

process: Maggie Corser, Matt Cox, Louis Esmé Cruz, Bill Hart-Davidson, Nancy DeJoy,
Betsy Geist, Daniel Heath Justice, Susan Applegate Krouse, Kendall Leon, Steven
Lessner, Lynnette Young Overby, Stacey Pigg, Jim Ridolfo, Cheyenne Roy, Donnie
Johnson Sackey, Robin McBride Scott, basil and billie rain-shadid, Tsi-ge'-yu Sharp

(welcome to the world, Ayanlil), Arlo Starr, and Robyn Tasaka.

iv

GIV to everyone at the Montana Two-Spirit Gathering and the Tulsa Two-Spirit

' Gathering and to everyone who participated in my research.

(I'IV, y'all. GV, GV, GV, GV.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A CALL TO ASSEMBLE ................................................ 1
Decolonization ..................................................................................................... 4
Chapter Descriptions .......................................................................................... l 1

CHAPTER 1

SGAG” Dd' S‘SY/DUYUK'TA AND GADUGI: DOUBLEWEAVING A THEORY

AND METHODOLOGY OF CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE ...................................... 20
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 20
What are Cherokee Performance Rhetorics, Anyway? ........................................ 22
How do SG’AO‘" and 583' (Duyuk'ta and Gadugi) Help Us Situate and
Understand Cherokee Performance Rhetorics? ................................................... 26

SEAT/Duyuk'ta .................................................................................... 27
SSY/Gadugi ............................................................................................ 30

The Question of Liberatory Methodologies ......................................................... 34
Rhetorics and Historiography .............................................................................. 38
SG’AG" Dd' SSY/ Duyuk'ta and Gadugi: Cherokee Responsibility Maps .......... 42
583' (Gadugi) and Decolonial Skillshare ........................................................... 45
Doubleweaving SGr'AO‘" (Duyuk'ta) and SS? (Gadugi): The Construction of a
Third Space ........................................................................................................ 51

CHAPTER 2

L51), ISL, 1.51: Dd'CéDT/DAKSI, DAKSI, DAKSI ALEGWUI/COME ON ALL YOU
SHELL SHAKERS: CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE RHETORICS,

DECOLONIZATION, AND HEALING HISTORICAL TRAUMA .............................. 56
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 56
Call And Response: Cherokee Performance Rhetorics ....................................... 57
O'cDO’flG/va'unquStoneclad: The Origins of Cherokee
Performance ............................................................................................ 57
516 O’OWo’IDYoDI/Gatiyo Unalskisdi/Stomp Ground: "Traditional"
Cherokee Performances ........................................................................... 59
Cherokee Performance as the Creation of Space ...................................... 64
Performance Rhetorics and Indigenous Traditions ............................................... 68
Historical Trauma: Beyond the Hiawatha Asylum ............................................... 70
Indigenous Performance Rhetorics and Resistance .............................................. 74
Cherokee Performance Rhetorics: Resistance, Healing, and Decolonization ....... 84
CHAPTER 3
INDIAN IN THE ARCHIVE: PERFORMANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY AS
CHEROKEE GHOST DANCE ..................................................................................... 88

vi

Cherokee Ghost Dance ....................................................................................... 89

Redbird Smith and the Keetoowah Society ....................................................... 100
Historiography as Ghost Dance: Recovering Nineteenth Century Cherokee
Theater ............................................................................................................. 106
Warriors of Anikituwha .................................................................................... 119
Ghost Dancing the Archive ............................................ 121
CHAPTER 4
ON THE WINGS OF GLSS (WADADUGA): TOWARDS THE PERFORMANCE OF
TWO-SPIRIT CRITIQUES ......................................................................................... 124
Splint ULéD/Saquu/One: Introduction ................................................................... 124
Splint WP/I‘al/Two: Re-storying GLS‘S (Wadaduga) ......................................... 126
Splint KT/Tso/Three: Two-Spirit Critiques ........................................................ 133
Splint OY/Nvg/F our: DQY DBC (Asegi Ayetl): Cherokee Two—Spirit People
Reimagining Nation ............................................................................................ 143
Splint .BoiW/Hisg/Five: Cherokee Two-Spirits in the Archive ............................. 164
Splint VLF/Sudal/Six: Ghost Dancing the Repertoire ......................................... 169
Splint SPVY/Gal'quogVSeven: DQY(Asegi) Stories Revising Our Futures ....... 174
CHAPTER 5

.Dfil‘hflci) ?V'H'9/HIYOHUNIHIYA, HEDOHALENA/T HIS IS YOUR PART,
START IT QUICKLY: PERFORMANCE, DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGY, AND

CULTURAL RHETORICS ......................................................................................... 177
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 77
Colonization, Decolonization and the History of Rhetoric ................................... 178
Performing Cultural Rhetorics, Disrupting Binaries ............................................ 184
Embodying Rhetorics, Performing Pedagogy ...................................................... 191
Conclusion: Imagining Cultural Rhetorics .......................................................... 197

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Archival Notes from the Cherokee Heritage Center Archives,
Cherokee Male Seminary Record Book ............................................................... 203
Appendix B: Interview with Cat .......................................................................... 207
Appendix C: First Interview with Robin Farris .................................................... 209
Appendix D: Second Interview with Robin Farris ................................................ 212
Appendix E: Interview with Daniel Heath Justice ............................................... 230
Appendix F: Interview with Chad and Corey Taber ............................................ 249
Appendix G: Archival Notes from the Museum of the Cherokee Indian Archives,
John Howard Payne Manuscripts ......................................................................... 276
BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 28 1

vii

INTRODUCTION: A CALL TO ASSEMBLE

Bd‘Ud‘? Yelesalehe God

.905 hiwayona taught me
JSZI'YI. diganohogida song A
OTQDSR naiwodusv is beautiful

JDZI'YI. dikanohogida song

QUGU nuwolosa the way it went
Bd'HGfi yelesalohi God
.965 hiwayona taught me

These are the lyrics to a Cherokee stomp dance song (Heth 121-122). They reflect
the centrality of performance to Cherokee lifeways, community identity, and histories of
resistance. These lyrics are just one example of the ways that Cherokees employ poetics
and embodied practices in struggles for decolonization, and healing historical trauma.
Cherokee performance rhetorics involve multiple and complex contexts, identities,
histories, and forms. They emerge from Cherokee landbases, communities, and national
struggles as tactics to ensure the survival and continuance of Cherokee people.

Rhetoric and composition has mostly ignored the powerful rhetorical work of
community performance, particularly within Indigenous contexts.l Indigenous

rhetorics—as well as numerous other marginalized rhetorics—carry unique modes of

 

I . , . . . ,, .
Followmg Powell 3 suggestIon that In order to understand various terms as what they are: stones that
explain how the world works" that we "divest them of their initial capitals—Theory to theory, Discourse to

discourse. . ." l have not capitalized the names of fields and disciplines ("Listening" 1 8).

analysis and political obligations that require a shift in our field's theories and practices.
Moves to "decolonize" rhetoric and composition have been well-established for a number
of years. Victor Villanueva's famous call to the to reshape our scholarship in order to
intervene in Eurocentric discourse and include the rhetorics of the Americas helps
provide a context for a decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric:
We tend to get our Great Thinkers from Europe. . .. I am not saying we
shouldn't. I am grateful for habitus and hegemony as concepts that came
from Europe. I have a great deal of affection for the rhetoricians of
Greece and Rome. But we must break from the colonial mindset and learn
from the thinkers of our own hemisphere as well. [. . .] Break precedent!
We are so locked into the colonial mindset that we are now turning to the
excolonials of Europe to learn something about our own people of color
(Rhetoric 658-659).

His call to "break precedent" was issued the same year as Malea Powell’s "Blood
and Scholarship." Since these publications, Native rhetoricians and other rhetoricians of
color working in the field have both taken up these calls and put out calls of their own.
Scott Richard Lyons published "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians
Want from Writing?" in 2000 continuing a decolonial challenge to the field:

Rhetorical sovereignty is the inherent right of peoples to determine their
own communicative needs and desires in this pursuit, to decide for
themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages Of public discourse.
Placing the scene of writing squarely back into the particular contingency

of the Indian rhetorical situation, rhetorical sovereignty requires of writing

teachers more than a renewed commitment to listening and learning; it
also requires a radical rethinking of how and what we teach as the written
word at all levels of schooling. . .. (449-450).

Lyons continues by calling on the field to support rhetorical sovereignty through
recentering our current discourse: "I suggest that we begin by prioritizing the study of
American Indian rhetoric. . .in our graduate curricula and writing programs, focusing on
the history of both secret and not-so-secret wars in the contact zone " (464).

Powell continued her critiques of what Lyons calls "The C&R Ranch" (450)
through the publication of her 2002 essay, "Rhetorics of Survivance: How American
Indians Use Writing":

There is little work on American Indians being done in our discipline and
much Of it suffers from the burdens of a colonial mindset and a general
lack of understanding about the diversity of American Indian cultures and
histories on this continent. [. . .] In short...we've done a pretty good job of
not doing a very good job of critically engaging with Native texts. That
alone makes the attempts of Native scholars in composition and rhetoric
both necessary and quite difficult (Survivance 397).

This dissertation is a way of contributing to work in rhetoric and composition that
is rooted in, and responsible to, Native communities. By looking to performance as an act
of rhetorical and intellectual sovereignty we can shift both the subject of analysis as well
as our discipline's methodologies in order to be more accountable to rhetorical histories

and traditions rooted in the Americas.

My own interest in Cherokee performance rhetorics emerges from my work as a
Cherokee activist, poet, and performer who extensively uses radical performance and
poetics as tools for decolonization and healing historical trauma. My scholarly interest in
kinesthetic knowledgehinclusive of what I am now calling performance rhetorics—
began while working on an MA that focused on how writing, theatre, and story can be
used in Native communities to build coalitions working for decolonization. I am
currently not only interested in contemporary performance rhetorics of Cherokee
communities, but also the connections between contemporary and historical Cherokee
performance rhetorics. I am particularly concerned with how Cherokee performance is
utilized as a tool of survival, resistance, nation building, and decolonization.

The restoration and continuance of Indigenous performance practices aid in larger
struggles for decolonization and healing historical trauma. For Cherokees, and no doubt
for many Native people, performance has been used historically as a means of resisting
colonization and genocide. As it has since European invasion, the uSe of perforrnative
resistance in our lives and struggles remains central 'to movements for decolonization and
healing. This dissertation is meant to contribute to ongoing decolonization struggles in as
well as continuing work within the field to Indigenize our analyses, methodologies, and

scholarship.

Decolonization
Because concepts of decolonization are central to Indigenous methodologies, I
would like to discuss my own formulations of decolonization here, particularly in their

relationship to rhetoric and composition. When I speak of decolonization I am speaking

of an ongoing process Native people and our allies are engaged in to end the occupation

and wounding of our homelands. Decolonial work by Native scholars and our allies

within the academy is connected with bell hooks' concept of yearning:
Yearning is the word that best describes a. common psychological state
shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and
sexual practice. Specifically, in relation to the postmodernist
deconstruction of 'master' narratives, the yearning that wells in our hearts
and minds of those whom such narratives have silenced is the longing for
critical voice (Natoli and Hutcheon 314).

Yearning for the decolonization of our landbases, bodies, and communities moves Native

people in the academy to yearn for a decolonial approach to the stories told by, about, and

on our bodies.

When we speak of a decolonial approach to scholarship, we must be committed
to current struggles for Native people. The struggles of Native people—inside and
outside of the academy and the discipline—should be of pressing concern to Native and
non-Native people alike. Winona LaDuke says powerfully, "In the final analysis the
survival of Native America is fundamentally about the collective survival of all human
beings. The question of who gets to determine the destiny of the land, and of the people
who live on it—those with the money or those who pray on the land—is a question that is
alive throughout society" (5).

Decolonization is a multifaceted process, and academic scholarship has an

important role in engaging the following facets of decolonial movements:

Land Redress

Perhaps central to decolonization are current struggles for land redress being
engaged in by Native peoples. If we are not concerned with land redress, I doubt very
much that we are talking about decolonization. Projects such as the White Earth Land
Recovery Project or the establishment of Nunavut in Canada are important models and
examples of land redress occurring in Native communities in North America, as are
continuing struggles to protect sacred landbases. Colonialism, by its very definition,
seeks to erase Indigenous title to the land. Just as colonialism attempts to erase Native
people from land and history, dominant accounts of rhetorical history and theory within
our field erases the presence of Native peoples from its telling, claiming the territory of
rhetoric as European. A consciously Indigenous approach to rhetoric must interrupt
manifestation of colonial thinking within our scholarship.

Sovereignty

Sovereignty is a central struggle for Native nations and peoples. Like land
redress, it is difficult to argue that one is speaking of decolonization if sovereignty is not
being addressed. Scott Richard Lyons writes, "Sovereignty is the guiding story in our
pursuit of self-determination, the general strategy by which we aim to best recover our
losses from the ravages Of colonization: our lands, our languages, our cultures, our self-
respect. For indigenous people everywhere, sovereignty is an ideal principle, the beacon
by which we seek the paths to agency and power and community renewal " (449). Lyons'
idea is connected to Robert Warrior's concept of "intellectual sovereignty." Warrior
writes that a "process-centered understanding of sovereignty provides a way of

envisioning the work Native scholars do" (87). Similarly, Craig S. Womack defines

sovereignty as "an intellectual idea in Native cultures, a political practice, and a theme of
oral traditions; and the concept, as well as the practice, predates European contact" (51).
Because of its centrality to Native resistance and intellectual movements, sovereignty is a
necessary concept in any discussion of decolonization. Further, concepts of rhetorical
sovereignty are not only important as conceptual frameworks when addressing writing by
Native people, but are also important because those concepts emerge from—and are
intended to contribute to— grassroots struggles for sovereignty.

Healing Historical Trauma

The concept of historical trauma is rooted in trauma studies and psychoanalytic
theory, and carries with it strong connections to Holocaust studies and postcolonial
theory. The authors of the essay "Healing the American Indian Soul Wound" write,
"Historical trauma is trauma that is multigenerational and cumulative over time; it
extends beyond the life span. Historical trauma response has been identified and is
delineated as a constellation of features in reaction to the multigenerational, collective,
historical, and cumulative psychic wounding over time, both over the life span and across _
generations" (Danieli 342). Decolonization actively engages with healing the wounds of
colonization that continue to manifest in our community, familial, and individual lives.
One Of these wounds has been an attempt to erase the histories of Native peoples. Linda
Tuhiwai Smith writes, "...history is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful
and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in
positions in which they can continue to dominate others" (34). Speaking our own
histories is one way to mend the damages of dominant history. Smith continues, "Telling

our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the

past are all strategies which are commonly employed by indigenous peoples struggling
for justice. [. . .] ...[T]he need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a
powerful form of resistance" (35). A decolonial approach to rhetoric helps to heal the
trauma inflicted by colonial narratives.

Recovery and Continuance of Indigenous Knowledges and Lifeways

Recovery and continuance of our traditions is inseparable from a process of
healing historical trauma. Several factors in the genocidal history Of the continent have
contributed to a wounding of cultural memory in many Native communities. Part of
colonization always attempts to eradicate Indigenous lifeways and lives from the planet,
or to appropriate and misuse those knowledges for profit and for the continuance of
colonial powers. A perfect example of such appropriation is corporate interests in putting
patents on life, both human and more-than-human, in order to further corporate and
imperial powers, which are increasingly one and the same. Decolonization requires not
only the halting of colonial practices that seek to destroy or steal Native knowledges, but
also works to ensure that our lifeways remain rooted within our cultural practice and
memory. Native communities have our own histories and rhetorics, which are carried on
in various forms into the present. Even so, colonization has often intentionally attempted
to destroy Native knowledges and lifeways. Most Native people in North America, for
instance, do not speak our Native languages. A decolonial approach to the history of
rhetoric aids in a process of restoring and continuing these knowledges and practices for

the benefit of Native communities.

Accountability and Reparations to Native Communities

The devastation of genocidal practices in the Americas has created
intergenerational wounds that must be attended to. A process of healing requires that
governments, communities, and individuals that have perpetuated violence against Native
communities take responsibility for their actions. Movements for accountability and
reparations are central to struggles for decolonization. Rhetoric and composition, like all
fields in university, must be accountable to the Native people whose lands are being
occupied in order for us to do our work. Part of this accountability is to engage in
decolonial practices and scholarship, what I will call intellectual reparations to Native
communities. Educational systems in the US and Canada (and certainly other occupied
territories) have done enormous damage to Native communities through assimiliationist
and missionary projects, the establishment of universities in order to appropriate land
bases, and research projects that physically and psychically injure Native communities. In
such a context, a decolonial approach to scholarship should be a matter-of-course.
Further, a decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric in our field is not simply a
corrective act to the master narratives too often told by the discipline, it a reparative act.
A decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric—and indeed the history of our fields and
institutions—is part of struggles for accountability and reparations. Intellectual
reparations and accountability are important steps towards in a process of reconciliation.

Reconciliation

Decolonization is also a process of reconciliation with non-
Native peoples who have been part of the occupation of our land bases. A decolonial

approach to the history of rhetoric is an act that aids Native and non-Native people in a

process of reconciliation and collaboration. Powell's call for "alliance" is rooted in
decolonial politics that hope for reconciliation and the mending of human relationships.
She urges, "Maybe, as allies, we can spur one another on to even more disruptive tactics.
Maybe we can learn to take hold of one another and emerge at the beginning of a new
story about ourselves. . . " (River 57).

I am not asserting that there is any linear order to a decolonial process I have
outlined above, nor do I think that these are the only aspects in such a dynamic and
complex undertaking. I do think, however, that such criteria should be present if we are
to speak Of decolonization. If decolonization is a process of suturing the wounds Of
colonialism and bringing it to a halt, decolonization must directly engage and interrupt
colonialism. A decolonial approach to scholarship within our field, then, must find ways
to engage decolonial struggles. Such an approach moves beyond Native people or
histories at the "subjects" of study, but instead builds and supports already existing
connections between Native struggles and academic scholarship.

I hope that my work—here and elsewhere—contributes to decolonial struggles.
By looking to the radical rhetorical work that performance does in Native communities,
this dissertation is meant to contribute to ongoing scholarship and activism by Native
people both within and outside of academia. It is deeply influenced by radical movements
and arts which I am involved. Performance disrupts colonial taxonomies and enables us
not only to "restore" both delivery and memory to the discipline, but also to re-center our
analysis on embodied, practiced rhetorics more conducive to understanding Indigenous
rhetorical productions. Performance disrupts rhetoric/poetic splits, which can aid in

struggles to re-root rhetoric and composition studies into the soil of the Americas.

10

Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor writes, "The rift, I submit, does not lie
between the written and spoken word, but between the archive of supposedly enduring
materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire
of embodied practice/knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual)" (19). My
historiographic work in part looks at the relationship between the archive and the
repertoire in relation to Cherokee performance rhetorics. How can and do Cherokee
communities utilize the archive to bring performances back into the repertoire? What is
the relationship between my own work in the archive and Cherokee performance
repertoires, and how can engagement with both be useful to Cherokee communities?

This dissertation seeks to answer these questions.

Chapter Descriptions

The first chapter of this dissertation, SG'AO” Dd' SSY/Duyuk ’ta and Gadugi:

Doubleweaving a Theory and Methodology of Cherokee Performance, provides a
theoretical base for my scholarship. An in-depth discussion of my methodologies are
included in Chapter One, rather than within this introduction, as a way of arguing for the
entwined nature of theory and practice. Doublewoven baskets, one of our oldest arts and
technologies as Cherokees, is used as a metaphor to examine the theoretical work
possible through thinking of doubleweave as a Cherokee a Cherokee theory. I look to the

Cherokee values of SG'AG“ (duyuk’ta, "balance") and 583' (gadugi, "cooperative

labor") as methodologies that can doublewoven, drawing on the work of Emma Pe’rez to

11

argue that through doubleweave a third space emerges that can engage in radical

decolonial work.2

Chapter Two, 55-5, L511, 555 Dd’CflT/Daksi, Daksi, Daksi Alegwui/Come On

All You Shell Shakers: Cherokee Performance Rhetorics, Resistance, and Decolonization,
articulates a theory of Cherokee performance rhetorics, specifically in relationship to
struggles for decolonization and healing historical trauma. Employing de Certeau's,

notions of practice, space, place, tactics, and strategies I argue that performance is a

central to Cherokee practices used to maintain SG'AO" (duyuk'a), ensuring the

maintenance of Cherokee space. Further, I look to a broader history of Indigenous
performance to position performance as integral to Indigenous rhetorics and resistance.
By doing this, I am able to examine the parallel—but very different—rhetorical work
taking place in both stomp dance communities and in the Society of American Indians in
the nineteenth century.

Chapter Three, Indian In The Archive: Performance Historiography as Cherokee
Ghost Dance, looks to Cherokee revialization movements as a model for engaging
decolonial historiographic work. The so-called Cherokee Ghost Dance movement in the
early ninteenth century and Redbird Smith's wave of the Keetoowah Society both
employed historiographic tactics, making use of both what Diana Taylor calls the archive
and the repertoire (2003), to reconstruct and revitalize Cherokee performance traditions

and other lifeways. I use these revitalization movements to think about Cherokee

 

2 While it is outside of the scope of this dissertation, by looking at the rhetorical work that doubleweave
does, this chapter also begins to articulate relationships between performance and material rhetorics that I

am interested in pursuing further.

12

historiography, including my own historiographic work to recover a history of nineteenth
centry Cherokee theatre. I also look the historiogrpahic and decolonial work of being
done by the Warriors of Anikituwha, a performance group at the Eastern Band of
Cherokee Indians, who work to revive and maintain particular Cherokee performance
traditions.

Chapter Four, On The Wings Of Wadaduga: Towards the Performance of T wo-

Spirit Critiques, is in many ways the heartbeat of this dissertation. GLSS (wadaduga)

means dragonfly in Cherokee. I've been searching for several years to learn more about

the place of GLSS within traditional Cherokee stories while also searching for the stories

of Two-Spirit people within the Cherokee past and present. As will be discussed in

Chapter Four, GIISS (wadaduga) has surfaced for me as a metaphor for Cherokee Two-

Spirit people. On The Wings Of Wadaduga is the beginning of a much larger project that
gathers the stories of Cherokee Two-Spirit people through archival research and
interviews, which will be collaboratively transformed into a public performance in the
future. What I provide in this dissertation is merely the raw materials from which the
performance will be collaboratively woven.

I conceive this project as historigraphic rather than ethnographic, and originally

thought that I would employ fairly straight-forward oral history methods. 3 As I continued

 

3 1 am choosing the term Two-Spirit, rather than other terms I could use such as Native Queer or Native
Trans People, for several reasons. The term Two-Spirit is a word that is intentionally complex. Like other
umbrella terms—including queer— it risks erasing difference. But also like queer, it is meant to be
inclusive, ambiguous, and fluid. Some Native GLBTQ folks have rejected the term Two-Spirit, while

others have rejected terms such as Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans, Queer in favor of Two-Spirit or tribally-specific

13

work on this dissertation, I was asked by a few potential participants if, rather than being
interviewed and recorded, they could write responses to questions.4 Their request made
me reconsider an exclusive "oral history" approach to these interviews, bringing into

question if such an approach is truly in the spirit of 58y (gadugi) which—as discussed

in Chapter One— is one of my core methodologies. If the preferred method of potential
participants is to transmit their story through writing rather than through an oral history,
and if I believe participants should have control Of the authorship and representation of
their stories, then using oral history exclusively ceases to make sense. While all of the
participants within this dissertation participated in recorded interviews, they also had the
opportunity to edit and revise their words. Daniel Heath Justice made some very minor
revisions and clarifications to his interview, but has otherwise remained the same as the
original. Robin Farris made some substantial edits and additions to her interview. None
of the other participants have revised any other their original interviews. It is important to
me, however, that participants have the opportunity to revise their Original interviews,
shifting my method from oral history to a collaborative interview and writing process
more conducive to a project rooted in Cherokee methodologies.

My original call for participants for this project brought some critique. I received
an email from a prominent Cherokee activist, David Cornsilk, challenging my criteria of

who could participate in this project, and an email from Richard LaFortune——another

 

terms. Still others move between terms depending on the specific rhetorical context, rhetorical

sovereignty.

4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Whrle none of these rndrvrduals have partrcrpated In thrs prOject In trme to be Included In the dissertation,

I expect that they will all participate in the future.

14

prominent Two-Spirit activist—pointing out the problematic nature of some of the ways I

was using GLSS (Wadaduga) as a metaphor in my call.

In my original call for participants, I make clear that one does not have to be an
enrolled Cherokee from a federally recognized Cherokee nation to participate in this
project:

This research is for all Cherokees who also identify as Two-Spirit, Gay,
Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersexed, Genderqueer, or Queer. For
the purposes of this project, "Cherokee" people will be defined as those
who meet at least two of the following criteria: 1.) Have Cherokee
ancestry. 2.) Are enrolled members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma,
the United Keetoowah Band, or the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians 3.)
Are involved with Cherokee community and are recognized by other
Cherokees as being Cherokee.
Comsilk felt that if I included non-citizen Cherokees, then I neededto require some sort
of proof of their Cherokee heritage. I am a non-citizen Cherokee myself, and the political
decolonial commitments of my Native communities—Cherokee and not—are opposed to
such pressures around identity verification. It is not my place as a scholar in rhetoric and
writing—and contrary to my politics and values—to require documentation of Cherokee
ancestry to participate in this project.

However, I appreciated Comskilk's concerns and his willingness to approach me
about them. Cornsilk's critiques did bring up the important question of how one
determines Cherokee-ness within the context of this project. In the end, I have found that

the few people who have contacted me whose connection to Cherokee communities is

15

perhaps questionable—I had one person who claimed to be trained as a "shaman" while
spending time at the Qualla boundary, for instance—did not pursue participation in the
project after I began asking who their family was and what their connection was to
Cherokee communities. I want to be clear here, however, that just because I found a few
individuals suspect because of New Age rhetoric, this doesn't mean that these individuals
aren't of Cherokee descent. It does mean, however, that it finally comes down to an
individual judgment on my part of whether it seems appropriate to include an individual
in this project. While I'm not entirely comfortable with this, it seems the best way to be
inclusive of non-citizen Cherokees.
While I did not change my criteria because of Cornsilk's concerns, LaFortune's
critiques did prompt me to revise some of the language in my original call. My original
call stated:
Wadaduga (Dragonfly) is an animal that enters only peripherally in
recorded Cherokee stories. Wadaduga is a species currently in grave
danger of extinction. Like Wadaduga, Cherokee Two-Spirits are currently
being attacked and erased and our histories ignored. While contemporary
writing and activism has demonstrated the roles of Two-Spirit people
within various Native traditions and histories, discussions of Cherokee
Two-Spirits have largely been left out of discussion. This project aims to
bring our experiences to the center for both our present for future
generations.

LaFortune emailed with concerns about describing Two-Spirits as "in grave danger of

extinction" and worried that it ignored the contributions of Cherokee activists in Two-

16

Spirit movements. I found that I agreed with LaFortune. While my intention was to
express the very real violence that racism, colonialism, queer/transphobia, and other
forms of oppression have on the lives of Cherokee Two-Spirits, I could clearly see
LaFortune's concerns. I revised the language in the call, 'which now reads:
Wadaduga (Dragonfly) is an animal that enters only peripherally in
recorded Cherokee stories. Like Wadaduga, the histories and stories of
Cherokee Two-Spirits are too often ignored within contexts of
colonialism, homo/transphobia, and other systems of oppression. This
project aims to continue work to bring our experiences to the center for
both our present and future generations.
Finally, I would like to say how much of an honor it is to work on this project.
While it is difficult within the context of Chapter Four to hear the complexity, humor,
and joyful resistance in these interviews. Many of the stories that I think may be most
prominent in future ensemble performances and not included in my analysis. However,
what these stories do is simultaneously perform vital critiques and imagine future
liberation by drawing on cultural memories. I think this is the rhetorical work possible in
performance and poetics that is not easily done within scholarly genres and constraints,

and so the stories in the appendices are truly the basket that carries this dissertation.

Chapter Five—flfil'fificfl PV'H'G/Hiyohunihiya, Hedohalena/T his Is Your Part,

Start It Quickly: Performance, Decolonial Pedagogy, and Cultural Rhetorics—
contextualizes performance and decolonial pedagogy within the context of disciplinary
shifts towards cultural rhetorics. Performance, I argue, helps to "decolonize" established

histories of rhetoric. This chapter is a call for rhetoric and composition to shift our

17

methodologies, practices, and pedagogies in order to engage with issues of colonization
decolonialization.

Finally, what is important for me in this dissertation is not only what it does, but
what it cannot do. Rather than see this dissertation as an early draft of a single
manuscript, I see several coils of basket reed that help me to imagine and design future
nested projects. I believe that my work on histories of Cherokee performance that I begin
here may very well join other work I've done on Native performance to become it's own
project. Indian in the Archive likewise feels like it will evolve into its own project, one
that will look more deeply at the work of Native people revising embodied practices
through archival research and serve as a practical guide for Native people wanting to use
archives in their activism. 0n the Wings of Wadaduga will likely evolve into more than
one manuscript: one I envision as a collection on Native Queer theory, and the other will
be a collection of the oral histories from this project along with whatever script should
emerge from the ensemble performance. This dissertation, then, weaves together several
moments of my current work that will likely develop into several projects that engage
radical, decolonial rhetorics through embodiment and performance.

If we are to Indigenize and decolonize our field, academia, and this continent, then
we must deeply re-examine our taxonomies, histories, and methodologies. Within
rhetoric and composition, performance unsettles our obsession with alphabetic writing
and textuality, reminding us of the importance of bodies and embodied memory to all
rhetorical production. If we are to engage in decolonial work, we must look to decolonial
practices in which Indigenous communities are engaging. Performance is only one of

these practices, one that disrupts dichotomies between archive and repertoire. It is

18

employed by Native communities to resist colonization, heal historical trauma through
mending cultural memory, and continue the lifeways of our ancestors through embodied
practices.

This dissertation pays close attention to performance as a way of reshaping our
relationships with rhetoric and history. It contributes to a growing disciplinary turn
toward cultural rhetorics by looking to performance as deeply rhetorical. By seriously
considering performance as rhetorics, scholars in rhetoric and composition can begin to
undo practices that have ignored bodies—particularly Indigenous bodies—and recreate

our work to be contribute to radical decolonial activism.

19

CHAPTER ONE

SG'AO“ Dd" SSY/DUYUK'TA AND GADUGI: DOUBLEWEAVING A THEORY

AND METHODOLOGY OF CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE

Introduction

Native people have long been objectified and marginalized by white supremacist
institutions seeking to continue colonial projects through the creation of "knowledge." In
many ways, academe is an outpost of Empire, attempting to spread dominant European
and EuroAmerican thought and control throughout colonized lands. Responsible work
within the academy, then, must address issues of power and colonization, and further,
seek an activist approach to research and scholarship that decolonizes. Linda Tuhiwai
Smith calls decolonization "a process that engages with imperialism and colonialism at
multiple levels. For researchers, one of those levels is concerned with having a more
critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which
inform research practices" (20).

The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my research draw from
numerous intellectual genealogies, what Smith call "dissent lines" (13). These dissent
lines include: Cherokee traditions, other Indigenous traditions, grassroots activisms,
Queer and Trans studies and politics, rhetoric and composition, Native studies,
(post)colonial theory, performance studies, feminisms, and radical psychoanalytic theory.
Within Cherokee traditions there exist two concepts which are central to my own

methodologies, traditions which reflect concerns of critical, decolonial analysis: SG'AG'

20

(duyuk’ta) and SSY(gadugi).5 SGAO“ and 585' have particular relationships to

Cherokee performance through Cherokee stomp (ceremonial dance) grounds. SGAG"

can be defined as "truth," "justice," and further, a mode of conduct and behavior in which

one strives balance. SSY is a community of cooperative labor. Articulating SGAG‘ and

985' as central to my theories and methodologies is part of claiming rhetorical and

intellectual sovereignty. It recenters academic discourse so that it focuses on Native
thought systems, and also critiques the historical European domination of research by
indigenizing the terms of discussion. Such a stance is rooted in Powell's assertion of
"alliance as a practice of survivance," attempting to build intellectual alliances between
traditional Cherokee concepts and the theories of the academy ("ijer" 38).

Rhetoric and composition has made particular demands for reciprocal,
accountable, and transparent methodologies that engage civic responsibility. Likewise,
Native studies insists on methodologies that serve Indigenous communities and struggles.
Taylor makes the case that scholarship focusing on performance must alter its
methodologies: "By shifting the focus from written to embodied culture, from the
discursive to the performatic, we need to shift our methodologies. [. . .] This shift
necessarily alters what academic disciplines regard as appropriate canons, and might
extend the traditional disciplinary boundaries to include practices previously outside their

purview" (l6, l7). SGAG‘" and 581' can be seen as maps for ethical research that can

 

5 The work to articulate SG’AO’and 58y as Cherokee methodologies has formed through the

collaborative intellectual production between myself and my colleague Angela Haas.

21

be woven into calls for scholarship that pays attention to social justice, analyses of power,

transparency in the research process, and performance-centered methodologies.

What are Cherokee Performance Rhetorics, Anyway?

In order to articulate SGAO“ (duyuk'ta) and 683' (gadugi) as methodologies

suited to pursue inquiry into Cherokee performance rhetorics, it is important to make
clear my current thinking around what such research comprises. I see Cherokee
performance as inclusive of a wide range of presentational and participatory practices
defined by Cherokee communities as performance. Taylor writes, "To say something is a
performance amounts to an ontological affirmation, though a thoroughly localized one.
What one society considers a performance rrright be a nonevent elsewhere" (3). This is
where Michel De Certeau's notion of practice can be useful.
De Certeau's theory of practice is connected to my understandings of
performance, particularly the ways in which performance can be uSed to subvert power
structures:
Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are
activities that seem to correspond to the characteristics of tactical ruses
and surprises: clever tricks of the 'weak' within the established order of
the 'strong,' and art of putting one over on the adversary on his own turf,
hunter's tricks, maneuverable, polymorph mobilities, jubilant, poetic, and
warlike discoveries" (Practice 40).

Practices, like performances, are embodied acts. The distinction between what I am

calling performance and what de Certeau calls practice is that de Certeau urges us to look

22

at the "practices of everyday life," whereas performances are that which are marked by
the community are outside of the everyday. Performance may be a practice, though a
practice is not necessarily a performance. Performances are marked by the community as
somehow extra-ordinary.

Dominant Western formulations often interpret performance as entailing a passive
audience that watches performers on the proscenium, or in another space, specifically for
entertainment. Considering histories of the colonizers, "whose imperial eyes passively
look out and possess" (Pratt 7), the use of the word performance can carry troubling
connotations. When I speak of Cherokee performance rhetorics and traditions, it is my
understanding that Cherokee performance is often bound together with community and
the sacred, and does not emerge from the same concepts of performance that currently
permeate dominant culture. "Traditional" Cherokee performances such as the stomp
dance require reciprocal and participatory engagement. One could argue that even within
proscenium theater, Cherokee performance calls for engagement and commitment to
Cherokee communities rather than passive consumption. When I discuss performance, I
am including both "traditional" and "contemporary" dance, oratory, song, storytelling,
and theater.

Notions of performance offer important considerations and questions to rhetoric
and composition. Despite the assertion by contemporary rhetoric and composition of a
split between rhetorics and poetics, within "classical" Greco-Roman rhetoric the canon of
delivery has an obvious connection to performance. The Greek and Latin terms for
delivery, hypocrisis and actio respectively, both refer to acting, embodied gestures, and

vocal tone. While actio is often claimed as a lost canon in the rhetoric and composition,

23

it is certainly alive and well in other fields and disciplines, such as performance studies
and communication studies. Current understandings of delivery in the field are too often
removed from the body. Recuperations of delivery have come to mean the presentation of
non-embodied compositions. While such an approach is valuable, I would like to
challenge the field to also re-embody delivery and pay attention to performance—
embodied delivery—as again central to rhetoric.

Performance is rhetorical: Not only does performance have a historical presence
and precedent in Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions, it is also an important tactic of
surviance for Native peoples. De Certeau writes that a strategy is "the calculation (or
manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will
and power. . .can be isolated. [. . .] ...[I]t is an effort to delimit one's own place in the
world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other" (36). A tactic, on the other hand,
"is an art of the weak" (37). Within the contexts of colonization, Cherokee performances
are often tactics for survivance and continuance. Taylor argues that "performance
transmits memories, makes political claims, and manifests a group's sense of identity"
(xvii). Performance rhetorics can be defined as any discourse that uses embodied
performance as its central modality.6

For the purposes of my current work, I am drawing a clear distinction here
between performance and notions of peformativity discussed by theorists such as Judith
Butler, J .L. Austin, and Jean-Francios Lyotard. Butler argues, "Gender reality is

performative, which means. . .that it is real only to the extent that it is performed" (qtd in

 

6 I include written scripts in this category because, while textual, they are composed in order to be

performed.

24

Schechner 131). Austin writes that the performative ". . .indicates that the issuing of the
utterance is the performing of an action" (qtd in Schechner 111). Lyotard's notion of the
perforrnative is rooted within a systems analysis of the mechanisms of oppression and
power in relationship to knowledge production: A
Technical devices [. . .] follow a principle, and it is the principle of optimal
performance: maximizing output...and minimizing input.... Technology
is therefore a game not pertaining to the true, the just, or the beautiful, etc.,
but to efficiency. . .. [. . .] Power is not only good performativity, but also
effective verification and good verdicts. It legitimates science and the law
on the basis of their efficiency, and legitimates this efficiency on the basis
of science and law. It is self-legitimating, in the same way a system
organized around performance maximization seems to be (Lyotard 44,
47).
These notions ofperformativity are indeed important, and certainly such theories inform
my inquires. What I wish to make clear here, however, are distinctions between my
understanding of performance and the usage of performance-based terms such as
performativity as used in postmodern scholarship.

My research into Cherokee performance rhetorics entails an examination of
historical performance practices in the nineteenth century, how Cherokee communities
are involved with the recuperation and continuance of performances through the archive,
and the ways in which oral history, interviews, and archival work can be utilized in

community-centered performances.7 It is my hope that my work can not only help to

 

7 See Chapters Three and Four.

25

decolonize the field of rhetoric and composition, but also aid in the struggles of
Cherokees and other Native peoples in a process of healing historical trauma,
decolonizing our bodies/minds/homelands, and working for the continuance of our
traditions, memories, and lifeways. Ellen Cushman writes, "Through activism, we've
taken the first, tentative steps toward social change outside of the social confines of the
university classroom. Finally, we not only fill a civic responsibility with activism, but
also inform our teaching and theories with the perspectives of people outside the
university" (22). My theories and methodologies approach Cherokee performance

rhetorics as tools for decolonization and continuance.

How do SGAO" and 583’ (Duyuk'ta and Gadugi) Help Us Situate and Understand
Cherokee Performance Rhetorics?

SCAG" and 583' are central to any understanding of Cherokee performance

rhetorics. In order to understand SGr'AO‘ and 583' as methodological frameworks, it is

necessary to address some of the historical and cultural contexts from which these

concepts arise. Cherokee ceremonial dance is performed to maintain SG’AO“ and ensure

the continuance of the world, and 583’ is both the spirit of cooperation integral to stomp

grounds as well as the traditional town structures that stomp grounds inherit. Employing

SCAG“ and 983' as methodologies helps to recenter rhetorical analysis and scholarship

onto the embodied practices and memories of Cherokee communities.

26

SG'A W/Duyuk'ta

SCAG” is essential to Cherokee values and community. In addition to "truth" and

"justice," SG’AG“ is used to translate the following English words: honest, outright, and

right. It is also connected with the concept of being pious, duyugidv asdawadegi

(Cherokee Nation "Dikaneisdi"). SGAG" is often referred to as "The White Path," likely

because the concept of SG’AO‘" is told through the use of wampum belts, one of which

depicts a white path against a field of purple beads.

It is important to mention wampum belts here, because SGAP'S relationship to

performance is through both stomp dance communities and wampum belts. Wampum
records are themselves connected to performance. Wampum records, in Cherokee and
other Native traditions, contain stories and memories that must be told.8 They require that
their messages are transferred into community and cultural memory through recitations of
their meanings. Angela Hass writes:
Wampum belts signify a surviving intellectual tradition that communicates
living stories of a living culture. The treaties (and other messages woven
into the wampum) are renewed by regularly revisiting and re-"reading"
wampum vis-a-vis community memory and performance (92).
Traditional wampum recitations often involve following particular community protocols

(such as an exchange of gifts), positioning the wampum record in a place that can be seen

 

8 GV ( Wa'do) to Angela Haas and Malea Powell for their ongoing rhetorical work on wampum, and to

Robin McBride Scott for teaching me to weave wampum.

27

by those present, explaining the particular visual mnemonics used in the record, and
reciting the specific message of the record so that it can be remembered by those present.9
In Oklahoma, the Keetoowah Society—a traditionalist organization—keep seven

wampum belts that are used to teach the concept of SGAG" (duyuk'ta) as a core religious

teaching. The story of the belts is performed annually for Cherokee ceremonial
communities in Oklahoma (Jones).'0 While kept by the Keetoowah Society, the belts are
also important to cultural memory and performance for Eastern Cherokees.

In her introduction to Living Stories of the Cherokee, Barbara R. Duncan includes

a story that links wampum, performance, and SGAG'.” This story, told by Lloyd

Sequoyah in 1978, relates the wampum belt's significance and meaning. Sequoyah, who
believed this belt was lost during removal, tell us this story: "Years ago/ ...... an Old man
came to the city of Old Echota./ [. . .] Before he spoke he took a wampum belt/ And

threw it up over two of the crossbeams" (Duncan 26-27). Placing the belt over the beams

 

9 While I speak again of wampum in Chapter Three, 1 have not included a detailed discussion of the
relationships between performance rhetorics and wampum records here. I am extremely interested in the
specific performance protocols around wampum records, particularly within Cherokee history. This is
constitutes its own detailed study, which cannot be fully addressed here. Hass and I, however, plan to
continue our scholarship around Cherokee wampum rhetorics and other Cherokee rhetorical traditions in
the near future.

m The relationship between these wampum belts, historiography, and performance will be discussed in
Chapter Three.

It This story was told by Lloyd Sequoyah in 1978 during the Eastern Band of Cherokee lndians' legal
challenge to the Tennessee Valley Authority's (unfortunately successful) plan to build the Tellico Dam,

which flooded the site of the ancient Cherokee capitol, Echota (Duncan 25).

28

is part of the performance that wampum requires: it situated for the audience to see the
record while paying attention to the recitation. Sequoyah continues,
The white path of beads down the center of the belt
represents Duyukta, the path of harmony, of being in balance.
The black beads on both sides of the white path
represent all the things that you can do
to stray from the path of being in harmony.
The checkerboard of squares at the other end of the belt
represents all of the good things that will come to you
at the end of life's journey
if you stay on the path of harmony (26).
Sequoyah relates that "as [the old man] finished speaking the wampum belt burst into
flame./ The people were horrified,/ thinking this signified the end of them as a people./
But when the flames died down,/ they saw that the belt was still intact..."(26). In this
story, the burning belt—regardless of how it occurred—is part of a performance intended
to teach Cherokees how to survive and continue. Lloyd Sequoyah's story here is likewise
a performance that transmits cultural memory, a specific performance demand of
wampum. Even though the belt is not present, Sequoyah transmits cultural values and
memory through remembering and telling the story woven into the belt.

SG'AO" (duyuk'ta) is connected to Cherokee performance rhetorics through

wampum traditions well as through the stomp dance communities that maintain these

wampum records. My understanding of SGAO“ as part of a Cherokee methodology,

29

then, connects this methodology to Cherokee performance traditions and cultural memory

through the context of stomp dance traditions.

SSY/Gadugi

Like SG'AO" (duyuk'ta), 88y (gadugi) is a concept and practice that serves the

continuation and survival of Cherokee communities. Raymond D. Fogelson and Paul
Kutsche's 1959 essay "Cherokee Economic Cooperatives: The Gadugi" describes the

583’ as "a group of men who join together to form a company, with rules and Officers,

for continued economic and social reciprocity" (87). It is important to point out that,
despite the patriarchal language used in this description, women and children are both

clearly part of the 883' structure. Wilma Dunaway reports, "Men and women alike

formed the gadugi, a labor gang that tended the fields and garden lots of elderly or infum
members of the village" (qtd in Cherokee Nation "The Origin of Gadugi").

F ogelson and Kutsche trace the 583’ to town structures, red (war) and white
(peace) organizations, as well as agricultural and hunting parties.12 Looking to the work

of James Mooney and Cherokee language speakers in the Qualla Boundary, Fogelson and

Kutsche posit that the word gadugi is related to sgatugi (township), Gatutiyi ("town

 

'2 Until the early nineteenth century, Cherokee politics were defined by these opposing——
but complimentary—political modes. Red (war) organizations led the people in times of war, while white
(peace) organizations lead the people in times of peace. Daniel Heath Justice has used these political modes

as a way of analyzing and interpreting Cherokee literature (Justice 2006).

30

building place") and suggest that all of these words have an etymological relationship
with gadu (bread):
Gadu anigi, according to one informant, means "to eat bread." According
to the same informant Gadugi means not Only the cooperative work
organization, but also, "Where all the group meets and eats bread
together." [. . .] Our informant told us, "If 3 Cherokee asks, 'When are we
going to have Gadugi?‘ he means, 'When are we going to have the bread

eating and the working?'" (Fogelson and Kutsche note 2, 88).

683', then, is entwined with concepts of community, continuance, and sustenance. It is

labor that emerges out of community needs and is carried out to sustain survival. Robert
K. Thomas' 1953 thesis, The Origin and Development of the Redbird Smith Movement
points out that in the 1890's, "Although the families lived in individual homesteads, much
of the work was done communally. The Cherokee of this time were a very compact and
united people. Most of the large efforts in their economy were accomplished by
community work" (81).

Since Chad Smith's second inauguration as the Principal Chief of the Cherokee

Nation of Oklahoma in 2003, he has conceived of 883' (gadugi) as part of a larger spirit

of COOperation: "Gadugi means to come together and work. Gadugi is our culture, our
heritage and our tradition. We must work together for the good of the Cherokee people"

(Cherokee Nation, "Chief Stresses Gadugi"). 58y continues to be used as a central

metaphor and motif of Chief Smith’s tenure at the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, where
he connects it to the concept Of "building one fire" (Cherokee Nation "Chief Stresses

Gadugi"). Smith's use of 583’ as a not only an act, but also a Cherokee theory of

31

cooperation, provides a place from which to theorize 583' as part of a methodology that

centralizes collaboration that serves Cherokee communities. '3

Along with the concept of SGAO‘" (duyuk'ta), my research seeks to utilize 583'

as one of its central methodologies. For example, in On the Wings of Wadaduga, which
will be discussed in depth in Chapter Four, research participants maintain legal
authorship of their oral histories in future publications, shifting my role as a researcher to
be more in line with the editor of an anthology, a coordinator in bringing previously
unheard perspectives and experiences to the public. Such an act is way of ensuring
justice, and a way of maintaining power balances between researcher and research
participants. Ensuring that participants have control of their histories as authors also
minimizes possibilities for coercion in order to extrapolate stories, and helps participants
understand they have control over what aspects of their stories are brought to the public
eye through print and/or performance. While breaking silence is an important goal for
my work, it is not my intention to pressure participants to break silences. Silences often
exist for very important reasons of safety, comfort, and/or survival. My analysis here is
informed by the scholarship of Janice Gould who writes, "I would like to believe there

are vast reserves of silences that can never be forced to speak, that remain sacred and safe

 

'3 It cannot go without saying that under Chief Smith's governance that Cherokee Freedmen descendents
have been purged as citizens of the CNO and Cherokee same-sex marriages have been fought against in
tribal court. Smith's use of gadugi in his rhetoric, then, seems increasingly troubling, a totalizing discourse
that attempts to construct a Cherokee nationalist agenda that erases differences and complexities. The use

of 58y (gadugi) as a theory and methodology that includes F reedmen descendents, Cherokee Two-Spirit

people (see Chapter Four), and non-citizen Cherokees subverts this rhetoric.

32

from violation" (qtd. in Brant Writing 20). Approaching my work with Cherokee Two-

Spirit people with SGAO“ (duyuk'ta) as a central methodology helps ensure research that

collaborates and contributes to work happening in Cherokee Two-Spirit communities.

As mentioned earlier, 583' (gadugi) has a specific relationship with stomp dance

communities. Jason Baird Jackson points out that stomp dance grounds are seen "as the
present-day manifestations of town organizations," a basic unit of traditional civic
organizations for Southeastern Native people (30).'4 Thomas discusses the fact that when
the Keetoowah Society was formed in Indian Territory in 1859, that it was "a partial
return to some type of town organization. The Keetoowah Society provided for a little
captain for each community and for committee members chosen from the community"
(63). '5 As the descendents of townships, stomp grounds are sometimes referred to as
sgadugi. Charlotte Heth's 1975 dissertation on the Cherokee stomp dance music and
communities says that the Stokes Smith Ceremonial ground is called ajiskvnvgesdi
skadugi or ajiskv nagehesda skadugi (60), and in an analysis of a stomp dance song she

translates the phrase "heye gedugi" as "this stomp dance" (124). 583' (gadugi), like
SG'AG' (duyuk'ta), has a critical relationship with performance as a means of survival

and cultural continuance and locates performance within cooperative communities. 58"

 

'4 While Jackson is speaking specifically of Creek and Yuchi ceremonial grounds, the same is true for

Cherokee ceremonial grounds.

5 "LrttIe captain," usdr sgargunst, IS a specrfic trtle from the Red Organization that was rernscrrbed as a

title by the Keetoowah Society (Thomas 62).

33

provides an understanding for a methodology that is collaborative, reciprocal, and

surfaces out of community needs.

The Question of Liberatory Methodologies

Coming from the stance that liberation should be a goal of research brings one up
against important considerations and dilemmas. Indeed, too often researchers have
conducted "liberation" research without the understandings of power and privilege
inherent in such a stance to disastrous results. The off—reservation boarding school
system, considered a grand experiment, is one example of the danger of such a stance.
Within the white supremacist and genocidal reality of the nineteenth century, the
boarding schools were considered progressive and liberatory. The oft-quoted slogan of
the schools, "Kill the Indian and Save the Man," was a huge departure from the outright
slaughter of Native people. Further, bringing "civilization" to the "savages" was viewed
as a way to liberate Native people from savagery while simultaneously liberating the US
of its "Indian Problem."

The entire idea that "going into communities" as necessarily helpful to those
communities smacks of a missionary history in which universities are implicated.” Smith
reminds us that, "Indigenous peoples were classified alongside the flora and fauna;
hierarchical typologies of humanity and systems of representation were fuelled by new

discoveries; and cultural maps were charted and territories contested by the major

 

l6 . . .
A particular GV (wa’do) to Colrn Kennedy Donovan for the numerous conversations about the current

colonial phenomenon of activists wanting to "go into communities" in order to bring political

"enlightenment."

34

European powers" (59-60). Knowing that the academy and researchers have been part
and parcel with colonial (and often genocidal) projects, research without critical analysis
and self-reflection can have dire and damaging consequences within communities for
generations to come.

Decolonial methodologies must approach research carefully and collaboratively,
helping to minimize power differences between the researched and the researcher, and
firrther, helping to ensure little to no risk for the people and communities being
researched. Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie assert:

Engaging in more collaborative approaches to research can help reduce the
distance between researchers and participants. Participants can be brought
in as co-researchers. . .. Not only should participants co-author the
questions, they can also work with researchers to negotiate the
interpretations of the data at both the descriptive and interpretive level
(Kirsch and Ritchie 22).

Scholars within rhetoric and composition, as in other fields, have called for
transparency and disclosure of positionality and researcher motivations. Royster, for
instance, has called for "[a]n acknowledgment of passionate attachments... " (Kirsch et al
228, italics in original). She contends that such acknowledgment

reminds us that knowledge has sites and sources and that we are better
informed about the nature of a given knowledge base when we take into
account its sites, material contexts and points of origin. My point here is

that knowledge is produced by someone and that its producers are not

35

formless and invisible. They are embodied and in effect have passionate
attachments by means of their embodiment (Kirsch et al 228).
My own "passionate attachments" are rooted in my identity as a Cherokee Two-
Spirit activist and performer that believes deeply in the necessity of social change,
resistance, healing historical trauma, and cultural continuance. Too often the maneuvers
of researchers from marginalized communities that try to decentralize the authority of the
privileged in the academy, such as calls for self-reflexivity and examination of
positionality, are misappropriated by the privileged to recentralize discourse around
communities in power. "Rights do not flow from hardship," Lyotard states, "but from the
fact that the alleviation of hardship improves the system's performance. [. . .] In this
sense, the system seems to be a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it,
dehumanizing it in order to rehumanize it at a different level of normative capacity" (63).
In other words, and in the context of postmodern scholarship, calls for methodologies that
could minimize potentials for exploitation and oppression are oftentaken up by the
academy only to restabilize itself in the face of challenge and continue to perpetuate—
and mask—oppression. As Cushman has pointed out:
[T]he incessant focus on the personal as political has led scholars to ask
invasive and troublesome questions about a researcher's background and
identity, resulting in flat, or worse, narcissistic disclosures about the
researcher's positionality. [. . .] The fixion of the self. . .presents an easy
story that scholars want to hear about the researcher. Yet it tells precious
little about the social relations that actually positioned researchers and

participants" (Brandt et al 44-45).

36

And, it is those social relations that the original demands of radical postmodernism were
hoping to make transparent.

While I am particularly interested in engaging the ways Cherokee communities
use performance tactically in struggles against colonization and for sovereignty and
continuance, it is important to simultaneously acknowledge the ways performance has
been used by some Cherokees as a strategy of reinforcing colonial power relationships.
In her history of the Cherokee Female Women's Seminary, Devon A. Mihesuah reminds
us, ". . .darker-skinned students participated in the seminary's productions in blackface. . ..
Although blacks were given property and citizenship within the Cherokee
Nation...separation of the Cherokee and black races remained in effect, as did the
separation of whites and blacks in other parts of the country" (83). In this instance
performance was used as a strategy to construct racial differences and dichotomies in the
Cherokee Nation, even while "blacks" and "Cherokees" often shared—and share—both
Cherokee and African ancestors in common, and Cherokee Freedmen and their
descendents were—and are—often Cherokee-African mixedbloods. Utilizing tactics and
strategies helps bring to the surface the ways complex power relationships between the
governmental body of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the governmental body of the
US, and Cherokee communities are manifested through performance. For example, and

as discussed in Chapter Four, participants in On the Wings of Wadaduga are critical of

37

the strategies of Cherokee politics that attempt to erase the presence of Two-Spirit people
in Cherokee histories.17
Including an analysis of tactics and strategies in my methodological approach
also enables me to articulate power differences that may exist between myself and the
Cherokee communities my inquiry is taking place with. It is important to acknowledge
that while the work I am doing has a decolonial focus, and that perhaps such a move is a
tactic within a colonial institution such as the university, as a researcher involved with a
colonial institution, my research relationship is not necessarily one made up entirely of
tactics. Researchers must acknowledge that as people who are a part of the academy that

our work is, in part, is a strategy that participates in the demands of a colonial institution.

SG'AG" (duyuk'ta) and 585' (gadugi) demand a balancing of power relationships

through collaborative, cooperative scholarship that builds a reciprocal relationship

between researcher and research participant.

Rhetorics and Historiography

Historiography Offers methodologies that germinate important questions and
challenges to Cherokee performance rhetorics and help to create the central ribs of my
research. Chapter Three looks to Cherokee revitalization movements as a way of
informing a decolonial historiographic practice, and Chapter Four looks to both the

archive and the repertoire to revise historical memory. Hayden White reminds us that

 

'7 While not addressed in Chapter Four, but evident in the interviews included in the appendices,
participants in this project are also critical of the CNO's strategy of using enrollment as the defining factor

of Cherokee identity.

38

historiography has disciplinary roots within rhetoric: "Throughout the eighteenth century
historical studies had no discipline proper to call itself alone. [. . .] Historical writing, in
fact, was regarded as a branch of the art of rhetoric" (64). I see historiography as a
rhetorical tactic in decolonial struggles within and outside of rhetoric and composition.

Decolonial methodologies informed by SCAG" and 533’ underpin my theory

and practice of historiography. Historiography, if it is to be meaningful for Native
communities, cannot take place in the archive alone, and my work includes
historiography in both the archive and the repertoire. Julie Cruikshank asserts that "local
voices from North American indigenous communities provide more than grist for
conventional disciplinary paradigms and have the power to contribute to our
understanding of historiography" (Shoemaker 6).

Historiography also provides a means to engage in activist scholarship within
traditional academic discourse. Thomas P. Miller and Melody Bowdon assert that
archival research can be used "to achieve the civic potential that. opens up as rhetoric
expands its purview beyond the teaching of academic discourse" (Miller and Bowdon
594). 'Within rhetoric and composition, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Malea Powell both
provide methodological models to engage archival research as part of rhetorical, civic
engagement. Royster's formation of an afrafeminist ideology as a guiding methodology
in her historiography offers a model to other social justice, decolonial based
methodologies:

We are free to do our own intellectual business, and at the same time we
are also obligated to have that work respond to sociopolitical imperatives

that encumber the community itself. We. . .are accountable ultimately to

39

the merging of the interests of mind, body, and soul as part and parcel of
the wholeness of the knowledge-making enterprise, which includes
accounting for our own social obligations as members of the group. We
speak and interpret with the community, not just for the community, or
about the community (Kirsch et al 224).
While an afi'afeminist ideology cannot be removed from the cultural and gendered
contexts for which it was intended, Royster does offer a responsible methodology that
urges collaboration, accountability, and attention to "mind, body, and soul" too often split
from one another in academia.
Powell's work offers a similar model for collaborative and accountable

methodologies within historiography. She argues, successful' texts are collaborative
and are meant for the community, not for the self; and that through continued textual
production the community (and the knowledge of its members) survives and gives thanks
for its survival" ("River" 44). Historiography as textual production must aid in what
Gerald Vizenor and Powell have termed survivance, survival + resistance. (Vizenor
1999; Powell 2002, 2004). My engagement with Cherokee performance rhetorics, then,
has goals of transmitting community-based knowledge and history through performance
and textual production and examining relationships between the archive and the
repertoire that can be useful for Cherokee cultural engagement and movements.

Historiography is not without its methodological dilemmas. Taylor argues that the
archive was created in an attempt to erase Indigenous cultural memories:

...[T]here is a politics. . .which in the Americas dates back to the

Conquest, of thinking of embodied knowledge as that which disappears

40

because it cannot be contained or recuperated through the archive.
Nonetheless, multiple forms of embodied acts are always present,
reconstituting themselves—transmitting communal memories, histories,
and values from one group/generation to the next (Taylor 193).

Looking to the repertoire in addition to the archive helps to indigenize and
decolonize historiography. LeAnne How's concept of tribalography, for instance, helps
articulate the importance of embodied, Indigenous knowledges to historiography. In "The
Story of America: A Tribalography," Howe roots tribalography within Indigenous
stories, and says it "comes from the Native propensity for bringing things together, for
making consensus, and for symbiotically connecting one thing to another" (Shoemaker
42). Howe's concept of tribalography, while best known in the context of Nancy
Shoemaker's collection Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American
Studies, also has an explicit connection to performance. In an introduction to her play
Indian Radio Days (co-written with Roxy Gordon), Howe writes, "American Indian
playwrights and writers tend to create stories from the experiences of our people. In turn,
our work belongs to the ancestors, and the next seven generations of American Indians. I
call this process 'Tribalography' " (D'Aponte 104). Performance, both its historical
implications and its creation and practice, are central to an understanding of
tribalography. Tribalography can be understood as a way to place performance and story
into Indigenous methodological approaches to historiography that emerge from, and are

given back to, communities.

41

SGAO‘" Dtl' SSY/ Duyuk'ta and Gadugi: Cherokee Responsibility Maps

George Noblit points out that "(p)eople of color have had to live postrnodemity
for some time, but only recently has it come to privileged white intellectuals" (deMarrais
& Lapan 193). I would argue that this is not only because as communities of color
oppression has made us acutely aware of the importance of understanding the role of
oppression and power in society, but also because our traditional understandings of the
world are Often relative and in motion, unlike dominant European and EuroAmerican
intellectual traditions which often understand the world as fixed, finite, and quantifiable.

One of the underlying assumptions of current academic discourse is that concepts
of responsibility, social justice, and critical scholarship are "postmodern." And while
within the histories of academia this is certainly true, within many Indigenous
communities, the calls of postmodernism are rooted deep within our cultural experiences.
This is not to say that I am rejecting the research and scholarly demands of

postmodernism, quite the opposite is true. I am attempting to articulate SG'AG"

(duyuk'ta) and 583’ (gadugi) as components of a radical, Cherokee-centered, bricolage

that informs my engagement with narrative inquiry, historiography, performance, cultural
rhetorics, and other research methods and methodologies.

Like the methodologies and methods of researchers mentioned earlier such as

Powell, Smith, and Royster, incorporating SSY into my methodologies necessitates

collaboration and a focus on the well-being of the community. 583' is a collaborative act,

which not only means that each individual is part of a larger whole for which they are

laboring, but also that each member of the community is responsible and accountable to

42

that community. As researchers engaged with work inside our communities, we are
responsible not only for collaboration that disrupts power imbalances, our work must

always be responsible to the community. We must approach our work with SGAG'

(duyuk’ta) in order to walk a sometimes tricky line betWeen researcher and community

member. As Beverly Moss discusses:
...tensions emanated from my dual roles as community participant and
researcher. [. . .] I forgot is was Okay to acknowledge my role as a
community participant. In fact, it was necessary to acknowledge that role.
Yet [. . .] from time to time, I was trapped by that ancient model of
research that dictated that any reference to one's self in a study [. . .] be
done in an impersonal, dispassionate, third person way—the researcher.
That model tries to erase the personal, affective experiences of the
researchers (Moss 16).

I would further argue that the model Moss speaks of also. tries to erase the
community as a whole by disconnecting relationships and individualizing the researcher.
It is important for those of use who are "insiders" doing work that we are insiders, and
that acknowledging and speaking about that insider status is part Of articulating our

locations. We are intricately and undeniably connected to our communities. 583'

requires we understand ourselves as part of those communities, not as distant and

objective. 683' requires our work be part of, and for, our communities.
SG'AO‘" (duyuk'ta) is likewise a part of responsible research and action in the

world. While one translation of SGAO" is "truth," I do not wish to confuse SGAG“ with

43

the dominant European positivist idea of "Truth." SC AG" is a way of being and behaving

in the world that strives for honesty, and in this way resonates with postmodern concerns
for transparency, self reflexivity, critical analysis, and positionality. Postmodern
critiques of modernist, positivist movements have asserted that without acknowledging
one's locations and worldviews, and by asserting that there is a "Truth" to be found, that
researchers mask their own biases and hide multivalent realities and understanding of the
world. Denzin and Lincoln note, "Many members of the critical theory, constructivist,
poststructural, and postmodern schools of thought reject positivist and postpositivist
criteria [. . .]. They see these [. . .] as irrelevant to their work and contend that such criteria

reproduce only a certain kind of science [. . .] that silences too many voices" (Denzin and

Lincoln 15). SCAG" as a methodological component, then, seeks honesty in
understanding that the world contains multiple stories and realities. SCAG" insists on

responsible behavior in the world and strives for goodness. In this way it reflects calls
for critical work that has social justice and transformation as its goals.

Looking at the methodological work of other scholars, and by bringing Cherokee
worldviews into the discussion, I am weaving a basket to carry Cherokee-centered
research and scholarship. Naming of locations, understanding the complexities of identity
and power, creating a theory and practice in which power is critiqued and power

differences minimized, and engaging in activist-minded work is vital to my own values as

a scholar. Incorporating SCAG" and 983’ into my methodological approach is part of

decolonization: it is radical stance against dominant European treatments of Indigenous

people in mainstream scholarship. SCAG" and 583', like postmodernism, insist on the

44

naming of positionality in order create responsible, ethical work and critically engage
with systems of power.

SCAG" and 683’ as methodologies in both the archive and the repertoire

demand respectful behavior with the communities, ancestors, and bodies that are
involved with inquiry. Royster writes, "The challengeis to teach, to engage in research,
to write, to speak with Others with the determination to operate not only with
professional and personal integrity, but also with the specific knowledge that
communities and their ancestors are watching" (33). My research goals in Cherokee
communities, then, are not only to engage oral and archival performance histories, but
also to build relationships that can aid in social transformation and decolonization.
Historiography, archival and embodied, is a process that helps Native communities

recuperate and continue cultural memory, tactics of resistance, and embodied knowledge.

SSY (Gadugi) and Decolonial Skillshare

A concept and practice that I'm calling decolonial skillshare— rooted in activism,
popular education, and contemporary Native artistic practice— is embedded in a theory

and methodology that employs 583'. Because of the reciprocal nature of SSY,

decolonial skillshare requires that information gathered from research with Indigenous
communities should then be shared with those communities. The purpose of a decolonial
skillshare is not only to disseminate scholarly or theoretical work, but also to learn and

share specific embodied practices.

With its focus on embodiment, a decolonial skillshare as a facet of a 583'

methodology disrupts the rift between archive and repertoire. It asserts that it is not only

45

written history that can be revised through the archives, but also that the repertoire can

also be revised through historiography. SSY methodology is not only collaborative in its

process, it is also employs collaborative means for the presentation of research findings.
As I will discuss in Chapter Four, the design for an ensemble performance based on oral

histories, interviews, and archival work focused on Cherokee Two-Spirit people is

reflective of a 583' methodology. It is important that any future performance is

ensemble-based, not a solo performance, and that the performance itself is created
through a collaborative process that is intentionally decolonial.

The concept of a decolonial skillshare comes from my experiences as a grassroots
activist in primarily Queer and Trans communities of color on the West Coast. For the
past ten years, my activist work has focused on popular education and arts that can work
to heal historical trauma and build communities of responsibility and resistance. In order
to provide a context for a decolonial skillshare, I want to briefly talk about the
experiences that gave rise to the idea.

"Skillshares," while undoubtedly having countless origins, is a concept that I
locate within punk and anarchist communities seeking to disrupt authoritative and
capitalist powers though sharing specific "do-it—yourself" skills that aid in building
cooperative, egalitarian economic and social structures. Building egalitarian social
structures while disrupting hegemonic powers are values that I share with punk and
anarchist communities. However, within the United States and Canada, punk and
anarchist activism tends to be dominated by white people (often men) from middle class
backgrounds who, rather than disrupt hegemonic powers, actually reinforce them through

oppressive organizing. The skillshares that I'm familiar with often have a very narrow

46

analysis of oppression and power that tends to ignore colonization, racism, sexism,
ableism, and queer/transphobia. The skills shared at such workshops tend to follow pat
themes of interest to particular activist communities, such as bicycle repair. While I have
no problem with the foci of these workshops—learning to repair a bicycle is certainly an
important skill for anyone who rides them—I worry that skillshares tend to ignore the
skills that Native people and other people of color see as necessary to the continuance of
our communities. The concept of a decolonial skillshare deliberately subverts and
critiques claims to radicalism that—in actuality—reinforce white colonial powers.

The idea for a "decolonial skillshare" comes directly from my own frustrating,
disheartening experience with a white-dominated Trans community on Vancouver Island,
BC. Such an experience is one familiar to many activists of color, one that reflects larger
patterns of racism and colonialism throughout the US and Canada. In February 2004, a
call for workshops and artists was distributed for an event on Vancouver Island called
"The TransMission Festival." I responded to the call, and my ideas to conduct a
workshop and read poetry at the event were initially received enthusiastically. When I
proposed a workshop specifically for Indigenous Two-Spirit and Trans people, however,
the organizers began back-peddling on their initial enthusiasm. I was told by one of the
festival organizers, ". . .I'm wondering if we would have enough First Nations people
attending for your workshop to take off—how many people would you like to see to
make it a success in your rrrind" (Donovan 4)? I responded to this question with an open
letter of concern and critique about the place of anti-racist organizing at the TransMission
Festival. "What does it mean," I asked, "that an event for Trans folks is expecting there

to be a small turn out of First Nations folks or other folks of color? What does it mean to

47

be creating a movement of non-Native / non-folk of color Trans movement" (Donovan
5)?

The response from the organizers of the conference was—to say the least—
defensive, and the focus of the festival began to shift in response. An organizer
responded to my concerns by writing,

One of the things that we might be shifting towards slightly is focusing the
workshops on "hands on" or "do-it-yourself" kind of things, and especially
around art and creativity, as that was one of the key things about the
festival. Most people were pretty clear that we want a "festival"
atmosphere rather than a "workshop" one (Donovan 7).
Two-Spirit Mi'kmaw artist and activist Louis Esme Cruz likewise wrote an open letter to
the organizers of the TransMission Festival about concerns over racism taking place in
regards to my request to have an Indigenous-focused workshop. Cruz was told, "The
main reason why I had raised concerns with Qwo-Li about hir workshop proposal was
because the idea itself was excellent, but it didn't fit within the format of the festival
(which is 'hands on', skills-based, and celebratory)" (Donovan 9).

Now deeply upset by the shifting terms of the festival's goals, I wrote yet another
open letter to the organizers that included the seeds of the idea of a decolonial skillshare:
"If your intent for workshops was a skills-share, as is now reflected on your website, it
should have been made clear in your initial call. (And, on that note, I would argue that
there are few skills more important to First Nations people and other people of color than
to find ways to survive the continuing destruction of our peoples and the continuing

occupations of our homelands)" (Donovan 12). Needless to say, the festival did not

48

include my workshop, or any other workshops or events with a focus on colonization or
race. While the challenges to the TransMission Festival continued after these dialogues,
what is most important for my purposes here is to contextualize my personal and
community experiences with "skillshares" and ~outlineone of the genealogies of a
"decolonial skillshare."

The other genealogy for a "decolonial skillshare" comes from craft circles that
take place in the Native communities. As in many other communities, craft circles in
Native communities are places where people can come together and talk while working
on specific art projects. My experiences in Native craft circles have been a place to learn
specific Indigenous arts. Edge beading, weaving Cherokee doublewoven baskets, and
weaving wampum are all skills that I learned in craft circle settings. And, through craft
circles, I have been able to pass on these skills to other Native people.

The skillshare and the craft circle came together for me in a context of decolonial
activism after being invited to submit a workshop proposal to Homo-a-Gogo, a biannual
Queer Music and Arts festival. Informed by my PhD coursework, the rhetorical work on
memory being done by Haas, Villanueva, and Powell, and my own poetic and activist
work on memory and historical trauma, I designed a workshop entitled Memory as
Resistance: A Decolonial Skillshare:

Colonization and genocide in the Americas and elsewhere depends on the
destruction of cultural memory. Knowledges and lifeways of people of
color/mixed-race people are routinely appropriated, erased, or

interrupted by systems of colonization and white supremacy. How can

49

and do we relearn and/or continue our artistic (visual, material,
performative, etc) traditions as Queer and Trans folks of color/mixed-race
people? How do we restore, continue, and transform the embodied
practices that create cultural memory? How can engagement with our
traditional/community-specific arts aid in healing historical trauma? How
can we work to pass cultural memory on to others? Using interactive
theater, traditional, and contemporary arts, this workshop will examine our
cultural memories and practices as Queer/Trans people of color/mixed-
race/non-white people (Homo A Gogo).
A decolonial skillshare, as I will speak more to in Chapters Four and Five, creates
spaces for Native people to both learn and teach specific embodied practices as a specific

tactic in processes of decolonization. I see decolonial skillshare as a practice of 885' as

a methodology, a process of collaborative labor that answers community needs. Further,

decolonial skillshare has a focus on both activist and pedagogical concerns of Native
people. Like other skillshares, it has a focus on teaching and disseminating specific
embodied practices. And like Native craft circles, the decolonial skillshare focuses on
embodied practices that continue cultural memories. Decolonial skillshares have
intentional and specific goals to heal historical trauma, resist colonization, and continue
our traditions.

Decolonial skillshares creates a precedent within SSY not only to work

collaboratively, but also to ensure that the information and knowledge-making generated
though scholarship does not remain within the academy or only disseminated through

academic discourse. It calls for knowledge to not only be built reciprocally, but to also

50

be shared with Indigenous communities. Decolonial skillshares have a specific focus on
practice. The research that emerges from our work should help generate and continue
embodied practices that aid in larger struggles for decolonization. As discussed in
Chapter Four, this idea is the basis for using performance and rehearsal space as a means

to share research, theory, and practice. Decolonial skillshare as a practice of 583’ helps

to ensure that our research is accountable and usefirl to Indigenous communities both

inside and outside of academia.

Doubleweaving SCAG" (Duyuk'ta) and 583' (Gadugi): The Construction of a Third

Space

In The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Emma Pérez
writes, "I believe that the time lag between the colonial and the postcolonial can be
conceptualized as the decolonial imaginary" (6). She theorizes the decolonial as "a
rupturing space, the alternative to that which is written history" and "that interstitial space
where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated" (6). She continues to
propose that the decolonial imaginary is a location in which a third space surfaces: "If
the colonial imaginary hides something, then the decolonial imaginary teetering in a third
space recognizes what is left out" (55). Pe'rez' analysis of a third space between the
colonial and the postcolonial—the space Indigenous people in North America currently
survive in—provides a theory that more fully develops my own methodologies. By
looking at the use doubleweave in Cherokee rhetorical traditions, we can theorize a third

space that materializes through the process of doubling SCAG" (duyuk'ta) and 583'

(gadugi).

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Doublweave is a form of weaving in Cherokee (and other Native Southeastern)
traditions that has its origins in river cane weaving. Sarah H. Hill writes: "One of the
oldest and most difficult traditions in basketry is a technique called doubleweave. A
doubleweave basket is actually two complete baskets, one woven inside the other, with a
common rim" (Hill 44). Cherokee rhetorics, regardless of their genre, often centralize

doubling in their construction. Doublewoven baskets and Cherokee performance—for

instance—both utilize doubling to reflect Cherokee attention to SCAG" (duyuk'ta).

Doublewoven baskets can have two independent designs as a result of the weave, one on
the outside and one on the inside. Doubling is likewise employed as a rhetorical strategy
outside of basketry, in which two seemingly disparate rhetorical approaches exist
concurrently. Like many other Native traditions from the eastern part of what is being
called the United States, call and response is a central feature of our performance
discourse. Call and response can also be seen as a doubling strategy, in which the
individual and the collective are woven together through song, dance, and ceremony.

I draw the concept of doubleweave as a feature of Cherokee rhetorics through
Marilou Awiakta's book Selu: Seeking the Com-Mother's Wisdom, which is deliberately
constructed after doublewoven baskets. She explains, "As I worked with the poems,
essays and stories, I saw they shared a common'base. . .. From there they wove around
four themes, gradually assuming a double-sided pattern—one outer, one inner—distinct,
yet interconnected in a whole" (Awiakta 34). Cherokee scholar and creative writer Daniel
Heath Justice's utilizes doubleweave as an interpretive devise in his essay, "Beloved
Woman Returns: The Doubleweaving of Homeland and Identity in the Poetry of Marilou

Awiakta," focusing on the balance created between homeland and identity in her work.

52

He writes, "The Cherokee philosophy of balance. . .is the basic foundation upon which
Awiakta crafts her work. Intimately connect with the concept of balance is that of
respect—one cannot exist without the other" (Rader and Gould 74).

Doubleweave can also be seen as a rhetorical feature of Justice's scholarship
(2006) as well as his fantasy fiction series, The Way of Thom and Thunder. As mentioned
earlier, Justice looks to red and white town structures to build a Cherokee methodology
that interprets literature. Daniel calls these a red "Chickamauga consciousness" and a
white "Beloved Path" reading of Cherokee literature (30). This approach doubleweaves
these modes: "Neither exists independently; there is a necessary tension that brings the
war and peace perspectives together into constant movement. . .. This interdependence
and relationship provides an interpretive guidepost to much of the Cherokee literary
tradition" (30). Similarly, The Way of T horn and Thunder uses the structure of fantasy
fiction as a way to critique colonialism, racism, queer/transphobia, and misogyny. On the
outside of the series is the fantasy genre apparatus, while on the inside is woven a story
that deals with historical and contemporary Indigenous politics (2005, 2006, 2007).

Cherokees have long been known as people who are adaptable to interferences on
our lifeways by incorporating them as part of our culture. Jack F. and Anna G. Kilpatrick
note our "amazing ability. . .to maintain an equilibrium between two opposing worlds of
thought. [. . .] Behind the television set in the cabin of his fellow tribesman lurk the
Little People, and the Bible and Thunder share Cherokee reverence" (Friends xv). Not
only has this occurred out of a necessity to maintain our culture during the colonial
period (which has yet to end), but also because the idea of doubling is deeply rooted in

Cherokee rhetorical traditions.

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Using basket weaving as a metaphor enables me to articulate a methodological

approach that draws on and intersects numerous dissent lines in order to weave together

SCAG" and 583'. Like doublewoven baskets, in which a third space materializes

between the basket walls, the weaving together of SCAG" and 983' within a context of

decolonization and the decolonial imaginary, creates a third space. The space created
through this doubleweaving contains the stories that colonial culture has ignored or that
have been intentionally and tactically hidden by Indigenous people as an act of survival.
In the case of my research, it is in this third space of the decolonial imaginary that Two-
Spirit histories, stories, and performances surface. Perez writes, "If the colonial imaginary
hides something, then the decolonial imaginary teetering in a third space recognizes what
is left out" (55).

Pérez' historiographic work locates the lives of Chicanas within a third space,
which she articulates through the concept of third space feminism. Similarly, my
historiographic work on nineteenth century Cherokee theater (Chapter Three) locates
itself in a third space in which histories, practices, and lives marginalized by colonial

cultures are listened to. The third space created in the doubleweaving of SCAG" and

653' is a location in which those practices and stories that colonialism has actively

sought to suppress, discredit, and destroy are able to come to the center of discourse.
Through this doubleweaving of methodological approaches, a theory and practice

surfaces that can carry the complexities of decolonial engagement within community

contexts. Doubleweaving SCAG" and SS)’ privileges the voices and stories that

54

colonial projects have attempted to destroy but, hidden in a third space forgotten about
by colonial cultures, survive.

Understanding SCAG" and 583' as Cherokee-centered methodologies helps us

create both theories and practices that are uniquely suited for decolonial activism and

scholarship within Native—and in this case specifically Cherokee—contexts. SCAG"
and SSY, when conceptualized as intertwined walls of a doublewoven basket, enable us

to see the numerous splints—~including Native politics, postmodern scholarship, and

grassroots activism— from which these methodologies are woven. Doubleweaving helps

us conceive of a third space that emerges through the weaving together of SCAG" and
583' in which forgotten and/or intentionally hidden stories can be told.

SCAG" (duyuk'ta) and 583' (gadugi) are methodologies that lend themselves to

Cherokee performance rhetorics because of these concepts' relationship to Cherokee
performance through stomp dance communities. They provide a means to indigenize our
scholarship and engage in decolonial work that is responsible to dismantling power
imbalances and engaging in cooperative scholarly work. Further, they enable scholarship
that contributes to decolonial practices through decolonial skillshares. By doubleweaving

SCAG" and 583' within a context of the decolonial imaginary, we can theorize a third

space from which marginalized stories can emerge. These methodologies are integral to
responsible, reciprocal, and balanced scholarship within Cherokee communities that

engages radical, decolonial activism.

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CHAPTER TWO

ESL, L51), [.5]: Dd'LéDT/DAKSI, DAKSI, DAKSI ALEGWUI/COME ON ALL YOU

SHELL SHAKERS: CHEROKEE PERFORMANCE RHETORICS,

DECOLONIZATION, AND HEALING HISTORICAL TRAUMA

Introduction
As mentioned in the previous chapter, call and response is a central rhetorical

tactic in Cherokee traditions, woven into our sense of community and history. Like our

doublewoven baskets, call and response is a representation of SCAG" (duyuk'ta).

Traditional Cherokee cosmology conceives the world as an island floating on water,

attached to a sky vault by woven cords at the four cardinal directions. When the cords

break, the world will sink back into the water. Maintaining SCAG" (duyuk’ta) is

necessary in order to for the world to stay afloat.

Traditional practices help maintain SC AG"(duyuk'ta). ' Duncan writes that "(t)he

Cherokee believe that stories, along with ceremonies, arts and crafts, and other traditions,
help the individual and the culture to 'stay in balance.’ The Cherokee attribute their
survival as a people. . .to their closeness to the land and their adherence to Duyukta" (25).
Performances—whether through dance, song, storytelling, theater or other genres—are

central practices to maintain SCAG" (duyuk'ta). Colonial projects have often sought to

suppress and destroy Cherokees through attacking our performance traditions, throwing

Cherokee communities out of balance. The practice of our performance traditions, then,

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is not only a means to maintain SCAG" (duyuk'ta), but also and act of resistance to

colonization that heals and restores SCAG" (duyuk'ta).

Performance asserts the survival of Cherokee communities and ensures our
continuance. It is a tool for healing from intergenerational grief and trauma brought
about by colonization. This chapter will articulate a theory and history of Cherokee
performance rhetorics through examining performance as central to Cherokee rhetorics,

movements of Indigenous resistance, and the healing of historical trauma In order to

have a deeper understanding of Cherokee performance and its relationship with SCAG",
I would like to contextualize it within the context of the Cherokee story of O'cDO’fiO

(va'unuw').

Call And Response: Cherokee Performance Rhetorics

O'aDO'QO/va’unuWVStoneclad: The Origins of Cherokee Performance

Cherokee oral literature, what Ngugi Wa Thiong'o calls "orature," (94) says that
the origin of songs for prayers, medicine, and dances come from a large, human-eating

being called O'cDO’fiO (va'unuw', "Stoneclad"). Because of his stone skin, killing him

was nearly impossible.‘8 The story of O'cDO’fiO (va'unuw') is central not only to

understanding the cultural contexts of Cherokee performance rhetorics, but is also a clear

example of SCAG" (duyuk'ta) as integral to Cherokee worldviews.

 

'8 O'IDO" q 0 (va’unuw') is also often translated as "Stone Coat" and "the Stone Man" and rendered in

several ways in English alphabetics. My use of "Stoneclad" is based on the Kilpatricks' translation in

Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokees (59).

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In the version of this story told by Eastern Cherokee Will West Long, O'cDO’fiO

(va'unuw') was a shapeshifter who could transform himself into a human in order to live

among people and eat their livers. O’cDO’QG (va’unuw') transformed himself into the

likeness of an orphaned boy, and was then taken in by a man and his family. Soon
afterwards, the man's children were found dead, their livers removed. After realizing that
the orphaned boy was responsible for the murders, the man consulted elders and the tribal

council and a plan was devised to kill the monster by bringing seven women

menstruating during the full moon to wait along a path for O'cDO'fiG. The power of the
seven women caused O'IDO'QO to become sick, immobilized, and he began dying.
O'cDO'fiG then commanded the people who had gathered to watch his death and burn his

body. West Long tells us that
When they lighted the fire Stone Coat began talking to them, telling them
that while he was burning. . .there would issue forth a series of songs.
These, he told them, were his offering to the people to aid them in all
branches of life. As the songs came forth, he commanded, they were to
learn them and teach them to their children, to be used forever by the
Cherokee. [. . .] He said, "You kill me, so I leave disease in the world
behind me. But my songs will cure that." He also told them that besides
leaving with them the magic songs for dances in fulfillment of their social
life, and song formulas, he would leave them a quantity of powerful
medicines in the form of pieces of stone forming his stone coat... (Speck

& Broom 15).

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This story not only reflects the origin of Cherokee songs and formulas, it

illustrates SCAG" (duyuk'ta) as a deeply Cherokee value woven into the cosmology of
Cherokee performance. O'cDO'flO (va'unuw') is a monster, murderer, and cannibal
who is a danger to Cherokee people. At the same time, O'cOO’fiO is also a powerful

spirit who gifts Cherokees with songs to help them in all aspects of their lives. While

O'cDO‘fiO punishes Cherokees with disease, he also leaves his songs and medicines as a

means of curing. This story is both a call and a command that the songs be learned,
performed, and passed on to all Cherokees. Through this story, we can begin to see the

ways in which Cherokee performance rhetorics are practices that maintain SCAG"

(duyuk'ta) in Cherokee communities and the world.

5.76 0’9 WaOJ’oOI/Gatiyo Unalskisdi/Stomp Ground: "Traditional " Cherokee

Performances

Pre-invasion Cherokee communities and governments were structured as semi-
autonomous townships linked together through a shared clan system, language, history,
culture, and cosmology. Because townships were independent entities often separated by
great distances, Cherokee community practices have never been unified. The Cherokee
Nation of Oklahoma's website is careful to note when including "traditional"
information that "Cultural information may vary from clan to clan, location to location,
family to family, and from differing opinions and experiences. Information provided

here is not 'etched in stone'" ("Literature").

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Cherokees don't always agree on what is "traditional" and what is not. Further,
while some activities such as the stomp dances in Oklahoma are considered core to
"traditional" culture, they are also fairly recent manifestations of Cherokee performance
traditions. Cherokee Baptist churches are, for many Cherokees in Oklahoma, a core of
"traditional" culture. The Eastern Band's performance traditions, while sharing core
rhetorical features with those of Oklahoma Cherokees, are in many ways distinct from
those practiced in Oklahoma. And, this is to say nothing of the numerous Cherokee
people and communities in diaspora outside of our traditional homelands and our post-
removal landbases west of the Mississippi.

The designation of particular performances as "traditional," then, is problematic.
However, the term "traditional" is also commonly used within Cherokee and other
Native communities to designate particular practices defined by local communities as
being core to the maintenance of specific cultural identities, practices, memories, and
futures. While it is a term that is far from static, certainly complex and often
contradictory, my usage is meant to follow community precedents by speaking of
"traditional" performances and practices as those that are designated by Cherokee
communities as such.

As discussed earlier, responsorial community performance—call and response—

is a central manifestation of SCAG". This rhetorical feature and core value is evident
through performance at the 6115 O’OWII‘DYIIDI (gatiyo unalskisdi, stomp grounds), the

central site of Cherokee non-Christian religion and performance in Oklahoma.'9 I will

 

l9 . . . . . . .
Because of an often unbalanced and problematic relatronshrp academic research and wntrng has wrth

Native communities, particularly their religious ceremonies, I want to be clear that my analysis here is

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focus on the Silfi O’OWo’ilyIfdl (gatiyo unalskisdi) here in order to articulate the

rhetorical features and functions of traditional Cherokee performance.

Charlotte Heth's work on Cherokee stomp dance music helps us identify
numerous instances of call and response in Cherokee performance contexts. Call and
response is not only a central rhetorical feature of Cherokee song and dance, it is a

central feature of Cherokee community practice, a reflection of SCAG" (duyuk'ta).

Call and response is seen not only through responsorial singing, but also through the
calls of stomp dance leaders for community participation in both the dance and in
Cherokee communities. Heth reports that as the dance is getting ready to begin "the
chief firekeeper gives a call for the people to assemble" and after they have gathered, the
chief delivers a speech that is a call for participation in Cherokee communities:20
The chief's speech is a kind of sermon adrnonishing the people to follow
the old Ketoowah ways. He urges them to follow God's way, to sing and

dance all night, raising the song up to heaven with the smoke. He prays to

God to teach them and the children the way to sing. He cautions people to

 

based on research already completed and/or published, and I believe respectfully so, concerning stomp
ground communities and other Cherokee performances. Central to my discussion here are 'lhomas' The
Origin and Development of the Redbird Smith Movement Heth's The Stomp Dance Music of the Oklahoma
Cherokee. Certainly much has changed in stomp dance communities since their fieldwork, though the core
rhetorics of Cherokee performances have remained constant. I want to make clear, however, that my
discussion is based in previous research rather than my personal experiences or relationships with stomp

dance communities.

20 . . . . . .
Frrekeepers are responsrble for marntarnrng the sacred fire, which burns at the center of the stomp

ground.

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be good and peaceful, and to cause no trouble in that ground. He asks

them to be honest and to join in the ceremony (77).”
After taking up a collection and attending to business, "the chief turns the meeting over to
the firekeepers who call for the dancing and singing-to begin" (77-78). The firekeepers
give the following calls for participation for a lead singer and for shell shakers: "hvlalv
sangnahvye kanogi alskidv alegwui/Come here number one singer dance hurry" and
"daksi daksi daksi alegwui alegwui daksi/turtles turtles turtles hurry hurry turtles" (Heth
79).

In Cherokee ceremonial traditions, singing is usually considered the men's role

and shell shaking—dancing with terrapin shells filled with pebbles strapped to one's

legs—is considered the women's role.22 SCAG" (duyuk'ta) is maintained in the

performance through the balancing of gender reflected in both men's singing and
women's shell shaking. It is also manifested through the physical placement of men's and
women's bodies in the dance around the sacred fire: "In a stomp dance, the first seven

men enter from the west side of the fire. . .. They begin walking around the fire

 

2' In this context, Keetoowah (also Ketoowah and Kituwah) is the name used in Oklahoma to designate the

traditional Cherokee religion and 516 OOWIDYIIDJ (gatiyo unalskisdi) communities. The Keetoowah
Society as a spiritual organization is distinct entity from the federally recognized United Keetoowah Band
of Cherokee Indians. Keetoowah comes from the Cherokee word YSG (Giduwa), the name of the
Cherokees' ancient mother mound. Dh FSGJ (Am’ Giduwagi, "People of Giduwa") is our oldest name for

ourselves.

22 As will be discussed in Chapter Four, these roles are not necessarily based on biological gender. Brian
Joseph Gilley, for instance, mentions the fact that some male-embodied Two-Spirit Cherokees are shaking

shells as a reflection of their place within ceremonial communities and traditions (141-143).

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counterclockwise. The shell shakers and other women take their places between the men,
and the singing begins" (Heth 89). Call and response can again be seen here through the
musical relationship between both the lead singer, who is answered in chorus by the men,
and also through the musical relationship between the singers and the shell shakers.
Women's shell shaking is necessary in order for stomp dancing to take place. The songs
cannot be sung in the stomp dance without the shaking of the shells.

SCAG" (duyuk'ta) is performed through call and response and through

numerous reciprocal relationships needed to maintain community. Jason Baird Jackson's
scholarship on Yuchi stomp grounds and other ceremonial communities are particularly
useful in analyzing call and response as a central rhetorical tenet of Cherokee
performance. Jackson's work examines the importance of reciprocity in stomp dance
communities:

Within the stomp dance, expressions of reciprocity operate at several
levels at once. In an intimate way, each dance is a test of the social bonds
that hold groups and individuals together. When a man is called out to
lead a dance, he relies on his kinfolk and fellow ground members to
support his effort. [. . .] Without the support of his peers, a leader is
weakened and his performance is lessened. When his townspeople
enthusiastically file behind him, they indicate that he is a man of
esteem. . .. This indicates to other participants that the ground is a unified
whole (168-169).

Jackson also asserts that stomp dance communities depend on what he calls "performance

circuits" in which "each community interacts with a smaller subset of other groups" (143)

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and "bind themselves and their supporters more tightly in the web of reciprocal support"
(148). The performance circuits are networks of stomp dance participants who aid
various grounds in singing and shell shaking. These performance circuits are "a
collective transaction. For most ceremonial grounds to build or sustain their reputations
and the vitality of their activities, they must actively seek to support the dancers of other

groups. This support is reciprocated as hosts who have benefited from the participation

of a regular guest in turn become visitors" (169). The structure of 8'1 6 OOWoDy 001

(gatiyo unalskisdi), then, is one built on interrelationships and 583' (gadugi) in which

call and response is not only a feature of traditional performance, but also means to
participate in civic and ceremonial life. Dancers and singers actively call for assistance
from other stomp communities and are expected to respond to calls for assistance from
other grounds. Traditional Cherokee performances utilize call and response as an active

engagement with and reflection of SCAG" (duyuk’ta). Call and response is both a

central rhetorical feature of Cherokee performance and a philosophical base of Cherokee

community.

Cherokee Performance as the Creation of Space
Cherokee traditions and worldviews are linked to performance as a means of
building relationships, continuing culture, and engaging with spirituality. Performance is
epistemologically bound to Cherokee understandings of the universe and human
relationships with the more-than-human world. De Certeau makes a sharp distinction
between space and place. "A place," he writes, ". . .is the order. . .in accord with which

elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. [. . .] A place is. . .an

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instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability" (117). A
space, on the other hand, "is composed of intersections of mobile elements. [. . .] In short,
space is a practiced place" (Practice 117). Following de Certeau's frameworks, Cherokee
understandings of traditional land bases are always "spaced." Cherokee conceptions of
traditional geographies, and Cherokee cosmology as a whole, are dependent on
understanding places as practiced. Cherokee epistemologies, then, do not conceive of
place, but rather always see the world as a space.

Cherokee creation stories see creation as practiced. The world is one which
natural and supernatural beings have created through embodied action. This is markedly
different from dominant Anglo-Westem creation stories told in The Bible. Creation in
Genesis begins simply with God's desire and then command: "Let there be light." While
speaking is certainly an act, God's series of creationist events in Genesis are not
conceived by dominant European Christianity as practice. Providence has an amorphous
relationship with both place and space. The central place created—the Garden of Eden—
is one in which humans are forbidden to transform into a space. Eve makes two
revolutionary acts which destabilize the place created by God: 1.) Having a relationship
with the more-than-human world by befriending a snake 2.) Eating the forbidden fruit.
These acts cause humanity's fall from Grace. The Garden of Eden becomes a concept
with no geographic specificity. In this story, the act of attempting to turn Eden into a
space means that humans are forever barred from Eden as a place, and the "Western"
imagination's relationship with the more-than-human world and space becomes steeped

in shame.

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Cherokee stories, on the other hand, are firmly rooted in touchable, knowable,
spaces. "Spacing" place is part of the act of Creation, as opposed to an act contrary to the
will of the Divine. The creation of place is impossible without creating space
simultaneously. For instance, the Cherokee story of the creation of the Smokey
Mountains depends on space. In this story, the Smokies are created through a practice:
the flapping of Buzzard's wings against the muddy ground of a newly created world. The
Smokies are a geography that the tellers of traditional stories, and all Cherokees, have an
ancient relationship with. They are not an Eden where the act of creating space is
banned. Unlike Eden, the Smokies can be seen, lived in, and experienced.

Cherokee stories are always rooted within land. They are stories about specific
geographies. The places in Cherokee stories exist are significant because of the creation
of space. Cherokee cosmology sees the earth as existing in a delicate balance that
humans live in right relationship with. Ceremonial performances such as the stomp
dance exist to maintain this balance, to affirm a practice with space. Cherokee

cosmology understands humans as in relationship with the more-than-human world,

always in an effort to maintain SCAG" (duyuk'ta). Places are always spaces. In

Cherokee language places are often understood only in context of their practice. For
example, a pool in the Ocanaluftee River in North Carolina is called Gihili-dinehuh-i,
(Place of the Dogs) because "Two 'red dogs,’ which normally live underwater, were once
seen playing on the bank here" (Rossman 20). In another example, the literal translation
of "reservation" is "told to stay there." These instances are understandings of space.

De Certeau's articulations of space and place help bring dominant discourse to

epistemological understanding that Cherokees, and other Indigenous people, have long

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understood. He breaks the Biblically mandated silence around articulating the existence
of space, and pushes scholars towards a more Indigenist analysis of the world.

Much of Cherokee Christianity has indigenized dominant European Christianity
through practices that simultaneously emphasize the performative aspects of Creation
and through the use of Christianity to continue specific embodied practices and
knowledges. Cherokee rhetorics understand that words have the power to shift the world.
Jack F. and Anna G Kilpatrick write that "most Cherokee magical rituals consist of
something that one says (or merely thinks) or sings, called the i:gawé:sdi ('to say, one'),
and some recommended physical procedures, called the i:gv:n(e)dhi ('to do, one'). . ."
(Walk 4-5).

Growing up, my mother occasionally quoted Bible verses. One of the most often
quoted, John 1:1, seems particularly Cherokee: "In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God." Margaret Bender's Signs of Cherokee
Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life discusses, in part, the use of
Cherokee language bibles and hymnals. She asserts:

Reading. . .the New Testament was for most readers a performative
demonstration of faith. [. . .] ...Christians frequently read John l...over
and over again in their effort to learn the syllabary. The 'word,’ as
reflected in the New Testament, and God have the same timeless
beginning and immutability" (Bender 100).
Bender neglects to consider that John 1 also may be used as a learning tool because the
verse makes sense within Cherokee worldviews. John 1's reference to Genesis and the

beginning of the world with a performative act, God's utterance of "Let there be light,"

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(Genesis 1:3), can be doublewoven into Cherokee traditions that centralize the power of

performance and utterance to both shift reality or maintain SCAG" (duyuk’ta). Howard

Meridith and Virginia Milam Sobral write that
[t]he Cherokee language is a system Of relationships. It establishes
categories and makes distinctions through networks of action-oriented
metaphors. The language system reproduces cultural relations. Culture,
as the pattern where meaning is generated and experienced, becomes a
determining, productive field through which social and natural realities are
experienced and interpreted (30).

Consistent with de Certeau's understanding of space as "intersections of mobile

elements," the Cherokee language's "networks of action-oriented metaphors" are a part of

a constant making of space through utterance. Cherokee understandings of the world are

linked intimately with embodiment, practice, space, and performance.

Performance Rhetorics and Indigenous Traditions

Just as dominant European discourses traditionally argue for the existence of a
rhetoric/poetic binary, they also insist on a literate/oral binary, and have reduced writing
to an alphabetic phenomenon. Indigenous rhetorical traditions in "the Americas" include
numerous systems of recording and transmitting information, even if colonial discourses
since the first invasions have tried to destroy, deny, or minimize them.

Wampum belts, Lakota winter counts, Peruvian quipus, birchbark scrolls, Mexica
amoxtli, and Mi'kmaw pictographic writing are only a handful of the systems traditionally

used to record information. While European discourses also include and are rooted in

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non-alphabetic writing, those rhetorics were likewise disregarded and minimized during

European Christian colonization. As Walter D. Mignolo has demonstrated, in this process

"the Book" was centralized and embodied knowledge denied:
...[W]hen the word was detached from its oral source (the body), it
became attached to the invisible body and the silent voice of God, which
cannot be heard but can be read in the Holy Book. [. . .] Christianity is
not, of course, the only religion having a holy book or Scriptures. . .. But it
shares with those others the disequilibrium of power between religions
possessing the Book and those without it. At stake here is the role played
by the book as a text during the process of colonization carried on by
literate societies (82).

Colonial Christianity divorced the body from rhetorics, compositions, and cultures and

attempted to squelch Indigenous rhetorical productions.

Performance has historically been a center of Indigenous rhetorics throughout the
Americas. Instead of seeing embodied rhetorics at the opposite end of the spectrum from
written and/or composed rhetorics, Indigenous rhetorical traditions pay attention to the
relationship between these rhetorical expression: "Since before the Conquest. . .writing
and embodied performance have often worked together to layer the historical memories
that constitute community. [. . .] The telling is as important as the writing, the doing as
central as the recording, the memory passed down through bodies and rrmemonic

practices" (Taylor 35).

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Historical Trauma: Beyond the Hiawatha Asylum

Because of perforrnance's centrality to Native rhetorics, colonization's attempts to
supplant Native cultures with those of Europe entailed a fierce suppression of Indigenous
performance practices. Indigenous performances were often seen as threatening to
European power and white supremacy. European powers have gone to extreme levels in
order to extinguish and contain Native performative resistance—such as the Ghost Dance
on the plains— causing ongoing historical trauma in Native communities.

Colonization is a kinesthetic reality: it is an act done by bodies and felt by other
bodies. Violence is not just an intellectual knowledge, bur rather one that is known
because of damage done to our skin, flesh, muscles, bones, and spirits. Both our
homelands and our bodies are violated through colonization. If we take the boarding and
residential school systems as just one example of numerous colonial acts, colonialism as
a kinesthetic act becomes very clear. It is in our bodies, and as bodies, that we
understand what it means to be Native people enacting survival and continuance through
the present colonial period. If colonization is a kinesthetic wounding, decolonization is a
kinesthetic healing. We must address the healing of historical trauma in our communities
in order to help heal ourselves and homelands. Because our performance traditions have
often been a target of colonial violence, they are also central to healing historical trauma
and mending the wounds left by invasion.

Historical trauma can be defined as trauma so widespread as to impact the
collective memory and identity of a community. It results from violence that has been
carried out to control, wound, marginalize, or destroy an entire people. Maria Yellow

Horse Brave Heart explains, "The concepts of a historical trauma response and historical

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unresolved grief are intended to be inclusive of massive, genocidal trauma across
generations upon which life span trauma is superimposed" (3). Historical trauma is not
ethereal, it impacts human relationships and family structures and has real, immediate
impacts on the descendents of survivors. Brave Heart asserts that "[t]rauma response
features include elevated mortality rates and health problems emanating from heart
disease, hypertension, alcohol abuse, depression, and suicidal behavior" (2). 23
Countless acts of violence against Native people can be seen throughout
colonization's history as the roots of historical trauma. One example of such a traumatic
event is the establishment of the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians—also known as the
Indian Insane Asylum—in Canton, South Dakota in 1899, only nine years after and four
hundred miles away fi'om the Wounded Knee Massacre. If the massacre at Wounded
Knee was meant to bring the Ghost Dance and Indian performative resistance to an
immediate halt through slaughter, the establishment of the Hiawatha Asylum was meant

to contain Indian performative resistance by pathologizing it. _

 

23 Having said this, I want to acknowledge that not all Native communities have had to survive acts of
historical trauma or see addressing such issues of particular importance. Genocide, forced removal,
boarding schools, and land theft are concerns for many Indigenous communities in North America, but I
want to be cautious not to project my own tribal experience, nor make overgeneralizations about Native
experiences under colonialism. However, I also think that even communities that have not been directly
impacted by historical trauma feel its waves, and those waves can have impacts. Those waves, after all, are
racism, sexism, homophobia, authenticity debates, and other forms of oppression that are often used to
divide Native communities. Institutions such as slavery impact all Americans, even if their ancestors had
no involvement in that peculiar institution either as slaves or slaveholders, because slavery continues to

dictate race relations in this country.

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The Hiawatha Asylum was established by the US Congress in 1899, admitting its
first "patient" in 1903. The authors of a 1999 article in the American Journal of
Psychology nearly mythologize the asylum and its creators:

The promoters of this asylum were genuinely concerned with alleviating
suffering among Native Americans by providing better care than jails,
"hospitals," or workhouses for the mentally ill, who were often homeless
and poorly treated by the community. They argued that a separate
institution for Native Americans was needed because they had unique
mental health "afflictions." In less than three decades after the hospital
opened, the reformers were attacked for poor mental health care at the
asylum (Bhatara et al 767).
Recent research and critiques of the asylum by Native activists and survivors of
psychiatric abuse paint a more realistic—and much grimmer—portrait of the motivations
behind the establishment of the Hiawatha Asylum. Pemina Yellow Bird argues that the
institution was created "as a pork-barrel project in the minds of two South Dakota
congressmen who wanted to attract settlers, create jobs and generally build the economy
of their newly minted state..." (4). Yellow Bird claims that the asylum had very little to
do with "alleviating suffering among Native Americans." "Many of the inmates at
Canton," she insists, "were there for reasons that had nothing to do with mental illness.
Some where there because of a physical ailment. . .. Most. . .were young—thirty years and
younger—with many children present at any given time" (5). Instead, "patients" were

often incarcerated in Hiawatha for resisting white authority or policy:

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These. . .individuals found themselves incarcerated at Canton for arguing
with a reservation agent, a schoolteacher or a spouse. Many were there
because they refused to give up their ceremonial or spiritual ways of life.
Still others were there because they refused to allow their children to be
kidnapped and carted away to government boarding schools, or for
refusing to be stripped of some other basic human right. [. . .]
Incarceration at Canton meant no medical care of any kind and what's
more, incarceration there was terminal: institutional policy declared these
Native people to be "defectives," and as such, procreation must be
prohibited and they must be sterilized before they could be discharged.
Since the superintendent did not know how to conduct sexual sterilization
procedures, inmates simply remained until they died. Of the average ten
discharges per year at Canton, nine were due to death (5).
The Hiawatha Asylum was finally closed in 1933 after investigations exposed gross
mismanagement of the facility and horrific abuse of patients (Yellow Bird 6-7). After
the closure, the asylum was torn down and the grounds later turned into the Hiawatha
Golf Course by the city of Canton.
On the back of a 1918 postcard of the Indian Insane Asylum is this inscription:
"This is the only institution of the kind in the world. Do hope they won't break jail while
we are here. There would be some lively doings I expect. I hope you are having a good
time" (Disability History Museum). This inscription is chilling both because of its
flippant humor and its appearance on the back of a tourist postcard. The casual ease of

colonial violence is reminiscent of photographs of other atrocities such as the lynchings

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of African Americans and massacres like Wounded Knee. I want us to remember the
Hiawatha Asylum as one of many examples of the ways in which colonial violence
pathologizes Native peoples and bodies in order to contain resistance and perpetuate
genocide and historical trauma. Because of the traumatic histories of pathologization and
the use of institutions such as Hiawatha to contain Indian performative resistance, I
believe that the majority of healing must take place outside of medical institutions.
Performance offers one space in which the healing of historical trauma can occur.
Perforrnative work is intensely kinesthetic. In performance, the body becomes the
central rhetorical tool. I agree with Augusto Boal when he writes, "Theatre is a form of
knowledge" (Boal 20). I would go on to say that it is also a way of knowing If we can
find ways to kinesthetically explore historical trauma, power, and oppression, we can
more deeply understand the nature of our oppressions and the impact of colonization on
our lives and communities. Performances, both "traditional" and contemporary, are
powerful practices that resist racism and genocide, continue our communities, bear

witness to our histories, heal historical trauma, and imagine decolonial possibilities.

Indigenous Performance Rhetorics and Resistance

Performance as a means of resistance has precedents within several Native
movements in this country. An analysis of performance enables us to examine rhetorical
maneuvers of Native communities across perceived barriers and differences. The "racial
reform movements" of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries share
performance as a common tactic for intervention in genocidal policies of the US

government. During the same time period, Cherokee resistance movements against US

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annexation of Indian Territory and the dissolution of tribal governments employed
traditional performance as a tactic of resistance and continuance. While these two
movements have stark differences in many of their goals, both employed performance as
a central means to practice space. Both movements, while concerned with the specific
tribal concerns of their respective communities, spring fi'om intertribal relationships and
alliance as survivance.24

Powell's work examines the importance of alliance not only in the interpretation
of rhetorical/historical productions, but also as a form of activism and scholarly behavior.
Her work is grounded in both Miami histories of resistance (specifically the Miami
Confederacy), and "diplomatic discourses that were rooted in indigenous insistence on
shared relations and shared responsibilities between partners" ("River" 42). It also
evidences a rooting in historical and contemporary coalition-based work of grassroots
movements for social justice, including Black/Native intellectual and political alliances
of the nineteenth century and contemporary women of color feminisms. Alliance is
central to Indigenous survival and continuance in the Americas, both historically and
contemporarily: "Our strength was, and is, in alliance and in the ability to adapt to rapidly
changing worlds," Powell writes ("River" 39).

The work of Native literary scholars such as Robert Allen Warrior and Craig S.

Womack (among others) have called for an analysis of Indigenous writing that is

embedded in tribally/nationally specific histories and contexts that assert sovereignty and

 

24 . . . . . . .

Intertrrbal suggests the coming together of distinct native nations for a specrfic purpose or moment,
while pan-tribal suggests movements across cultures. I prefer the term intertribal not only because it
points towards interactions between distinct nations, but also because it is a word that connotes

performance for many contemporary Native people, intertribal dances at powwows.

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resistance. Womack has famously and influentially argued from "the assumption that
Indian viewpoints cohere, that Indian resistance can be successful, that Native critical
centers are possible, that working from within the nation, rather than looking toward the
outside, is a legitimate way of examining literature. . ." (12). Nationalist approaches to
examining the rhetorical productions of Native communities, however, do not eclipse the
importance of intertribal, pan-tribal, and pan-Indigenous modes of rhetorical resistance.
Womack's reading of Joy Harjo's work asks, "(H)ow do we justify literary nationalism in
relation to powerful pan-tribal movements" (225)? Womack offers the answer that
Harjo's pan—tribal work is successful because it is "rooted in a solid national center" and
that it is a continuation of Creek history that has "always experienced powerful cultural
grth as a result of pan-tribal influence" (223, 260).

Warrior's work, while similarly rooted in struggles for sovereignty and resistance,
is focused on pan—tribal struggles against colonization and racism. By using the
intellectual work of Vine Deloria Jr. and John Joseph Matthews to push towards Native
critical theory, Warrior is able to demonstrate pan-tribal intellectual engagement that
bolsters the sovereignty of Native peoples:

If our struggle is anything, it is the struggle for sovereignty, and if
sovereignty is anything, it is a way of life. That way of life is not a matter
of denying a political ideology or having a detached discussion about the
unifying structures and essences of American Indian traditions. It is a
decision—a decision we make in our minds, in our hearts, in our bodies—

to be sovereign and to find out what that means in the process ( 123).

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While Native nations certainly retain specific cultural and national identities,
intertribal coalitions and rhetorical influences often deeply inform these identities. It
would be na’r‘ve, then, for my own work on Cherokee performance rhetorics to take a too
separatist approach. Indigenous tactical maneuversrin the face of ongoing colonialism
share performance as a key mode of resistance throughout the Americas. Further, Native
resistance movements in what is being called the United States commonly share and
build on one another's rhetorical tactics.

The rhetorical resistance of Cherokees during the period shortly before Cherokee
removal is certainly influenced by other Indigenous rhetoricians of the period and
previous to this era, just as Cherokee rhetorics have influenced other Native rhetorics.
The Memorial of John Ross and Others... from the 23rd Congress, 2"d Session, reveals the
tactics Ross and other Cherokees used in an attempt to protect Cherokee sovereignty and
lifeways that are employed by earlier Native rhetoricians such as Francis Occum and
Joseph Johnson, as well as by their contemporaries and intellectual descendents. Ross,
Richard Taylor, Daniel McCoy, Samuel Gunter, and William Rogers make this appeal in
1835, the poignancy of which is worth quoting at length here:

Persuaded that the United States have the power to protect them, and
convinced that the United States are bound by the most sacred
engagements to exert that power, they have no appeal left upon earth but
to your honorable bodies. They earnestly and anxiously make that appeal,
for themselves, for their wives and children, for the aged and helpless; in a
word, for the nine or ten thousand unoffending human beings of their

nations residing within what are claimed to be the charter limits of

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Georgia, they respectfully pray that measures may be adopted by your
honorable bodies to vindicate the faith of treaties, to preserve to them their
rights guaranteed by those treaties, to arrest the hand of rapine now
stretched forth to despoil them of their homes and possessions, and to save
them from being driven out to perish from starvation and misery; if not
condemned even to a speedier death, by the ruthless spoiler (Ross et al 2).
The use of dominant EuroAmerican discourse here, as in numerous examples
from post-invasion Native rhetorical history, is clearly not a move towards assimilation,
as some would argue. In her important analysis of Cherokee political resistance of this
period, Maureen Konkle asserts:
Neither Boudinot or the other "elite" and "acculturated" Cherokees. . .ever
denied being Cherokee, abandoned the nation, or accepted subordination
to whites. They counter EuroAmericans' removing them from time to
deny them political autonomy and equality byinsisting that they have
always been in time and are rapidly moving forward and becoming a
modern Indian nation" (79).
Such rhetorical tactics are consciously engaged with to protect Cherokee interests. Ross
and his colleagues compose a savvy defense of Cherokee people: not only are they
engaged astutely with the rhetorical devices of their oppressors, they also expose the US
government's own hypocrisy while making appeals to the pathos and logos of their
audience. The US is challenged to not only act hmnanely towards the Cherokee Nation,
but to also hold fast to their "most sacred engagements" and "to vindicate the faith of

treaties, to preserve to them their rights guaranteed by those treaties."

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It is important to remember that while Cherokee political discourse of this period
was often through written appeals, it was not limited to written texts. Oratory was central
to Cherokee (and certainly other) diplomatic relations and resistance tactics of the
nineteenth century. Both John Ridge and Elias Boudinot were skilled and popular orators
during this period, using their performances to raise money and to persuade white
audiences to aid in Cherokee struggles against US imperialism.25 Cherokee rhetorical
traditions included oratory long before invasion. Many rhetoricians, including Boudinot,
were also highly influenced by the sermonizing and preaching traditions that were part of
their Christian educations. Cherokee leaders utilized the popularity of oratory among
white abolitionists and those who supported Native causes to gather support for the
Cherokee nation: "The Cherokee council sent [Boudinot] on a speaking tour of eastern
towns and cities in the spring of 1826 to solicit donations to buy a printing press and type
in both English and Sequoyah's newly invented Cherokee syllabary, as well as to found a
Cherokee national school" (Konkle 50).

While Cherokee rhetors may have been advocating Cherokee—specific issues, the
tactics they employ are shared with other Native activists of this era and earlier. In her

discussion of Boudinot, Konkle asserts that he "must be understood in relation to other

 

25 While Ridge and Boudinot continue to be considered betrayers of the nation through the signing of the
Treaty of New Echota, and I agree, it is important to remember that Ridge, Boudinot, and others were also
fighting tirelessly to protect Cherokee nationhood and ensure Cherokee survival. While I disagree deeply
with many of the arguments and actions of the Treaty Party, much of their work did aid in Cherokee
resistance and continuance. Their work reminds us that "there were and are many perspectives among
Native intellectuals and political leaders about how to best deal with the effects of US. colonialism”

(Konkle 96).

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Native and African American writers active at the time, including David

Cuscik,. . .William Apess. . .and the African American writer David Walker" (50).
Performance, not only writing, is a central mode of resistance these activists employed.
Boudinot performed with William Apess at "an evening of oratory on behalf of the
Cherokees" in Boston in 1832 (Konkle 97), and much of Apess' own written works are
his published sermons. The tactics that are expressed in Apess' sermons show traces of
other Native Christian performers and writers, notably Occum and Johnson. These
earlier rhetors were able to use the pulpit and published sermons to argue that Native
people were both more Christian (converted or not) and more "civilized" than European
invaders imposing EuroChristian notions of "Christianity" and "civilization." Such
rhetorical maneuvers can be seen in Cherokee memorials and published speeches, which
often point out the "savage" and un-Christian behavior of white Christians.

Performance was also a tactic in Native resistance movements of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Performance was placed at the center of two
very different resistance movements: the racial uplift movement of organizations such as
the Society of American Indians, and the political/spiritual resistance movements of

Indian Territory that rooted themselves in the 516 OOWa’IDYa’IDJ (gatiyo unalskisdi,

stomp grounds). While these movements might be seen as being on very separate
political poles, an analysis of performance rhetorics allows us to examine some of the
shared modes of resistance of these movements.

Lucy Maddox's Citizen Indians: Native American Indian Intellectuals, Race &
Reform is integral to an understanding of the performance rhetorics of Native

intellectuals. Maddox examines "the ways in which Native intellectuals, in attempting to

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create a public, political space for themselves, deliberately adopted, manipulated, and
transformed the means already available to them for addressing white audiences,
particularly the means of performance" (16). Maddox argues that Native activists of this
period subverted and used dominant ideas of performance to intervene in racist systems.
Major figures of this period, such as Gertrude Bonnin, Charles Eastman, and Luther
Standing Bear, were all performers:
Although they are all now primarily known as writers, all three were also
accustomed to addressing white audiences through a variety of other kinds
of performances as well: both Eastman and Bonnin lectured frequently,
and Bonnin gave recitations and musical performances; Standing Bear
toured and performed with Wild West Shows, lectured, and later played
Indian roles in Hollywood (Maddox 128).
These activists believed that performance could shift racist concepts held by
predominately white audiences who could then aid in struggles that public Native
intellectuals were engaged. Performance allowed Native activists to place their own
bodies at the center of rhetorical moves against racism.26 Maddox asserts that
performance was important rhetorically to Eastman because he spoke English as a second
language and "he was also attempting to translate a philosophy and an intellectual system
from its natural linguistic home into a foreign language. Eastrnan's reliance on physical

images and performance—that is, on embodied, visual forms of his philosophy—should

 

26 It is also true that Native rhetors used writing as a performative act that subverted notions of "the Indian"
as acts of survivance. Powell demonstrates, for instance, that Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Charles
Alexander Eastman "perform a kind of civilized Indian-ness" in their writing as well as their public

performances ("Survivance" 405).

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therefore not be surprising. The body and its performance did not require translation"
(140-141). Similarly, Bonnin's activism and life were intimately concerned with
performance as a rhetorical tool for social change. A musician and composer as well as
an orator, Bonnin "sometimes combined her music with her oratory" (152). And, like
Eastman, "regalia and. . .music were wordless forms of communication to which she
turned often" (153).

While these performers intentionally placed their bodies between the white gaze
and white constructions of "the Indian" in order to intervene in systems of racism that
were injuring Native communities, other Native resistance movements used performance

as a central means of building resistance among Native people. SI! Ii OOWIOY I01

(gatiyo unalskisdi) in Indian Territory/Oklahoma were (and are) central to movements for

both intertribal and national survival and resistance. The 516 OOWoDy 001 (gatiyo

unalskisdi) are a clear example of how Native peoples placed performance traditions at
the center of cultural continuance and survival while members of the SAI were
simultaneously using performance as activism. While what I will call the stomp dance
movements from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth differed
substantially from contemporaneous racial reform movements, both movements
employed performance as a core rhetorical tactic against white racism in hopes for the
survival and continuance of their communities and nations.

Organizations such as the Keetoowah Society and the intertribal (Cherokee,
Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek) Four Mothers Society used traditional performance
practices as a tactic for community resistance to white racism, Christianity, US westward

expansion, and allotment. Heth provides some historical context of the intertribal yet

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nationalist histories of stomp grounds, pointing out their emergence through interactions
and shared histories between Cherokee, Creek, and Natchez communities in the late
nineteenth century (53). "In the latter part of the 1880's," she explains, "stomp dancing
had gone through a gradual decline and had stopped" (52). Before his 1871 death,
Redbird Smith's father, Pig Smith, specifically chose a man named Creek Sam (Natchez)
to teach Redbird Smith spiritual traditions:27
The choice of a Natchez ceremonial priest as a mentor to the leader of the
Cherokee movement had many ramifications. The Sams today are of
mixed Cherokee—Natchez blood but believe that since their "fire" was the
original one for the area, all subsequent changes must be wrong. On the
other hand, the Cherokees in getting back "what they lost," re-interpreted
the ceremonies in a Cherokee fashion. Creek Sam's picture, however, is
still displayed at the yearly ceremonial honoring Redbird Smith's birthday
(53).28
While there may be internal politics among various stomp dance communities, it is clear
that it is through intertribal histories and reciprocities that they have been able to
continue. Continuance—the central hope of both members of SAI and the stomp dance
movements—relies on embodied memory and practice, on the intentional use of bodies

that creates space. Performance rhetorics remind us that bodies are always present in

 

27 Redbird Smith, as will be discussed in Chapter Three, was chosen by the Keetoowah Society to help lead

their revivalist movement in the late nineteenth century.

28 The historiographic aspects of this revitalization process is discussed in Chapter Three.

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rhetorical contexts, that embodied knowledges and expressions are integral to rhetorical
resistance, and that performance carries culture. Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez tell us that
"Memory is. . .the cultural storehouse. [. . .] Memory should. . .be understood. . .in its
collective and physical manifestation: as remembrance and transmission of the
community's knowledge through that community's performance forms. . ." (Broylez-
Gonzales 15). Cultural rhetorics make room for the vital work performance does,
insisting that the most important aspects of rhetorics—the bodies that produce and engage
them—are not sloughed off in colonial mindsets that attempt to ignore or destroy

embodiment.

Cherokee Performance Rhetorics: Resistance, Healing, and Decolonization

I would like to return for a moment to West Long's story of O'cDO’flO

(va'unuw’) to imagine what it can teach us about performance in the face of the
devastation of colonization. Like any narrative, our stories take meaning through our

relationships with them, through the infinite layers of interpretation that they hold. West

Long's telling of O’IDO’QO (va'unuw') is particularly useful in understanding the

trauma and complexity of colonization as well as the role of performance in healing,
decolonization, and continuance. West Long relays:
The dying Stone Coat. . .told them that if they had tried to kill him by force
in the beginning that they would have failed because it was ordained that
they should not have relief until they had learned what suffering was.

Knowing the depths of suffering and the joy of relief, he said, would make

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them value the songs they were now to learn and the medicine they were
to gain by his death and sacrifice (Speck & Broom 15).

O'cDO’flO (va'unuw') shares many characteristics with colonial projects that

have attempted to destroy Cherokees. Like O’cDO’flG (va'unuw'), colonial powers

invaded Cherokee communities, threatening our very existence. Our ancient ways of

understanding the world, the songs and medicines given to us by O'cDO'fiG (va'unuw’),

were attacked by missionaries numerous times in our history. Our relationships with our
homelands were interrupted through waves of encroachments and removals.

And yet, we survived. The trauma that colonization caused us, and continues to

cause us, can be more complexly understood through listening to the story of O'cDO’fiG

(va'unuw'). Colonization has immensely wounded us, broken our hearts over and over
again. Certainly through this devastation Cherokees come to have an intimate and
intergenerational understanding of the "depths of suffering." If we listen to what this

story teaches us, though, it is that through this devastation we are offered the tools for our

healing and continuance. If we are to take SCAG" (duyuk'ta) seriously, then we must

look at the complexity of colonization and healing.

The story of OoDO’fiO (va'unuw') teaches us is that while colonization has

wounded us, if we listen carefully to our experiences as survivors, the means of
decolonization and healing historical trauma are already present. From the dying body of
colonialism rises the songs, stories, dances, and medicines that ensure our survival. The

story of O'cDO’flO (va'unuw') creates a precedent for performance as necessary to

decolonization.

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Cherokee stories assert that despair and disease are not put in the world without
joy and healing to balance them. Invoking the Cherokee cosmology of the world being
suspended by cords, Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy sees performance as important to

maintaining SCAG" (duyuk'ta): ". . .[O]ur existence hangs on a cord from a theater

which is the sound of voices telling our stories and facing our difficulties and even
rejoicing" (Geiogamah & Darby 361). Through the deep despair that colonization
causes, we survive and resist. We listen to the voices that rise out of the chaos of the past
several hundred years. We learn the songs and stories. We sing, dance, and continue.
Through our performances we keep the world afloat.

In this chapter we have seen a theory of Cherokee performance rhetorics rooted in

SCAG" (duyuk'ta) and manifested through call and response. By looking at the story of

O'cDO’fiO (va'unuw’) we can understand how both of these concepts are deeply

embedded in Cherokee worldviews of performance and how performance is central to
healing historical trauma. We have seen how Cherokee cosmologies are tightly bound to
performance through an understanding of the world as a space. Further, by paying
attention to performance as a central rhetorical tactic of Native people, we can have a
broader understanding of Native rhetorics. Native rhetors in the SAI, Cherokee leaders
facing forced removal, Cherokee stomp dance movements, and other Native rhetors
utilized performance intertribally as central means of activism.

Now that we have an understanding of a theOry and history of Cherokee
performance rhetorics as resistance and healing, the next chapter will examine how
Cherokees are using the archive, 3 site wrapped up in colonial projects, as a tool to revive

Cherokee performances and performance histories. This decolonial work can be

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understood as a Cherokee Ghost Dance that revives the past by re-embodying it in the

present.

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CHAPTER THREE
INDIAN IN THE ARCHIVE: PERFORMANCE HISTORIOGRAPHY AS
CHEROKEE GHOST DANCE
At night when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you
think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once
filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.
Let him be just and deal kindly with my people, for the dead are not
altogether powerless. Chief Si'ahl, Duwamish (H.A. Smith).
Performance can be a tool to heal Cherokee historical trauma through a

restoration of SCAG" (duyuk'ta) and Cherokee decolonization movements often place

performance at the center of resistance. Crucial to the enactment of many of these
performances is a historiographic practice—utilizing memory through both archive and
repertoire—in order to re-imagine and re-embody the past. Historiography is intimately
tied to movements to revitalize cultural performance traditions, as is made evident
through examining revitalization movements from the nineteenth century to the present.
The so-called Cherokee Ghost Dance movement of 1811-1813, Redbird Smith's revivalist
movement with the Keetoowah Society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, and the current work of the Warriors of Anikituwha at the Eastern Band of
Cherokee Indians to revive dance traditions have all relied on historiographic processes in
order to resist colonization. My own archival work to recover nineteenth century
Cherokee theater and Cherokee Two-Spirit histories is informed by these movements: it

is an attempt to subvert colonial archives by using them to recover cultural memories.29

 

29 Chapter Four will further address Cherokee Two-Spirit histories.

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Performance is both rhetorical and historiographic, it re—embodies the past and leads us to
remember that the ways that the dead—our ancestors—return to us and remain present

through our embodied practices.

Cherokee Ghost Dance

Before the Ghost Dance in the West, Cherokees had our own Ghost Dance.
"Ghost Dance" is a term most often associated with the Ghost Dance religion founded by
Northern Paiute religious leader, Wovoka/Jack Wilson, and likely is based on a
translation of the Sioux name for this movement, "spirit [ghost] dance" (Kehoe 8). As
mentioned briefly in Chapter Two, Wovoka's Ghost Dance was a spiritual resistance
movement which claimed that through the practice of particular songs and dances, white
people would disappear from the continent, buffalo herds would return, relatives who had
been killed by EuroAmericans would come back from the dead. While it originated
among the Northern Paiute, Wovoka's religious teachings spread quickly throughout the
West, and it was during the Ghost Dance that over three hundred Lakotas were murdered
by members of the US. Seventh Cavalry on December 29, 1890.

Because of the massacre at Wounded Knee, James Mooney left his fieldwork with
the Eastern Cherokees and conducted an extensive study of both Wovoka's religion and
the events that led up to the Wounded Knee massacre. Mooney's 1896 report to the
Bureau of Ethnology, The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890,
popularized the term "Ghost Dance" in relation to various Indigenous revitalization

movements throughout the Americas, of which Wovoka's religion is only one.30

 

30 For more information, see Kehoe (1989) and Mooney (1996).

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News of the Cherokee Ghost Dance was originally published by Thomas L.
McKenney in 1838, and later by Mooney in both his 1896 work on the Ghost Dance and
in his 1900 Myths of the Cherokee. Because Mooney's interpretation of the Cherokee
Ghost Dance is what most Cherokees and non-Cherokees have access to, and because a
critique of this interpretation is central to William G. McLoughlin's later interventionist
work, The Cherokee Ghost Dance, Mooney's description is worth quoting at length here:

From the Creeks the new revelation was brought to the Cherokee, whose
priests at once began to dream dreams and to preach a return to the old life
as the only hope of the Indian race. A great medicine dance was
appointed at Ustanali, the national capital, where, after the dance was
over, the doctrine was publicly announced and explained by a Cherokee
prophet introduced by a delegation from Coosawatee. [. . .] The Cherokee
had broken the road which had been given to their fathers at the beginning
of the world. [. . .] If they would live and be happy as before they must put
off the white man's dress, throw away his mills and looms, kill their cats,
put on paint and buckskin, and be Indians again; otherwise swift
destruction would come upon them. [. . .]

The prophet had threatened after a certain time to invoke a terrible
storm, which should destroy all but the true believers, who were exhorted
to gather for safety on one of the high peaks of the Great Smoky
mountains. In full faith they abandoned their bees, their orchards, their
slaves, and everything that had come to them from the white man, and

took up their toilsome march for the high mountains, There they waited

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until the appointed day and come and passed, showing their hopes and
fears to be groundless, when they sadly returned to their homes and the
great Indian revival among the Cherokees came to an end (History 88-89).

McLoughlin disagrees with Mooney's acCount and argues that the Cherokee
Ghost Dance was not connected to Creek revivalist movements, as it predated the Creek
revivalist movements during that period. Further, he argues that it was "much more
complex and disjointed than the standard accounts indicate"; "Far from being a trivial
incident, the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement marked a critical turning point in
Cherokee history" (1 13-1 14).

McLaughlin's work allows us to question Mooney's linear narrative of the Ghost
Dance, and instead look at the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement as non-linear and
complicated:

There was not one prophet. . .but a number of different prophets; some of
the visions appeared not to one person but to several witnesses. While
some of the prophecies did speak of a catastrophic hailstorm, others
predicted a three-day eclipse. While some looked forward to the
restoration of an idyllic past, others spoke of the end of the world or the
beginning of a "a new earth." [. . .] Some called for the total rejection of
the white man's culture and some for selective rejection. Some of the
prophecies show obvious influences of Christian millennialism (114).

Like Wovoka's Ghost Dance, the Cherokee movement had as its vision the hope
for protection from European invasion and the preservation and continuance of

Indigenous lifeways and traditions. Yet, unlike Wovoka's Ghost Dance, and most

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significant to my work here, the Cherokee Ghost Dance did not focus on the practice of
"new" performances, but instead focused on revitalizing traditions of the past.

Colonel Return J. Meigs, a federal agent to the Cherokee, wrote in 1812, "They
have revived their religious dances of ancient origin with as much solemnity as ever was
seen in worship in our churches. They then repair to the water, go in and wash" (qtd. in
McLaughlin 148). The Cherokee Ghost Dance was not a new religious movement, but
rather a movement to continue traditions of the past. Looking to the past and re-
embodying those traditions in the present is the central feature of both the Cherokee
Ghost Dance movement and the Cherokee revitalization movements that followed.

Rhetorically, the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement asserted the importance of
Cherokee traditions and worked to disrupt Christianization that literally demonized
Cherokee religious traditions. The Ghost Dance subverted the rhetoric of the missionaries
and colonists by asserting that it was European traditions—not Cherokee—that were
dangerous to the well being of the world and would cause God's judgment. According to
the Moravian missionaries at Springplace, Georgia, a Cherokee called Chief Keychzaetel
related the following story: A man and two women who claimed to have received a
vision of "a whole crowd of Indians arriving on the hill from the sky" (142), and the
leader of this group imparted this message to those present:

God is dissatisfied that you are receiving the white people without any
distinction. You yourselves see that your hunting is gone—you are
planting the corn of white people—go and sell that back to them and plant
Indian corn and pound it in the manner of your forefathers; do away with

the mills. The Mother of the Nation has forsaken you because all her

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bones are being broken through the grinding [of the mills]. She will return
to you, however, if you put the white people out of the land and return to
your former manner of life. [. . .] You may keep good neighborly relations
with them, just see to it that you get back from them your old Beloved
Towns (qtd. in McLoughlinl42).
The Cherokee Ghost Dance movement looked at particular European practices—not
necessarily all Europeans—as disruptive of Cherokee lifeways, and looked to Cherokee

traditions in an attempt to rebalance the world. In the example above, it is important to

understand that 4M (Selu) Corn, is considered a spiritual mother of all Cherokees.

Women's relationship with the planting, harvesting, and processing of corn was central to
women's gender roles, which—as a matrifocal and matrilineal cultureb—were in turn
central to Cherokee cosmology, politics, and economics. Theda Perdue explains,
"Women farmed because Selu first gave birth to corn. . .and then became the source for
corn. . .for all Indians. [. . .] A person's job was an aspect of his or her sexuality, a source
of economic and political power, and an affirmation of cosmic order and balance" (1 8-
19). The admonishment and warning to plant and harvest Cherokee corn in a traditional
way was an attempt to interrupt colonial projects that were throwing traditional Cherokee

gender—and thus Cherokee spirituality, economics, ecology, and politics—out of

some’ (duyuk’ta). 3'

 

3' Further research is needed to confirm this, but the statement, "The Mother of the Nation has forsaken
you. . ." leads me to guess that there was a specific ecological crisis happening in Cherokee communities
during this period specifically surrounding corn. Whether particular EuroAmerican farming practices were

diminishing Cherokee harvests or the importation on non-Cherokee corn hybrids were jeopardizing

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EuroAmerican practices adversely impacted a complex web and delicate balance
Cherokees had with the cosmos, and were seen by followers of the Ghost Dance
movement as a threat to Cherokee life. McKenney claims that Major Ridge, a Treaty
Party member who later illegally signed the treaty of New Echota, was told that a prophet
named Charles declared:

The Great Spirit said that the Cherokees were adopting the customs of the
white people. They had mills, clothes, feather beds, and tables—worse
still, they had books and domestic cats. This was not good—therefore the
buffaloe and other game were disappearing. [. . .] The nation must return to
the customs of their fathers. They must kill their cats, cut short their
frocks, and dress as became Indians and warriors. They must discard all of
the fashions of the whites, abandon the use of communication with each
other except by word of mouth, and give up their mills, their houses, and
all of the arts learned from the white people (136).

If, as argued in the previous chapter, Cherokee worldview sees practice as part of
the creation of space, and understands practice as deeply connected to maintenance of
relationships to land, it makes sense that the adoption of European practices by
Cherokees was seen as risking Cherokees jurisdiction over landbases. This is not only a

philosophical issue, but in fact had—and has—a very tangible impact on Cherokee life

 

Cherokee corn species—and it seems clear from this statement that many Cherokees were not planting
traditional corn strands—the idea of Selu abandoning Cherokee communities suggests that Cherokee corn

plants were either not growing or not producing food.

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and land. If space is a practiced place, then adoption of European practices threatens to
restructure Cherokee landbases into EuroAmerican spaces.
EuroAmerican practices literally transformed Cherokee landscapes and
ecosystems. Sarah H. Hill describes the major environmental—and thus cultural—
changes that happened in Cherokee territory in the eighteenth century, changes that no
doubt gave rise to the Cherokee Ghost Dance:
Missing from the landscape was the plant so closely associated with
women in one of their most fundamental responsibilities—rivercane. [. . .]
By mid-century, the destruction of cane was well underway in Cherokee
settlements. . .. Horses and cattle ravaged cane breaks. [. . .] Hogs caused
far greater damage as they scoured the earth to gouge out nutritious roots.
[. . .] The destruction of the cane also derived from the European practice
of firing woods in early spring to 'reveal the new green grass to the cattle
and other stock.‘ [. . .] Spring firing, repeated grazing of new growing,
and root disruption gradually eliminated the great Southeastern stands of
cane. By the end of the eighteenth century, the destruction of canebreaks
became a mark of civilized settlement. [. . .] (90-91).

Hill goes on to describe how the population of wild game and other animals on Cherokee

land dramatically shifted because of colonialism. The re-creation of Cherokee spaces into

EuroAmerican spaces through EuroAmerican practice—wwhether enacted by

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EuroAmericans, Cherokees, or enslaved Africans—radically altered landscapes and
transformed ecosystems, leading to major disruptions to traditional Cherokee life.32
The Ghost Dance's urging of Cherokees to abandon particular EuroAmerican practices
and return to Cherokee traditions, then, was not merely a symbolic gesture of protest.
Asking Cherokees to return to Cherokee lifeways was seen as a way of ensuring
Cherokee landbases remained Cherokee.

The Cherokee Ghost Dance, while pacifist, was nonetheless confrontational to
invading powers. By placing traditional Cherokee performance at the center of rhetorical
resistance, it both subtly and explicitly rejected European attempts to usurp Cherokee
lands. Philip J. Deloria remarks that Indigenous religious dances "offered (a). . .visible
threat for they suggested a willful breaking away fi'om the hold of church and
civilization" (27). Through the reclamation of traditional dances, songs, and other
religious practices, Cherokees were reasserting jurisdiction over Cherokee landbases and
rejecting European practices that threatened to usurp Cherokee land.

Some followers of the Ghost Dance publicly burned their European-style clothes
as a performed rejection of European practices. Cherokees and non-Cherokees alike
recognized these rhetorics of resistance and many attempted to suppress the movement.
Colonel Return J. Meigs—a federal agent to the Cherokees—expresses outrage at the

Ghost Dance, illustrating that colonial powers did not see the movement as innocuous:

 

32 While I cannot pursue this line of thought here, and I am no historical ecologist, I would like to raise the
possibility that Cherokee Ghost Dance leaders call for Cherokees to kill their cats was not merely because
domesticated cats were distinctly EuroAmerican, but also because domesticated cats were an invasive

species that radically disrupted Cherokee ecosystems.

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Amongst them are some fanatics who tell them that the Great Spirit is
angry with them for adopting the manners, customs, and habits of white
people who they think are very wicked. In some few instances some have
thrown off their clothing into the fire and burned them up; some of the
females are mutilating fine muslin dresses and are told they must
discontinue their dancing reels and country dances which have become
very common amongst the young people, being told by these fanatics that
these are amongst the causes of the displeasure of the Great Spirit
(McLoughlin 148).

The movement was clearly seen by colonial powers and some Cherokees as
dangerous because of its opposition to the United States' cultural and physical
encroachment. Major Ridge was one of the Cherokees opposed the Ghost Dance
movement. McKenney relates this story: "Major Ridge perceived at once the evil effect
that would be produced by such haranges. . .. He rose in his place and addressing the
tumultuous assemblage. . .said, 'My friends, the talk you have heard is not good. It would
lead us to war with the United States, and we should suffer'" (qtd. in McLoughlin 137).
Colonists, missionaries, and their Cherokee allies quickly began trying to contain and
discredit the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement's radically decolonial rhetorics.

Not only was the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement explicitly decolonial, it was
also historiographic. Rather than a historiography that utilized the archive as its primary
source and employed alphabetic texts to transmit historical interpretations, the Ghost
Dance utilized the repertoire as both its central source and means of delivery. If

performance does not disappear, as Taylor argues, but instead remains present through

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embodied memory and practice, then performances that reproduce practices of the past
are part of an embodied historiography. During the Ghost Dance movement, Cherokees
looked to a collective repertoire of Cherokee practices to reassert Cherokee traditions as
a radical act of resistance and continuance. Ancestral performances were centralized to
resist colonization, continue Cherokee lifeways, and maintain relationships with
traditional landbases.

Taylor argues, "Performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social
knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated, or what Richard
Schechner has called 'twice-behaved behavior'" (2-3). If we understand performance as
an act of transfer—what our field might call delivery——we see the ways‘in which the
Cherokee Ghost Dance movement insisted on the importance of transferring and
maintaining Cherokee historical memory. The Cherokee Ghost Dance did not teach that
the practice of traditional dances would literally bring back the dead, as did parts of
Wovoka's movement, but instead argued that our ancestors are made present through the
reenactment of their practices. This same tenet is present in other Native revitalization
movements, including Redbird Smith's movement to reestablish Cherokee ceremonial
traditions in Indian Territory.

As mentioned previously, some leaders of the Ghost Dance movement insisted
that not following the Ghost Dance movement would bring about God's wrath. Mooney
argued that the failure of apocalyptic prophecies to manifest put a quick end to the Ghost
Dance. Using McLaughlin's more recent work and looking to the rhetorical features of

the Ghost Dance in relation to other Cherokee revitalization movements may bring us to

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different conclusions.33 While 1813 is considered to be the "end" of the Cherokee Ghost
Dance movement, McLaughlin's work acknowledges that such an assertion is
problematic: "For the traditionalist, loyalty to the faith is itself a measure of pride. Open
espousal of the new religion may cease, but the religion may continue underground, in
personal talks, in the poses of private thought. [. . .] In any case, traditionalism did not die
with the Ghost Dance movement" (135). Kehoe likewise brings attention to ongoing
revitalization movements in Native communities: "Revitalization is strong, from
multiplying Sun Dances on the Plains reservations, to a growing serious literature by self-
consciously Indian authors" (133).

To demarcate a particular closure to the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement, then,
is difficult. "Cultural reformulation necessarily occurs over and over again in every
society. [. . .] This is not a matter of 'progress' but of adaptation to necessity; there is no
single line of development but a multitude of adaptations" (Kehoe 126). Revitalization
movements resurfaced in Cherokee communities after removal, in the face of allotment,
and are taking place in the present. Paying attention to performance rhetorics allows us to
see connections between the Ghost Dance movement and Redbird Smith's movement in
Indian Territory/Oklahoma. By looking to later revivalist movements among
Cherokees—including those currently underway—we can see traces of the Ghost Dance
movement, a movement that argued Cherokees must engage in ancestral performances

and other practices to resist, survive, and continue.

 

33 It is interesting to note that catastrophic disaster—the removal—did come to Cherokees and that, in fact,

those who hid in the mountains—now the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians—were spared removal.

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Redbird Smith and the Keetoowah Society

Even if some of the particular doctrines of this movement may have faded, many
did not. The fact that Cherokee spiritual, ceremonial, and performative traditions survived
through to the present may very well be owed to this particular revitalization movement.
Revitalization movements after removal contain traces of this movement, as do practices
and belief systems of many contemporary Cherokees. Wilma Mankiller, for instance,
writes, "There is an old Cherokee prophecy which instructs us that as long as the
Cherokees continue traditional dances, the world will remain as it is, but when the dances
stop, the world will come to an end. Everyone should hope that the Cherokees will
continue to dance" (29).34

Performance uses embodied practice to carry rhetoric over time and space: "The
repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of
knowledge by 'being there,‘ being a part of the transmission. [. . .] The repertoire both
keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning. [. . .] But even though the embodiment
changes, the meaning might very well remain the same" (Taylor 20). 1811-1813 is plenty
of time for particular practices to be transmitted, continued, and passed on to others, and
later revivalist movements drew (and draw) on embodied memories of performance
traditions. While looking at archival records alone might suggest that the Ghost Dance
ended in 1813, looking to the repertoire complicates this version of history.

In Chapters One and Two, I discussed some of the rhetorical features and contexts

of stomp dance communities as a way to examine the rhetorical work of performance in

 

34 Considering that this is a prophecy from the Cherokee Ghost Dance, it is my assumption that Mankiller

is—in fact—making a direct reference to beliefs rooted in this movement.

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Cherokee resistance. 1 want to take some time here to further contextualize Cherokee
stomp dance communities within a longer history of Cherokee revitalization movements.
Cherokee stomp dance communities have looked to the past, utilizing both the archive
and the repertoire, as an integral aspect of re-embodying history through performance.
Like the Cherokee Ghost Dance, Redbird Smith's movement with the Keetoowah Society
sought to revive Cherokee ceremonial performances as a way of resisting EuroAmerican
cultural dominance and colonization, arguing for the embodiment of Cherokee traditions
as central to resistance.

Redbird Smith's movement was not the first Cherokee revitalization movement in
Indian Territory, and was in fact a revival of earlier iterations of the Keetoowah Society.
The Keetoowah Society was originally formed in 1859 to counter the secret societies
started by pro-slavery, pro-secessionist interests in the Cherokee Nation. The Keetoowahs
were explicitly anti-slavery and pro-union. In addition to these particular political
commitments, the Keetoowah Society worked to preserve ancient Cherokee religion and

revive the township political structures of the past.35

The choice of the name Keetoowah (YSG) was itself a performative act to

maintain cultural memory and argue for the reestablishment of ancient practices. As

noted in the previous chapter, YSG is the name of the original mother town of the

Cherokees, near present-day Bryson City, North Carolina. The YSG (Giduwa) mound

remains a sacred place for Cherokee people. According Thomas, the name Keetoowah

 

35 I rely heavily here on Robert K. Thomas' The Origin and Development of the Redbird Smith Movement,

which provides a comprehensive and in-depth narrative of this particular revitalization movement.

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was decided by founders of the Society because "they decided that 'we are still A-ni-Ki-
too-wha-gi' or People of Ketoowha" (61-62). By choosing this name, Keetoowah Society
organizers argued for Cherokees to remember their most ancient histories, landbases, and
ceremonies. Regardless of the many differences and fissures between Cherokees——
especially those that emerged because of invasion, colonization, and removal—

traditionalists asked Cherokees to recall their earliest cultural memories as a unified

people, Dh YSGIY (Ani Giduwagi).

Not only did Cherokee traditionalists seek to reconstitute the past through the
naming of the organization, the Keetoowah Society—while pacifist—adopted aspects of
a "red town" governmental structure (Thomas 62).36 This incarnation of the Society
lasted until after the Civil War, but broke into smaller groups after the 1872 death of head
chairman Lewis Downing. The society was then reorganized by Bud Gritts in 1874 until
his death inl885 (Thomas 67-68).

In 1887 the Dawes Act was passed and in 1889 Oklahoma Territory was opened
by the US. government for white settlement. This same year, the Keetoowahs moved
from a mostly political secret society to a public political and religious organization
(Thomas 114-115). In 1894 the Dawes Commission began negotiating with the Five

Tribes around issues of land allotment and dissolution of tribal governments and in 1896,

 

36 Thomas writes, "Exactly what the reasons for using the titles of the old red organization, e.g., the captain
(skai-gunst) is not known. Perhaps the full-bloods still locked to the Cherokee government led by John

Ross as the white organization and did want to sever relations with it, so they used the red titles" (62).

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within the context of the allotrnent's threat to the Cherokees, Redbird Smith was chosen
by the Keetoowahs to aid in cultural revival and resisting allotment.

Redbird Smith was already involved with the Keetoowah Society as well as the
Cherokee Nation, and was selected by the Society to "get back what the Ketoowahs had
lost" (qtd. in Thomas 119). It was at this point that the Keetoowahs began to focus on a
reclamation of Cherokee ceremonial traditions through historiography in both the archive
and the repertoire. Like the Cherokee Ghost Dance nearly one hundred years earlier, the
Keetoowahs looked to the past in order to find ways to resist colonization in the present,
specifically focusing on particular performative practices as central to resistance.
Performances were once again seen as part of a practice that made particular places into
Cherokee spaces.

While the Ghost Dance movement relied on the repertoire as its main source of
historical memory, Redbird Smith's wave of the Keetoowah Society utilized both archive
and repertoire in order to revive and revise cultural memory and practice. One of the
central archival sources for the Keetoowahs were the seven wampum belts kept by John
Ross' grandson, Bob Ross. Thomas writes, "The first step that was taken to 'get back what
the Ketoowahs had lost' was to recover the Cherokee wampum belts" (119). While the
original purpose and history of the belts is debatable, the Keetoowahs felt that the belts
would help them in the reconstruction and revival of Cherokee ceremonial knowledge.
The Keetoowahs saw the belts as belonging to traditional communities, not to be kept as
family heirlooms, and after convincing Ross to lend the Society the belts, they refused to
return them. As mentioned in Chapter One, the belts continue to be held by the

Keetoowah Society.

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The process of interpreting the belts in order to reconstruct ceremonial knowledge
was historiographic: it relied on the wampum belts as archival material, combined that
material with cultural memories in order to interpret them, and transferred those
interpretations into community memory and practice. Thomas writes, "When the
Ketoowah Society first got possession of the wampums, they knew nothing of the
interpretation of them. [. . .] All the following acts of the great nativistic revival stemmed
from the interpretation of these wampums" (120- 121). The revitalization of Cherokee
performance and religious traditions were dependent on the interpretation of archival
knowledge in order to move this knowledge into the repertoire. Performance and
ceremonial traditions as well as political and social structures were put back into practice
through using the belts as an archival source. The Keetoowahs did not rely on the archive
alone, but—like the Cherokee Ghost Dance—looked to the repertoire to re-construct
Cherokee ceremonial performances. The Keetoowah Society's revival relied on Natchez
and Creek ceremonial tradition that had informed them, but drew on Cherokee cultural
knowledge to re-establish particular Cherokee traditions.

The Keetoowahs also relied on the work of a Native scholar to recreate Cherokee
ceremonial practices. In 1915, a graduate lawyer from the Oneida tribe of Wisconsin
named C.P. Cornelius joined the Keetoowah Society, helping to make particular
Iroquoian additions to Keetoowah ceremonials. Thomas points out, "The Oneidas of
Wisconsin had been Christian for many years and do not keep up with the rites of the
Long House. But C.P. Cornelius, being an educated man, must have read much of
Iroquois history and probably had visited the Six Nations in New York and Canada"

(182). Through his own cultural memory from both the archive and the repertoire,

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Cornelius helped to re-interpret the wampum belts and brought Iroquoian customs the

ceremonial and political structure of the Keetoowah Society. Thomas argues:
After these innovations. . .the organization of the Fires very closely
approximated the organization of the Cherokee town fires in aboriginal
times. The Cherokee town organization seems to have been a basic
Southeastern town organization modified by the Iroquoian emphasis on
clan. The Ketoowah Society had started out by taking on a modified
version of the Creek town organization and then had modified this further
with the help of an Iroquois, C.P. Cornelius (187).

Through a decolonial historiography using both archive and repertoire, the Keetoowahs

were able to revive practices of the past and return them to an embodied memory in the

present.

The revival and continuance of Cherokee ceremonial and performative resistance
in the face of colonial powers has necessarily looked to practices of the past. The Ghost
Dance movement utilized the repertoire as its central source for knowledge, while
Redbird Smith's wave of revitalization in Cherokee communities drew on both the
archive and the repertoire.

These revitalization movements provide a model for historiographic work that
places decolonization and continuance as its central motivation, and further, they insist
that historiography is a practice that makes the past present. My own historiographic
work uses revitalization movements as a model, paying close attention to the ways
historical memory can be revived and revised through research in the archive and the

repertoire. My archival work has focused on recovering a history of nineteenth century

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theater as a means of revising our memories of Cherokee rhetorical history, and—as will
be discussed in the following chapter—has looked to both archive and repertoire to
recover Cherokee Two-Spirit histories in order to revise both the archival record and
contemporary historical memory regarding thesehistories. Within contexts of decolonial
activism, historiography can become a radical act to revive historical memories by
placing them back into the repertoire. The Ghost Dance has yet to end: we are still

dancing.

Historiography as Ghost Dance: Recovering Nineteenth Century Cherokee Theater
I am in the reading room in the Newberry Library looking at a copy of a

nineteenth century Cherokee primer, whispering the Cherokee syllables to myself in a

beginning-level literacy in my ancestral language. LII}, bill. Siqua, siqua, I make out.

Pig, pig. But I don't know enough Cherokee to decipher the rest of what appears to be a

nursery rhyme or children's story. I rely on the woodcut images to help me through the

book: BOI'Ir, tlameha, bat. A word I can't read that must mean "gun" or "rifle." Another

word must mean "boat" or "steam ship," but I can only read one letter. And it occurs to
me that I'm engaged in a subversive act, performing a story that is the antithesis of the
colonial project. I remember the many Indian children forced into English literacy
through the boarding schools and missions, imagine them reading similar English

primers, sounding out each letter, studying the images to make sense of the text. What

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does it mean to go "back to the blanket" in this way?37 The archival project was not
created for Indians. It was created to consolidate knowledge about Indians. Thomas
Richards writes that the imperial archive "was a fantasy of knowledge collected and
united in the service of state and Empire" (6). And yet here I am, an Indian in the archive,
using it as a tactic in a process of Cherokee tribalographical and historiographical
production. Sitting in the archive, touching books that my ancestors may have touched,
feels like a Ghost Dance. The library throngs with (g)hosts.38

De Certeau says of historiography, "The dear departed find a haven in the text
because they can neither speak nor do harm anymore. These ghosts find access through
writing on the condition that they remain forever silent" (Writing 2, italics in original).
Yet, as de Certeau and Howe both assert, the silence of the dead and the past is a part of
distinctly dominant Western European cosmology. Native historiography/tribalography
understands the dead as present, as a continuing part of the story, as "not altogether
powerless." While Native historiography may very well be, in part, what de Certeau calls
a "discourse of the dead" (46), understandings of our relationships with the dead are often
drastically different than those of Europeans. Historiography as a Ghost Dance

understands that part of our work as Native historiographers is sustaining relationships

 

37 "Back to the blanket" is a pejorative phrase from the US. Indian boarding school systems that referred to
Native people who—rather than assimilating after their boarding school education—returned to their
communities and continued their traditions.

38 Wa’do to Malea Powell for bringing up ghosts and the Newberry Library in her own archival work in

her essay "Dreaming Charles Eastman: Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and Geography in Indigenous

Rhetorical Histories" (Kirsch et al 115-127).

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with our ancestors, bringing back their words and acts that have too often been stolen or
hidden from us. Indigenous historiography does not merely recover and re-contextualize
archival information, but moves the archive into cultural memory and practice. For
Native people, historiography is a practice that helps to constantly make and re-make
Indigenous space.

And here is the why the Indian in the archive threatens the very structure of
dominant discourse: unlike Indian artifacts and texts claimed by libraries and museums,
the Indian in the archive comes out of the archive again, bringing our ghosts with us. We
are not Indians in the cupboard, teeny playthings for white supremacy's imagination. We
are real and alive, just as our communities and histories are living and unruly. Indians in
the archive transform the archive into Native spaces by employing decolonial practices.
We disrupt the fantasy of the imperial archive by transferring the archive to the
repertoire of cultural memory.

Until the recent recovery of and critical work about Lynn Riggs by Jace Weaver
(1997; Riggs 2003) and Craig S. Womack (1999) and most recently Daniel Heath Justice
(2006), little history has been written about non-ritual Cherokee theater. Even with these
significant contributions, there still exists a void of history regarding Cherokee theater.
Examining its role as a tool of resistance, continuance, and nation-building, my archival
research focuses on recovering nineteenth century Cherokee theater and placing these
performances within a larger context of Cherokee histories.

It is important to say in an Indigenous-centered methodology that I feel that my
work in Cherokee historiography is aided by the dead, that ancestors are watching and

helping me in this work. While doing research at the Newberry, I told an archivist that I

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was interested in finding information on nineteenth century Cherokee theater. His
answer was, in brief, that it would be a difficult project, one that could take a decade, and
he suggested I try to find sources in other libraries.

A few hours after examining the Cherokee primer, I decided to simply jump into
an extensive card catalog and look under "Cherokee" for anything that might be of use to
me. I thought while looking through hundreds of titles, that perhaps ancestors would
push me in the right direction. After writing down about ten call numbers for books I
thought sounded interesting, I went to the fourth floor and chose three titles to look at in
the hour before the library closed. One of them was a slim volume from 1889 called
Literature of the Cherokees by George E. Foster, where I stumbled upon (or perhaps it
stumbled upon me) the following entry:

Brinton cites under the head of "Dramatic Literature," an instance. "A
pantomime where the actors appeared in costume was seen by Lieutenant
Timberlake among the Cherokees in the middle of the last century, which
he spoke of as 'very diverting,‘ where some of the actors dressed in the
skins of wild animals, and the simulated contest between the pretended
beasts and the men who hunted them being the motives of the contest."
We cite a later instance: when John Ridge, Elias Boudinot and

other Cherokee youth hereafter mentioned, attended the Mission School at
COrnwall, Conn., they arranged a drama, and it was acted in the school
and called a "Cherokee Council of War" (Foster 3-4).

This was the beginning I needed to pursue further archival work. This fragment of

history is a clear example of Cherokees—and in this case Cherokees who became quite

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prominent in Cherokee politics—using a Cherokee-centered performance within a
context meant to acculturate Cherokee people. This play is also mentioned in an 1822
edition of The Christian Disciple and Theological Review, discussing the missionary
work at the Mission School:
The present state of this institution the object of which is the education of
young heathens may be acceptable to our readers. It is five years since its
establishment. The annual examination and exhibition of the school were
very interesting to a crowded audience. Among the visitors were several
strangers gentlemen of intelligence and distinction who were much
gratified. Among the pieces exhibited were a Cherokee Council of War on
the subject of the present dispute between the Cherokees and the
Osages. . .(Worcester and Ware 62).

During this period, some Cherokees were willingly removing to present day
Arkansas and Oklahoma, onto Osage lands. This caused a series of major conflicts
between Cherokees and Osages that lasted from the beginning of the nineteenth century
until directly before removal. While John Ridge—the son of Major Ridge—and Elias
Boudinot pursued an education at the Cornwall school in order to aid in Cherokee
struggles against US. domination, it is clear that the mission school hoped to "civilize"
Indigenous people as a means of containing resistance. Ridge and Boudinot's use of
performance to address specifically Cherokee politics and concerns undermines the goal
of colonialism to contain resistance. Instead, this performance addressed Cherokee
politics and asserted Cherokee self-determination in the face of complex and overlapping

colonial projects.

110

While I don’t know the text of this performance at this point—it's quite possible
that the script was never written down—the fact that such a performance took place
exemplifies what I described in detail in Chapter One as a doublewoven rhetorical
strategy. On the outside of this performance is a public presentation to "gentlemen of
intelligence and distinction" to showcase the work of the mission school in "the education
of young heathens." The performance was used by both the school and by the Cherokees
involved to demonstrate that Indigenous people were able to successfully incorporate
dominant EuroAmerican culture and discourse.

On the inside of this performance, however, we see Cherokees utilizing
performance to re-center discourse onto Cherokee politics and struggles. Far from
containing resistance, the education at the Cornwall school enabled the Cherokees who
attended to subvert colonial projects. Uncovering this small fragment of documentation
helps imagine some of the ways Cherokees were using theater during the nineteenth
century rhetorically, and to have a clearer idea of the contexts and spaces in which such
performances took place. Furthermore, it illustrates one instance—likely one of many—
in which Cherokees were using theater to make particular arguments in the face of major
political and social upheaval.

While there is little doubt that A Cherokee Council of War was not an isolated
performance, the archival records I've accessed don't mention theatrical presentations in
Cherokee communities until after the removal. However, Cherokee theater and other
kinds of proscenium performances—music, oratory, dance, vaudeville—and certainly
performances like the Wild West Show—were taking place in Indian Territory at the turn

of the century. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of theater and other proscenium

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performances taking place in the Cherokee Nation is the fact that opera houses were built
throughout the Nation, including in Tahlequah, Claremore, and Vinita. Numerous kinds
of public performances and activities took place in these establishments, and in
Tahlequah the opera house was utilized for public performances of students from the
Cherokee National Male and Female Seminaries. One can imagine that the performances
that took place in Cherokee opera houses were similar to those that occurred in non-
Cherokee opera houses in the United States during this same period.

In a record book from the Cherokee National Male Seminary, on May 2, 1899 the
following is recorded: "The proposition to give an entertainment, the proceeds of which
to be given as a subscription to the erection of a statue in the memory of Sequoyah, was
heartily supported and the details of the work allotted to the several teachers" (Seminary
Record Book 7). The organizing and execution of this "entertainment"— which certainly
included music and likely included oratory and theater—is mentioned again on May 19'",
and on June 9th is a detailed account of the expenses and earnings from the fundraiser.39
The record notes the cost of renting a piano and the opera house in Tahlequah, and states
that the event raised $19.10 for the seminary (8-9)

On February 18, 1901, the production of an "entertainment" as a means to raise
funds for the school is mentioned again: "At a meeting of the faculty a committee of six
from Cherokee and Sequoyah societies, was present waiting permission to give an

entertainment about the first week in April 1901, for the benefit of the Athletic

Association" (49).

 

9 . . . . .
3 We must make an educated guess and assume that this "entertarnment" Included srmrlar performances as

the seminaries conducted during commencements.

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The fact that performance was being used by the Male Seminary to raise funds,
and the fact that opera houses such as the one in Tahlequah were utilized, tells us that
"entertainments" were not only performed, but that there was a paying audience in the
Cherokee Nation for such events. While the records from the Male Seminary are few, it
makes sense that such events were a regular and established means to raise money.

The National Cherokee Female Seminary likewise used theater and other
performances as part of the curriculum and activities of the school. After the National
Council authorized the construction of additions to the original building in 1877, the
seminary included an auditorium, and the library was also used as a "recitation room"
(Mihesuah 55). Further, both "Elocution" and "Expression" were a part of the education
of women at the Female Seminary (Fry 104). In Maggie Culver Fry's histories collected
in the late 19808 of lives in the Cherokee female seminary—Cherokee Female Seminary
Years: A Cherokee National Anthology—a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream
is mentioned several times, as are numerous other performances. Mae McSpadden Poole,
who happens to be a niece of Will Rogers, shares these memories:

I am Mae McSpadden Poole, daughter of John Tomas and Sallie
Rogers McSpadden. I am also a Cherokee National Seminary graduate of
1905.L.]

At the close of my last year there, we presented Shakespeare's A
Midsummer-Night's Dream, with Miss Allen, our Seminary principal, and
miss Minta Foreman spending their time for a year attending dramas and

operas in Kansas City and Dallas.

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Miss Allen was a spending organizer and gave parts of the play to
each Seminary teacher for their acting participants to learn. Thus we lived
Shakespeare for a whole year. I was Puck in the play and enjoyed it
immensely. Our presentation was at the Tahlequah Opera House" (147-
148)
Poole's experiences at the seminary show that not only were Cherokees involved in
theater, but that—at least for students and teachers at the Female Seminary from 1904—
l905—theater was central to people's lives.40 Poole continues:
After I graduated, I taught at Wheelock Academy in the southeast

comer of the state. It was located in the Choctaw Nation.

 

40 Working from some of the same primary sources 1 have consulted, Devon Mihesuah refers to an annual
Shakespeare production at the Female Seminary. As of this writing, I have had difficulty confirming this.
Poole's memory of the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream occurred during her last year at the
seminary, 1904-1905. Fry mentions the production happening in 1907, but the description of events
surrounding the performance sound like Poole's memories from 1905, leading one to wonder if these are
actually the same event:
When the Female Seminary Drama Committee selected Shakespeare's A Midsummer-
Night’s Dream as their final drama in the 1907 school year, both Miss Allen and Miss
Minta Foreman spent their vacation time going to opera and drama presentations in
Kansas City and Dallas, observing stagecraft and expression to the smallest detail (83).
Poole's story does not seem to indicate a precedent for Shakespeare being performed before her last year at
the Seminary, though while at the Wheelock Academy Poole notes that Cherokee Seminary students
performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream at least one additional time. While there may have very well been
an annual Shakespeare production—«and there was certainly a Drama Committee which decided on an
annual production of some sort—l am unsure how long this tradition lasted. Without a deeper examination

of archival records, I hesitate to claim that a Shakespearian production was annual.

114

It was while I was teaching at Wheelock Academy that some of the
Seminary players again presented A Midsummer-Night's Dream, this time
in a natural setting out in the open.

And again the Misses Allen and Foreman came to our assistance.

After the play was scheduled, we began to worry over one thing
we had overlooked.

Where would the audience come from?

Wheelock was near a little place called Millerton, just a "wide
place in the road. " It was sparsely populated and the roads were rough.
People lived miles away from the Wheelock Mission.

After watching the distant roads for the longest time, there in the
distance we saw the outline of a back. And soon, other figures appeared in
the distance.

They were actually coming...

By nightfall, one thousand Indians had gathered to see the play that
was presented by moonlight in an amphitheater, with the aid of electric
lights.

The people had left their work and traveled miles to see the play.

With the aid of the Female Seminary players and their directors,

the play was a success (148-149).

This memory shows that there was a huge Indian (and probably non-Indian)

audience for theater in Indian Territory. While we cannot be sure that it was actually "one

thousand Indians" that traveled to see the production at Wheelock, it was no doubt a

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significant number of people willing to travel several miles and lose pay in order to
attend such an event.“

Shakespeare was not the only kind of theatrical performance that took place at the
Female Seminary. "Pantomime" was performed by students within the seminary and
during public events (Fry 104-105). Mihesuah reports:

"The graduation activities for both seminaries were quite elaborate. [. . .]
The final night of the 1877 festivities was typical. A large group of
visitors gathered to hear some "well-delivered" compositions. . .. The Park
Hill Seminary (Female Seminary) Glee Club sang songs. . .. Another
student. . .recited "The New Church Organ," and prominent Cherokee
dignitaries gave speeches. [. . .] At other commencements, visitors
attended church services, recitals, plays, and programs consisting of vocal
solos, dances, instrumentals, and dramatic soliloquies (74-75).

Far from being an isolated or unusual occurrence, theater (among other
performances) was practiced and watched by Cherokees within a variety of contexts.

While the very beginnings of a recovery of nineteenth century Cherokee theater
are of no doubt exciting to me, the process of interacting with the archive has been almost
as important in my research as the actual recovery of such a history. In particular, I've
been struck with how, almost across the board, archivists have told me that I won't find
information on Cherokee theater during the this period, and further, that Cherokees

weren't engaged in theater at this time. What I've found, instead, is that there are

 

4 . . . . . .
I It rs Important to note that, while employees of the Cherokee Nation, the Instructors mentioned here are

not Cherokee.

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numerous references to theater in the Cherokee communities during the nineteenth
century, even with some of the major holes that exist in the archival record because of
removal, the Civil War, and the loss of both the Cherokee Male and Female Seminaries
due to fires.

What this tells me, then, is that there is a particular notion of both Cherokees and
"the Indian" that has been constructed that is removed from the actual practices of
Cherokee people in the nineteenth century. Cherokees performing theater are, as Phillip J.
Deloria claims, Indians in unexpected places. Deloria argues that "At stake in
discursive/ideological formations throughout US. history has been the body of accepted
knowledge about Indian people, the ways in which knowledge helped constitute
individuals and groups as subjects, and the new and old ways in which power was to be
allied to Indians and non-Indians alike" (1 1). The recovery of nineteenth century
Cherokee theater has been ignored not because of its absence in the archival record but
because of its absence in the minds of many scholars and researchers.

While the stomp dance utilized traditional Cherokee performances to argue
against dominant EuroAmerican culture, theater—at least the performances I point to
here—utilized a dominant EuroAmerican discourse to make arguments about the
Cherokee Nation as "civilized." By engaging in EuroAmerican theatrical practices—
whether through scripts created and performed by Cherokees such as A Cherokee Council
of War, or by Cherokees performing Shakespeare—Cherokees asserted that they could
become more "civilized" than EuroAmericans, asserting their sovereignty as well as

historical and legal relationships to land.

117

What does it mean to choose to ignore or forget this particular aspect of Cherokee
history? It means that we forget the complexities of Cherokee resistance that took place
through performance, trading a complicated cultural memory for a more convenient
construction of "Indian" or "Cherokee" that forgets the particular practices of our
ancestors. To forget theater as an important aspect of Cherokee resistance to
EuroAmerican colonialism ignores rhetorical and cultural work that was important to
many Cherokee people during this period. While different than arguments being made by
the stomp dance movement, Cherokee theater nonetheless employed performance to
make arguments about Cherokees as a people and as a nation.

Ignoring Cherokee theater in the nineteenth century leaves a gap in our cultural
memory, and recovering our rhetorical histories must entail a better understanding of
theater and other performances as part of rhetorical struggles. Reviving a memory of
these practices is part of a Ghost Dance that provides us with a more complete and
complex understanding of Cherokee histories of resistance. Reestablishing a memory of
nineteenth century Cherokee theater is part of larger Cherokee (and other Indigenous)
revivalist movements happening through the archive. Many Native people, including
myself, are making use of archival materials—texts, letters, wax reels, archeological
"findings"-—to put particular practices back into the repertoire. My archival work on
both Cherokee theater and Cherokee Two-Spirit traditions is meant to contribute to this

effort in order to revise cultural memories through both archive and repertoire.

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The Warriors of Anikituwha

Like previous Cherokee revivalist movements, contemporary Cherokees are using
both the archive and the repertoire to reestablish dormant practices. Part of this
revivalist movement takes place on a small scale: anytime a Cherokee learns and then
sings a traditional song fi'om a CD—for instance—they transferring a cultural memory
from archive to repertoire. Another part of this revivalist movement is happening on a
larger level: Cherokees are doing work within archives in order to completely revive
practices that are no longer within the repertoire. James "Bo" Taylor and Marie
Junaluska's work with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to revive performance
practices holds traces of the Cherokee Ghost Dance and other Cherokee revivalist
movements.

In 2003, Junaluska—a storyteller, Giduwa Cherokee speaker and teacher, and
tribal council member—approached Taylor—an archivist at the Museum of the Cherokee
Indian—to help recreate ancient Cherokee dances.42 Out of this process emerged The
Warriors of Anikituhwa, a performance group that has re-established the Cherokee War
Dance and the Eagle Tail dance. The group also performs Cherokee social dances such
as the Friendship Dance and the Bear Dance ("Warriors of Antikituwha").

Dormant dances were recreated through Lt. Henry Timberlake's descriptions of
Cherokees during the eighteenth century, wax cylinder recordings, elder knowledge, and
embodied cultural memories. According to the website for the Eastern Band, "As Taylor

put this knowledge together, he realized that the dance that Timberlake thought was a

 

42 There are two main dialects of the Cherokee language: Otali, mainly spoken in Oklahoma, and Giduwa,

spoken in the Qualla Boundary.

119

'Welcome' dance was actually a war dance, performed to let Timberlake know that the
Cherokees were a mighty nation and that visitors needed to be on their best behavior"
("Warriors of AniKituhwa: Cherokee Traditional Dances").

Taylor describes this process in explicitly revivalist ways, suggesting that the re-
embodiment of these dances is part of a larger process of Cherokee resistance and
healing. The re-embodiment of the past helps heal the legacies of colonization on both
individual and community levels. Bo Taylor claims, "For a long time, I didn’t know who
I was, where I came from. [. . .] From doing this, it has helped me find strength from way
back, from deep down" (ElGhazaly paragraph 3). Like the Keetoowah Society, the
Warriors of Anikituhwa invoke Cherokees' oldest name to argue for Cherokees to
remember our origins and practices, using both archive and repertoire in order to "get
back" what was "lost."

While the revival of ceremonial traditions in Indian Territory/Oklahoma focused
on reestablishing the social and spiritual structure of ceremonially white——peace—towns,
we can see the Warriors of Anikituhwa focusing on a revitalization of red—warrior—
traditions once central to Cherokee resistance, government, and diplomacy. Bo Taylor
argues that "Anybody who is keeping our culture alive is being a warrior. [. . .] For a long
time, we put on this paint in order to fight our aggressors. Now, we put on our paint to
challenge our own people to look down deeper and say this is important" (ElGhazaly,
paragraph 6). The performances of Warriors of Anikituhwa are an embodied
historiography. Taking information from archive and repertoire, Taylor and other

performers not only reconstruct the past, they move the past into an embodied present,

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arguing that these practices are necessary and vital to contemporary Cherokee life and
resistance.

Just as the War Dance was used as part of international diplomacy in the past, the
Eastern Band has designated the Warriors of Anikituhwa their official cultural
ambassadors ("Warriors of AniKituhwa: Cherokee Traditional Dances"). The work of
the Warriors of Anikituhwa has not only reestablished particular performance practices,
it has also reestablished the rhetorical-political significance of those performances within
Cherokee communities. The Warriors of Anikituwha does what all decolonial
historiography should do: revise our cultural memory of the past, shift our practices of
the present, and open the future to additional possibilities of resistance. Like the
Cherokee Ghost Dance and the Redbird Smith movement, the Warriors of Anikituwha
are arguing that it is through performance and other embodied practices that Cherokees
maintain cultural memory and resist colonization. A similar revitalization movement is
happening within Two-Spirit communities, which are using the archive to reestablish the
histories and practices of Two-Spirit people in various traditions. My archival work pays
close attention to a third space that contains stories and memories too often forgotten or

minimized.

Ghost Dancing the Archive
Native historiography entails what Malea Powell calls listening to ghosts: "[n]ot
only those arisen from the mess of blood and bones upon which 'America' is literally

built, but also those rooted in other knowledges, other ways of knowing, other ways of

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being and becoming that frequently go unheard and unsaid in much of scholarly work"
("Listening" 12). The dead are not altogether powerless.

While I was taking a Giduwa Cherokee language immersion course taught by Bo
Taylor on the Qualla Boundary in Summer 2007, I took some time to do archival work at
the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. Knowing that I was interested in nineteenth century
Cherokee theater, Taylor pointed me to the Eastern Band's transcribed copies of John
Howard Payne's manuscripts. Payne's account of Cherokee life during the nineteenth
century, while filtered through his own belief that Cherokees have a historical connection
of ancient Jewish culture, contain an immense amount of information on Cherokee
rhetorics, ceremony, and government. I had a limited time in the archive and hoped that
Payne—himself an actor—would make sOme sort of mention of Cherokee theater.

While my limited time with the manuscripts did not uncover information on
Cherokee theater, the archives suddenly offered up an unexpected gift: explicit
descriptions of same sex union ceremonies. As I will discuss in the next chapter, archival
evidence of Cherokee same-sex love and gender "variant" identities is at only the very
beginnings of being recovered, and so such a description is extremely important to
Cherokee Two-Spirit activists and tradition bearers. There is another Ghost Dance
happening in Cherokee country, the revival of Cherokee Two-Spirit practices and
memories.

De Certeau writes, “Archives make up the world of this technical game, a world
in which complexity is found, but sifted through and miniaturized, therefore made
capable of being formalized” (History 9). What does it mean, then, to be an Indian in this

game, to consciously subvert the precedents of dominant Western European history while

122

engaging with its game? It means that we are deeply complicating the game of the
imperial archive. And, in fact, we are doing something else entirely, while pretending to
play the game as a tactical maneuver. Instead of playing this game, we are performing a
Ghost Dance that, through reviving and continuing our cultural practices, can bring the

dead back home.

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CHAPTER FOUR

ON THE WINGS OF (“.85 (WADADUGA): TOWARDS THE PERFORMANCE OF

TWO-SPIRIT CRITIQUES

Splint UCG/Saquu/One: Introduction

Cherokee revitalization movements utilize knowledge from both the archive and
the repertoire to re-embody the past through contemporary practices. Among the many
revitalization movements happening in Indian Country are movements of Native Two-
Spirit people reconstructing spaces within our traditions, cultural memories, and
practices. On the Wings of Wadaduga, in addition to being the title of this chapter, is the
name for a larger research project I am conducting that utilizes both the archive and the
repertoire to tell Cherokee Two-Spirit stories through doublewoven performance.

Making a doublewoven basket is much more than the physical work of weaving:
Rivercane must be gathered, the stalks split, and the skin Of the splits carefully peeled to
create long splints to weave into a basket. The stories that I've gathered together from
interviews, archival research, and personal experiences are like freshly gathered cane that
I have only just begun to process into splints. These splints, the strands of research that
will be woven together in the future, have been left raw here so that they can be seen in
their material form. The research I am presenting points to the gaps in which a decolonial
imaginary can take place through processing and doubleweaving these splints. There is
no way for me to present this material as a completed basket, as the final creation will be

doublewoven through community, through SS)" (gadugi).

As I bring these splints together, the story of GLSS (Wadaduga, "Dragonfly")

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emerges as a powerfirl metaphor for Cherokee Two—Spirit people. GLSS enters only

peripherally in recorded Cherokee stories. Similarly, while contemporary scholarship has
addressed the roles of Two-Spirit/GLBTQ people within many Native traditions and
histories, discussions of Cherokee Two-Spirits have largely been left out of the discourse.
An absence of such scholarship and the lack of recovered archival documents regarding
identities we might now call "Two-Spirit" has been used by some Cherokees to argue that
Two-Spirit/GLBTQ people are, in fact, not a part of Cherokee traditions.

In the fall of 2004 Kathy Reynolds and Dawn McKinley put a call out to the Two-
Spirit community to aid them in a battle against the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. After
these two women had been issued a marriage certificate by the tribe in May of that year, a
moratorium on all marriages was placed, and the day before the moratorium was lifted,
an objection was filed against the marriage by Todd Hembree, an attorney for the tribe.
Reynolds and McKinley's call came shortly before a court date in which they were being
asked to demonstrate the historical existence of Two-Spirit people within Cherokee
tradition in order to justify their attempt at a legal recognition of their marriage.43
Knowing that there was very little information'recovered from the archive about
Cherokee Two-Spirit people, this call prompted me to begin research with Cherokee
Two-Spirit people that could revise the archive by creating a record of our experiences
through interviews and oral histories. Moving these interviews into a public performance
in the future can revise both the archive and the repertoire.

The participants involved with On the Wings of Wadaduga perform what I call

 

43 After a long battle, the Cherokee Nation’s Judicial Appeals Tribunal dismissed the injunction on the

couple’s marriage in February 2006.

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Two-Spirit critiques through the interview process. In the tradition of the Cherokee Ghost
Dance and the Redbird Smith movement, the stories from these interviews contribute to
Cherokee decolonization, healing, and continuance. This chapter establishes the
theoretical basis for T wo-Spirit critiques, looksto the stories of those involved with On
the Wings of Wadaduga for the ways they perform such critiques, and imagines a future
ensemble performance of these stories that can revise both the archive and the repertoire.
Cherokee Two-Spirits are currently engaged with numerous projects to re-story
ourselves. 4" One the Wings of Wadaduga is a rhetorical tactic that contributes to those

efforts.

Splint WP/TaI/Two: Re-storying (“.85 (Wadaduga)

There is an old Cherokee story about how Water Spider brought fire to the world on
her back. Like all stories, it's nested within other stories. Mooney's telling, and similar
versions, are the most well known:

In the beginning there was no fire, and the world was cold, until the
Thunders. . .who lived up in Galfifi'lati, sent their lighting and put fire into the
bottom of a hollow sycamore tree which grew on an island. The animals
knew it was there, because they could see the smoke coming out at the top,
but they could not get to it on account of the water, so they decided to call a
council to decide what to do (Myths 240-241).

Raven, Screech Owl, Hooting—Owl, Horned Owl, the Black Racer snake, and the Great

 

44 When I say re-story, I am speaking of a revitalizing cultural memories through stories in both the

archive and the repertoire. Restore + Story = Re-story.

126

Black Snake, all attempted to get the fire, but each failed. The smoke, fire, and ash gave

each of these animals their distinct physical characteristics.
Now they held another council, for still there was no fire, and the world was
cold, but birds, snakes, and four-footed animals, all had some excuse for not
going, because they were all afraid to venture near the burning sycamore,
until at last. . .the Water Spider said she would go. [. . .] She can run on top of
the water or dive to the bottom, so there would be no trouble to get over to the
island, but the question was, How could she bring back the fire? "I'll manage
that," said the Water Spider; so she spun a thread from her body and wove it
into a tusti bowl, which she fastened on her back. Then she crossed over to
the island and through the grass to where the fire was still burning. She put
one little coal of fire into her bowl, and came back with it, and ever since we
have had fire, and the Water Spider still keeps her tusti bowl (241-242).

In a brief footnote, Mooney mentions other versions of this story: "In the version
given in the Wahnenauhi manuscript the Possum and the Buzzard first make the trial, but
come back unsuccessful, one losing the hair from his tail, while the other has the feathers
scorched from his head and neck. In another version the Dragon-fly assists the Water-
spider by pushing the tusti from behind" (431).

I love dragonflies, and I became interested in thinking about their relationship to

Two-Spirit identities while finishing my BA at the University of Northern Colorado.45

 

4 . . .
5 This was, In part, influenced by Terry Tafoya's 1998 essay "M. Dragonfly: Two-Spirit and the Tafoya
Principle of Uncertainty" (Jacobs et 31 193-200). In 2006 Tafoya was found guilty of falsifying academic

and credentials. Further, he clearly misrepresented his relationship with Native communities. This was a

127

Mooney's brief mention of (11.88 (Wadaduga) in an alternate, and often untold, version

of the origin of fire intrigued me. Mooney briefly mentions GLSS (Wadaduga) again,

this time in relation to a story about a ballgame between birds and four-footed animals.46
This story, like the story of the origin of fire, is also about characters that dwell in liminal
spaces and cross boundaries. These ways of being—while initially met with derision or
skepticism—prove to be valuable assets to community:
The birds had the Eagle for their captain. . .. The dance was over and they
were all pruning their feathers up in the trees and waiting for the captain to
give the word when here came two little things hardly larger than field mice
climbing up the tree in which sat perched the bird captain. At last they
reached the top. . .and asked to be allowed to join in the game. The captain
looked at them, and seeing that they were four-footed, he asked why they did
not go to the animals, where they belonged. The little things said that they
had, but the animals had made fun of them and driven them off because they
were so small. The bird captain pitied them and wanted to take them.
But how could they join the birds when they had no wings? The Eagle,

the Hawk, and the others consulted, and at last it was decided to make some

 

shock to many Two-Spirit activists and our allies, as Tafoya had been a leader in Two-Spirit movements
and scholarship. Regardless, Tafoya's essay did prompt me to think about the stories and metaphors
dragonflies may hold for Two-Spirit people. Tafoya—deeply troubling as behavior may be—remains a part
of our larger story as contemporary Two-Spirit people.

46 . . . . . . .
Strckball rs traditionally an Important ceremonial and socral event for Cherokees and many other eastern

Native people.

128

wings for the little fellows (287).

Wings for ISO-Ir (Tlameha, Bat) were made from the groundhog skin from the head

of a drum, and wings for '66 (Tewa, Flying Squirrel) were made by two other birds by
stretching the animal's skin into wings. These two animals helped the birds win the ball
game against the larger animals. (287-288). In a brief explanation to a ballgame formula

in which 61.8% (Wadaduga) appears, Mooney writes, "The Watatuga, a small species of

dragon-fly, is also invoked, together with the bat, which, according to a Cherokee myth,
once took sides with the birds in a great ball contest with the four-footed animals, and

won the victory for the birds by reason of his superior skill in dodging" (397). Because of

the way both GLSS and Cherokee Two-Spirit people have remained marginal in both

published work and orature, GLSS emerges for me as a powerful metaphor for

contemporary Cherokee Two-Spirit experiences.

My call for participants for On the Wings of Wadaduga used GLSS (Wadaduga)

as a metaphor by pointing to a parallel near absence of both (“.88 and Two-Spirit

people in recorded stories. I was contacted by a Cherokee woman, Cat, who wanted to

tell me a version of the origin of fire she had learned.47 Cat's version of this story helps

to re-story GLSS into our consciousness, much in the same way as the stories that

 

47 Cat never identified herself to me as Two-Spirit. Her inclusion in the project was not because of her
identification, or lack thereof, with any labels under a "Two-Spirit" umbrella. Rather, she was included in
the project because she was willing to share a story that has important theoretical implications for Cherokee

Two-Spirits, and in fact all Cherokees.

129

Cherokee Two-Spirit people are telling are re-storying our place within Cherokee

communities and futures. Because of the significance of both this story to my own

theorizing, I would like to include Cat's interview here in its here in its entirety:
I was really little, I was probably about four or five, it was right before my
grandma died. And, we went down to the creek in the morning. And I
think we were either looking for crawdads, or we were gonna go get
pawpaws from under the trees down there. And, we were watching the
water spiders on the surface of the creek, and the dragonflies. And I was
talking about how pretty the dragonflies were, and I always loved the
water spiders. So my grandma started telling me the story about how we
got fire, and how the water spider brought fire in a little bubble on her
back. But her story was a little different from what I've heard since,
because what she said was along with all the other animals who went and
tried and failed and came back different, Water Spider tried and didn't
make it because it was just too far. So, Dragonfly offered up her back.
And Water Spider got up on the dragonfly's back and flew to get the fire,
and Water Spider got the fire, got back up on the dragonfly's back, and
when the dragonfly got tired she sat down on the surface of the water and
the water spider got the rest of the way.

So, the story's a little different from how I've heard it told since.

And it's very different from what I've read. And I don't know if my
grandmother was doing that because she wanted me to appreciate the

dragonflies for what they were, or simply because that was the way she'd

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heard it. But the other thing she said about the dragonflies after she told
the story was we were watching them and I was admiring their color, how
beautiful they were and she said that I always had to appreciate them
because no matter how frail and delicate they looked, that they were very
strong. And that they were very fierce hunters and fighters and lovers. And
I was a very little girl when she told me that story, and ever since I've
never forgotten that, and I've always admired the dragonflies because of
that story. And I've always thought of myself that way sometimes. When I
get a little afraid or a little. . .you know. . .about the way the world is
around me, I think back to that time that was a little more innocent and the
power of that moment. And I think of that dragonfly and I think I need to
be like that. Because that was my grandmother's lesson for me, was to tell
me that that's what I needed to understand, that was no matter how fragile
things seem, that they're stronger than we think. So I think that was about
it of the story, that I can really tell you. I mean, I could go through the
whole story about the different animals who went to the tree to get the fire,
but somehow that doesn't seem right to tell you that right now. But that's
my story.

Cat's telling of this story does very different theoretical work than the version of

the story that most of us are accustomed to hearing and reading. 48 Rather than a story

 

48 While previous to Cat's telling I had not heard anyone tell a version of this story with GLSS

(Wadaduga) involved, Mooney's brief reference to GLSS, however, helped me to imagine other versions

of this story to theorize a Cherokee Two-Spirit identity (2002, 2004).

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about Water Spider's individual victory, it is a story of cooperative labor—85y

(gadugin two small animals collaborating in order to ensure the continuance of the
world. This version of the story reminds us that there are many stories in Cherokee
communities in addition to the dominant stories taken as truth. As discussed in Chapter
One, these stories can be imagined as living in what Pérez calls a third space that hold
radical decolonial possibilities. By listening to and performing the stories denied or
forgotten because of colonialism—re-storying our cultural memories—we engage in
radical decolonial performance rhetorics.

It's important to remember that the nature of stories is that they have infinite
meanings. A story's significance is through our relationships to and understandings of
them. I don't think that "The Origin of Fire" is a "Two-Spirit" story, but rather, that it is
one story of many that can help Cherokee Two-Spirits understand our place within

Cherokee cosmology and give us strength in our present revitalization movements. By

doubleweaving stories of GLSS (Wadaduga) with Two-Spirit stories, additional ways of

seeing Cherokee Two-Spirit lives and struggles are able to emerge.

If performance is a rhetorical tool to transmit cultural memories, it is also a
rhetorical tool to intervene in dominant cultural memories that marginalize the
experiences of oppressed peoples. And, if embodied rhetorics—in this case
performance—aid in processes of healing historical trauma and struggles for
decolonization, then performance can be utilized by Two-Spirit people to heal from
colonization and place gender and sexuality at the center of radical, decolonial
movements. In order to understand the radical possibilities of performance within Two-

Spirit contexts, it is first necessary to discuss the critical work with which contemporary

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Two-Spirit people are already engaged.

Splint K'l'lTso/Three: Two-Spirit Critiques

While Cherokees remain largely marginal in scholarship on Two-Spirit people, a
very different but parallel erasure of Native Two-Spirit people has also occurred in
emergent scholarship being called "Queer of color critique" or "Queer diasporic critique."
In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, José
Esteban Munoz writes:

Disidentification can be understood as a way of shuffling back and forth
between reception and production. For the critic, disidentification is the
hermeneutical performance of decoding mass, high, or any other cultural field
from the perspective of a minority subject who is disempowered in such a
representational hierarchy (25).
Mufioz' work has been instrumental in the emergence of what is being called "Queer of
color critique" or "Queer diasporic critique." Roderick A. Ferguson says that
...Queer of color critique employs cultural forms to bear witness to the
critical gender and sexual heterogeneity that comprises minority cultures.
Queer of color analysis does this to shed light on the ruptural components
of culture, components that expose the restrictions of universality, the
exploitations of capital, and the deceptions of national culture (Ferguson
24).
One of the strongest aspects of Queer of color critique is its ability to employ a

multiplicity of tactics in order to decode nationalist (both colonizing and colonized)

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strategies. Queer of color critique uses both Queemess and race as a tactic to disrupt
white supremacist heteronomative strategies that constitute and normalize particular
practices and bodies through marginalizing others. Further, it seeks to position
Queemess as a tactic of resistance to hetronorrnalizing practices in nationalist discourses.

Another important feature of Queer of color critique is its insistence on drawing
from a variety of intellectual and political genealogies, including Queer theory, critical
race theory, and women of color feminisms (Ferguson 4). By drawing on numerous
locations, Queer of color critique is able to speak from multiple locations to numerous
audiences. Such critical interventions are necessary in order to reimagine Queer studies
as a space that focuses on intersecting experiences of oppression and resistance. What
Queer of color theorists offer to Queer studies, as well as the numerous interdisciplinary
fields they are connected with, is of the utmost importance.

Yet, the near absence of Native peoples and histories in the formulation of these
emergent theories should give us pause. The fact that Native people have largely (though
certainly not completely) been left out of Queer of color critique points to a major rupture
in its theories. Native people, then, must disidentijfv with the very critiques that claim to
be decolonial and counterhegemonic interventions for Queer people of color in order to
make it a viable theory for our communities. By doubleweaving Queer of color critique
with Indigenous theories, other critiques emerge that centralize Native peoples, nations,
identities, landbases, and survival tactics, which can be called T wo-Spirit critiques.
These critiques not only serve to disidentify with Queer of color critique, I believe they
create more robust and effective interventions in systems of oppression from which

Native studies, Queer studies, and rhetoric and composition can benefit.

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T wo-Spirit is a word that itself is a critique. It's a challenge to the field of
anthropology's use of the word berdache as well as to the white-dominated GLBTQ
community's labels and taxonomies. It claims Native traditions as precedent to
understand gender and sexuality, and asserts that Two-Spirit people are vital to our tribal
communities. Further, T wo-Spirit asserts ceremonial /spiritual communities and
traditions and relationships with medicine as central in constituting various identities,
marking itself as distinct from dominant constructions of GLBTQ identities.

Two-Spirit is also useful because it recenters a discussion on gendered
constructions, both fiom within and outside of Native traditions. While important work
is being done around Transgender, Genderqueer, and other "gender non-conforming"
people and communities, Queer too often refers to sexualized practices and identities.
Two-Spirit, on the other hand, places gendered identities and experiences at the center of
discussion. Indeed, many of the traditions that scholars and activists have identified in
Native communities as "Two-Spirit" are not necessarily about sexuality, they are about
gendered experiences and identities that fall outside of dominant European gender
constructions. To make "Two-Spirit" into "Queer" dressed in red, then, is not my
intention here. Rather, my intention is to indigenize Queer theory and Queer of color
critique by placing Native formulations of gender and sexuality, Native resistance to
colonization, and Native efforts of decolonization at the center. Through this process of
doubleweaving, we are able to hear the third space stories of Two-Spirit writers and
activists who have long been involved with various political movements, using Two-
Spirit experiences and identities as a means to critique homophobia, racism, misogyny,

classism, and nationalisms. Doubleweaving Native politics and Queer theory subverts,

135

challenges, and refashions Queer politics, claiming gender and sexuality as a space of
radical decolonial potential. From this act of doubleweaving, third space Two-Spirit
critiques can materialize. No understanding of sexual and gender constructions on
colonized and occupied land can take place without an understanding of the ways
colonial projects continually police sexual and gender lines. Two-Spirit critiques, then,
are essential to an understanding of homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia in the
Americas just as an analysis of Queerphobia and sexism is necessary to understand
colonial projects.

Part-and-parcel of the colonial experience for Native people in the US. is that we
are constantly disappeared through the stories that non-Native people tell, or don't tell,
about us. Powell calls this process un-seeing (Gilyard 3). Too often, other people of
color are as complicit in acts of un-seeing Native people as EuroAmericans. Native
studies poses a challenge to Queer studies—including its most recent waves of
scholarship—because it problematizes many of the theories that Queer of color critique
draws from. Two-Spirit critiques offer important challenges to both Native studies and
Native nations by pushing at who exactly is included within current formations and
movements of Native nation building and sovereignty struggles, as did Kathy Reynolds
and Dawn McKinley's marriage challenge to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Native people often have an uneasy relationship with other struggles for social
justice because the specificity of our struggles—rooted in sovereignty and a claim to this
land—are too often ignored. While women of color feminisms certainly have an
important place in the struggles of Native people, they havegagain—not necessarily

encompassed Native concerns. Native feminist analyses, for instance, often see patriarchy

136

as a tool of colonization. Chrystos writes, "What we experience is not patriarchy, but the
process of colonization, which immigrant women have profited from right along with the
greedy boys. Patriarchy is only one of many tools of colonizer mentality & is often used
by women against other women" (Fire Power 128). Similarly, Andrea Smith addresses
the ways in which patriarchal violence is used in genocidal projects launched against
Native people (2005). I believe that Two-Spirit critiques and an analysis of the continuing
colonization of Native people substantially challenge Queer studies and can push
emergent Queer theories to more fully realized decolonial possibilities.

I want to make clear here that I am not attempting to posit Two-Spirit critiques as
new or singular. There isn't a Two-Spirit critique. While the claims and work of Two-
Spirit activists, artists, and scholars have largely been left out of Queer studies—

Queer of color critique included—we have been present and writing and resisting in
various activist, artistic, and academic communities for what is now decades (and more).
What I would like to do here is tug on a few of the splints of this work and other critical
Native theories in order to bring what I'm calling Two-Spirit critiques into the center of a
conversation. There are immense possibilities that open up in conversations between
Queer of color critique, Native Studies, and Two-Spirit critiques. Such conversations are
a part alliance as a practice of survivance both inside rhetoric and composition and
outside of the discipline.

In Native studies, the enormous presence of Queer women as central to arts and
scholarship has meant that these women can't be ignored. However, they are often
included without Queemess being discussed. Out Queer men in Native studies are only

recently being published to a degree that intervenes in the field, and too often the

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Queemess of these artists and scholars remain in barely tolerated margins. The presence

of Trans peOple in the field, like much of academia, is starkly minimal. In Queer studies,

Native people have largely been ignored unless as "subjects" of anthropological and

historical research that demonstrated an idealized "Queer" past that can bolster non-

Native Queer identities.

While not the only features of Two-Spirit critiques, there are several things that I

think Two-Spirit critiques do that are important to ongoing struggles for social justice and

radical scholarship. Two-Spirit critiques:

1.

6.

7.

See Two-Spirit people and traditions as both integral to and a challenge
to nationalist and decolonial struggles.

Are rooted in artistic and activist work and remain accountable to
overlapping communities.

Are able to engage in both pan-tribal and tribally specific concerns.
Are woven into Native feminisms by seeing sexism, homophobia, and
transphobia as colonial tools.

Are informed by and make use of other Native activisms, arts, and
scholarships.

See the erotic as a tool in decolonial struggles.

See Two-Spirit identities in relationship with spirituality and medicine.

While Two-Spirit critiques hold Native nations and peoples accountable for

misogyny and homophobia, they simultaneously see Two-Spirit people and traditions as

necessary—if not central—to national and decolonial struggles. Or, in the words of Craig

Womack discussing Southeastern Native conceptions of difference, "Rather than

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disrupting society, anomalies actually reify the existing social order. Anomalous beings
can also be powerfirl; Queemess has an important place" (244). Two-Spirit critiques see
Two-Spirits as valuable participants in struggles for sovereignty and decolonization, even
while it calls into account the heterosexism and gender oppressions taking place in Native
communities.

As Queer of color critique draws on and expands women of color feminisms,
Two-Spirit critiques draw on Native feminisms and sees heterosexism and gender
regimes as manifestations and tools of colonialism and genocide. As Andrea Smith
points out:

US. empire has always been reified by enforced heterosexuality and
binary gender systems. By contrast, Native societies were not necessarily
structured through binary gender systems. Rather, some of these societies
had multiple genders and people did not fit rigidly into particular gender
categories. Thus, it is not surprising that the first peoples targeted for
destruction in Native communities were those who did not fit into Western
gender categories (Conquest 178).

Homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, then, are part of colonial projects intent
on murdering, removing, and marginalizing Native bodies and nations. As several
scholars including Perdue, Hill, and Mankiller address, as various waves of European
colonialism hit Cherokee territory, Europeans were often disturbed to find a matrifocal
culture in which women served as leaders of their communities and families. They
encountered communities in which both women and men enjoyed sexual freedom, and

there were both males and females practicing the gendered roles of the "opposite" sex.

139

Further, European agricultural gender roles differed substantially from those of
Cherokees, as in Cherokee traditions it is women, not men, who are responsible for
farming. From the moment of invasion through the allotment and beyond, Cherokees
were seen through a lens of European heteronormativity that saw Cherokees as "variant"
in both our sexualities and genders. A central effort of assimilation has been to try to
force Cherokees to conform to dominant European gender and sexual norms, which
includes concerted efforts to eradiate our spiritual traditions.

Looking at the work of Native writers, particularly Two-Spirit feminist poets,
helps us articulate what Two-Spirit critiques are, where they emerge from, and what they
do. Drawing on Vizenor's work on trickster hermeneutics, Powell has noted tha ". . .the
androgyny of the trickster offers compelling possibilities for unpacking gender binaries in
feminist rhetorics. In stories, the trickster is often assigned gender, but fi'equently cross-
dresses and mutates as well" (Gilyard 14). As Powell also notes, trickster figures have
played an important role in work by several Native women, including Two-Spirit women
such as Beth Brant, Janice Gould, Joy Harjo, and Chrystos (Gilyard l3). Vizenor's
concept of trickster hermeneutics, then, lends itself to Two-Spirit critiques. Womack has
likewise pointed to tricksters in relation to Two-Spirit people: ". . .the thinking behind the
term 'queer,‘ which seems to celebrate deviance rather than apologize for it, seems
embodied with trickster's energy to push social boundaries" (301). He goes on to look at

the term Two-Spirit as itself a trickster tactic (302).49 Similar, perhaps, to

 

49 It is important to note here that Womack also offers trickster tactics with a word of warning:

"Celebrating tricksters, is seems to me, should be done with caution. It is important to remember that

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disidentification and Queer theory, trickster hermeneutics critique, transform, and create
new possibilities in the ruptures of discourse.

Native studies insists on methodologies and theories that are rooted in,
responsible to, and in service of Native communities. Like women of color feminisms,
Native studies positions itself as activist scholarship that centralizes the relationship
between theory and practice. Queer and feminist theories in the academy have a history
of "theorizing" themselves away from grassroots communities. Not only do Two-Spirit
critiques remain accountable to both academic and non-academic audiences, they are
informed by both artist and activist movements. Being Two-Spirit is a practice, a tactic
of resistance to white supremacist colonialism. Two-Spirit critiques see theory practiced
through poetry, memoir, fiction, story, song, dance, theater, visual art, film, and other
genres. Theory is not just about interpreting genres, these genres do theoretical work.

Two-Spirit critiques insist on tribally specific approaches as a way to create pan-
tribal alliances and coalitions. Just as there is no such thing as a generalized "Native"
person, there is no such thing as a general "Two-Spirit" identity. Two-Spirit identities
and tactics are "rooted in a solid national center" (W omack 223).

Two-Spirit critiques see the erotic as a power that can aid in the healing of
historical trauma. Elsewhere I have suggested that a sovereign erotic can be utilized as a
Two-Spirit tactic for healing (2003, 2004). Deborah A. Miranda writes, "Grace, or what
I call an indigenous erotic, has a particular context for this particular continent: the

perpetual act of balancing—always working toward balance through one's actions, intent,

 

shape-shifting can also be a form of witchcraft and that tricksters can be oppressive assholes as often as

liberators. . ." (301 ).

141

and understanding of the world" (4). Other Two-Spirit writers, such as Brant, Chrystos,
and Gregory Scofield have likewise formulated the erotic as central to their work.

Two-Spirit people simultaneously challenge and bolster work in Queer studies
that seeks to decentralize white, male, middle-class formulations of Queemess. Through
Native disidentifications with Queer of color critique, emergent Queer theories are
complicated and developed. Munoz and Judith Halberstam have asked, "What does
Queer studies have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, and
terrorism? What does Queer studies tell us about immigration, citizenship, prisons,
welfare, mourning, and human rights" (2)? In an attempt to answer such questions, Two-
Spirit critiques point to Queer studies' responsibility to examine ongoing colonialism,
genocide, survival, and resistance of Native nations and peoples as well as Native studies'
responsibility to engage radically with issues of gender and sexuality. Two-Spirit
critiques ask all of our disciplines—and it is my hope rhetoric and composition will
listen—to formulate analyses that pay attention to the current colonial occupation of
Native lands and nations, and the way Two-Spirit bodies and identities work to disrupt
colonial projects. By moving attention to Two-Spirit critiques, our scholarship can aid in
the resistance struggles of Native communities and help create theories and movements
that are inclusive and responsive to Indigenous Two-Spirit people. Within the stories told
to me by Cherokee Two-Spirit people in my scholarship, Two-Spirit critiques are

performed through a re-storying of Cherokee nationhood.

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Splint OYINvg/Four: Dfiy D80 (Asegi Ayetl): Cherokee Two-Spirit People

Reimagining Nation
In Cherokee, the word for "nation" is DBC (ayetl). DBC literally means center, the

seventh direction in Cherokee cosmology. Unlike dominant European views of the world,
which understand only four fixed flat directions, Cherokee traditions understand the
world as multifaceted and in motion. "Center" is neither a stable nor singular as a
direction—the center is dependent upon one's perspective.

The same-sex marriage controversy and homophobia from both the mainstream
and Cherokee communities has spurred Two-Spirit Cherokees to question where BBC is
and what it means. Two-Spirit Cherokees are critiquing Indigenous nationalist projects
modeled after colonizing powers and offering alternative notions of Cherokee
nationhood. The concept of BBC enables us to theorize nationhoods that are numerous,
multiple, and complex.

As a way to further theorize Two-Spirit identities within Cherokee communities,

it is useful to look to a term that is being used by some Cherokees to talk about these

identities: Dilly (asegi) or D4“! OLOV (asegi udanto). There are numerous ways and
terms to talk about these identities within Cherokee, and D40'(asegi) and D4I'l' O’IIGV

(asegi udanto) are two of many.50 D‘I'y (asegi) translates as "strange," or "odd." Durbin

 

50 During a language immersion with the Eastern Band, I asked my language instructor, Bo Taylor, if there

were words to describe GLBTQ people in Cherokee. Taylor told me that people sometimes use the terms

DPCflJ 091.63 (age'yusd'udanti) and DoDScDCoOJ O'IJ (asgayusd'udantr) to speak of particular

143

Feeling translates the word as "peculiar" (49). David Comsilk translates this term as
"extraordinary" (Sophia).

The word OLOV (udanto) does not translate well into English's taxonomies. It

means heart/mind/spirit. In their work on Cherokee love incantations, Jack and Anna
Kilpatrick explain: "The Cherokee terms (there are several) that we have consistently
translated as 'soul,’ in many instances might just as fittingly have been rendered 'mind' or

'heart.' All derive from the verb stem —da:n(v)dh- ('to think purposefully') (22). D4“!
OLOV (asegi udanto), then, refers specifically to a different way of thinking, feeling,

and being that is outside of men's and women's traditional roles. Wahde, 3 Cherokee

traditionalist, posted this comment about Cherokee gender traditions in a MySpace

discussion forum:
At our Ceremonial Ground and most others, we Have three Gender Roles
for participation, they arent enforced, but suggested. Male, Female and
other. A woman could live as a male and vice verse, but a third option
exists, those that are niether or both. Some folks in other Tribes call it two
spirited, we dont. We call it asegi udanto or "other heart", these people are
trained in esoteric arts and Traditional Medicine. Among non-Traditional
Cherokees they are now both respected and feared, at one time they were

just respected, but with Judeo Christian influence, they have become

 

identities. These can be translated as "s/he feels like a woman" and "s/he feels like a man," respectively. I

have also been told in informal conversations that there are two other terms that can be translated "not just
a man" and "not just a woman." And, as is pointed out later in this chapter, I have been told of another term

that can be translated as "s/he has two hearts."

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feared; almost like witches among some of our own people ("Gay
People").5 '

I want to hold both of these concepts—BBC (ayetl, "nation/center," the seventh

and moveable direction) and DAY (asegi, "other")— to think about how contemporary

Cherokee Two-Spirit people are telling stories that re-imagine and re-story notions of

nationhood and disrupt contemporary queer/transphobia within and outside of Cherokee

communities. Listening to these other stories—these Ddty (asegi) stories—helps us think

about some how they perform Two-Spirit critiques that potentially shift and re-create
DBC (ayetl).

DAY (asegi) stories, within a third space, perform Two-Spirit critiques that
question reductive and autocolonial notions of "nation," and look at the ways that Native

nationalisms are not exempt from falling into the same modes of conduct as other

nationalisms. DAY (asegi) stories are a rhetorical maneuverto intervene in heterosexist

imaginings of Cherokee culture and histories. The work of Cornsilk, Reynolds, and
McKinley to challenge the marriage laws of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma—for

example—do just that. 1140' (asegi) stories place Two-Spirit identities into a repertoire

of cultural memories, employing Two-Spirit critiques in struggles for decolonization.
Andrea Smith writes, ". . .heteropatriarchy is the building block of empire. [. . .]
Heteropatriarchy is the logic that makes social hierarchy seem natural. Just as the
patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens"

("Heteropatiarchy"). Through our stories, Cherokee Two-Spirits people are challenging

 

5‘ Spelling and punctuation has been left as in original. '

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heteropatriarchy within Cherokee nation-building, exposing the ways oppression is

replicated by narrow notions of "nation." I would like to look to the DH (asegi) stories

told to me by four participants in On the Wings of Wadaduga—Robin Farris, Daniel

Heath Justice, Chad Taber, and Corey Taber—to see how they perform Two-Spirit
critiques and re-story DBC (ayetl).52

During the interviews, I asked participants what terms they use for themselves to
describe their gender-sexualities, and not surprisingly, the answers point to the
complexity and slipperyness of identity labels. While Two-Spirit is certainly used often as
an umbrella term in contemporary Native Two-Spirit/GLBTQ communities, participants
in this research have complex and conflicting relationships with the term. Daniel wasn't
comfortable using the term T wo-Spirit for himself because he felt the term was
unnecessarily normalizing:

I actually don't use T wo-Spirit very often. Queer works really well for me.
I like its ambiguity, and I like that it kind of shakes things up a bit. For
myself, I think T wo-Spirit is a bit. . .1 understand the reasons for
connecting it to a spiritual tradition and I think that's important, but I think
in some ways it normalizes in ways that I don't know if necessarily we
need to be normalized. I like the idea that whatever roles we may have had
in the past are roles today, that we could be really important in shaking up

complacency and conservatism and reactionary convention, and reminding

 

52 While all participants' identities are kept confidential as a matter-of-course, they also have the option of
waiving their confidentiality. These four participants all wanted their real names to be used in this project.

The entire transcriptions of the interviews are included in the appendices.

146

people that being Cherokee is about a lot more than blood and it's a lot
more than breeding. There's a lot to being Cherokee that is really exciting
and powerful and disruptive and beautifully quirky and weird and
anomalous. So, I'm very happy with Queer. I probably identify myself
much more as Queer than Gay. [. . .] Queer feels very much in keeping
with being Cherokee to me. And Gay is weighted by a lot of
representational burdens. Cherokees as a rule have always been. . .weird.
For our neighbors. So, in the Southeast we were the only Iroquoian
speaking people. We were the people who lived in the mountains. Socially
we were similar to the Muskogeean peoples in a lot of ways, but we were
also anomalous in a lot of ways. And anomalies are such a big part of our
tradition. I mean, you have Uktena, you have Wild Boy, you have. . .even
Thunder in some ways is anomalous.53 These are figures who cross
between worlds and represent a lot of different realities. That's been a
Cherokee experience. Our history of intermarriage, our history of
adaptation. . .we adapted pretty readily. Even traditionalists who didn't
speak English adapted to changing circumstances. Not necessarily gladly

all the time, but pretty practically, so, we've always been able to adapt and

 

53 05'69 (Uktena) is a giant winged, horned serpent that lives in the mountains and waterways. Wild Boy,
the son of QM (Se/u, Corn) and DO! (Kanati, the Hunter), was unknowingly brought into existence when

4M washed off blood in a river. Thunder is an important deity in traditional Cherokee cosmology, and is

considered a protector of Cherokee people.

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shift and. . .move ourselves as necessary, and I think Queer is a term that
really gives us that as well.

Chad, Corey, and Robin all used Two-Spirit in specifically Native contexts, but
also found it a difficult term to use outside of NatiVe communities. Robin said that she
uses the word Gay as more of a "universal" term, and also identifies as a Lesbian. On her
use of the term Two-Spirit she says:

Two-Spirit depends on where I'm at, 'cause so many people don't know
what that is [. . .] Obviously if I'm with Natives I would [use the term], if I
thought they'd understand it. [. . .] I don't like the word homosexual, that's
for sure. [. . .] [I]t sounds like a Christian sermon word to me. It's
derogatory, it's meant to separate and define who's doing something
they're not supposed to. I like what they said to today, about the fact that
Two-Spirit embraces more that just sexuality, that it embraces the whole
spirit part of who we are as a person, honoring and being genuine to who
we're born as.54

Chad and Corey—twin mixedblood Cherokee/Creek/Osage brothers who are
organizers in Oklahoma Two-Spirit communities—also spoke about their situational use
of the term Two-Spirit and some of the challenges of using it outside of Native contexts:

CHAD
It depends probably I guess to whom I'm speaking. Usually I identify as

Gay, but also because mainly where I live, it's very urban, there's not

 

54 Robin is referring to a presentation and discussion lead by John Hawk Co-cke’, an Osage Two-Spirit

activist, at the 2008 Tulsa Two-Spirit Gathering.

I48

many opportunities for me to use the term T wo-Spirit and be understood.
So usually I just used the term Gay and I identify as Gay and Native
American. (To Corey). How do you identify?

COREY '
You know, I think that people that are not Native American have no idea
what the word T wo-Spirit means in almost every instance, and so I think
it's kind of...it's a useless term in some scenarios...

CHAD
Sometimes. . .

COREY
...Unfortunately. And I don't mean to take away from it, like to say it's not
worth having around, but just that in certain situations it's not applicable
as. . .it's lost in translation, almost, you could say.

CHAD
Sometimes I use that as an opportunity to tell people a little bit about our
history.

COREY
To educate.

CHAD
Mmhmm. Especially in my day-to-day life because I come in contact with
a lot of people. I work as a stylist, and so I see a lot of people on a daily
basis, and a lot of them. . . just because of the nature of the work, I develop

a pretty close relationship with most of my clients, and so and a lot of

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them will ask me. And also, when I return from ceremony like Green Corn
Ceremony where I have scratches on my body and people see that. Or my
tattoos they see on my wrists and wonder what that's from or what it
symbolizes.55 And so that kind of gives me an opportunity to explain a
little bit more about myself and maybe even identify with the term T wo-
Spirit.
Cherokee people, then, have a complicated and nuanced relationship with the term Two-
Spirit. While Chad, Corey, and Robin all used the term for themselves, it was not the only
term they used as an identity label. Daniel simultaneously questioned the rhetorical work
of Two-Spirit, while also seeing its value in relationship to spiritual traditions. All four

participants, then, are able to disidentijy with the term as a tactic in constructing DAY
(asegi) and BBC (ayetl).

Many Cherokee Two-Spirit people who are not fluent in Cherokee—
including myself—struggle or have struggled with the absence and trauma caused by
language-loss in relationship to our identities as Two-Spirit people. One of the first
questions I had about my identity as a Two-Spirit Cherokee was, "What word or words
exist in Cherokee to talk about who we are?" Just as there is no singular answer to this in
English, there is no singular answer to this in Cherokee. The fact that most Cherokees are
not fluent in Cherokee adds additional complexities to searching for these terms, as we
often have to rely on other people—who may or may not be Two-Spirit and may have
various relationships to and opinions about GLBTQ issues—to relay very specific

cultural information. The conflation of sexuality and gender expression under umbrella

 

55 Chad has tattoos of scratches on his writs, symbolizing ceremonial scratches from Green Corn.

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terms like "Two-Spirit" and "Queer" may further complicate this process. Asking a
language speaker or elder if there is a word for "Gay" in Cherokee, for instance, may
cause the elder or speaker to say "no." However, asking elders or speakers if there are
words for people who live as a gender other than that assigned at birth may bring
different answers. Because the historical identities, roles, and expressions we are calling
"Two-Spirit" are primarily about gender role and gender expression—not about what
genders a person can fall in love with or are sexually involved with—there is no singular
or simple answer to questions about Cherokee terms for our identities.

Cherokee Two-Spirit people are looking to language—or lack thereof—to make
sense of our places in history, build our practices in the present, and transform the future
through our stories. Because of the importance of language for contemporary Cherokee
Two-Spirits, I asked participants if they knew terms in Cherokee for our identities. In
answering a question about terms for Two-Spirit people in Cherokee, Robin responded:

Well, I liked finding out from another Cherokee [. . .] that there had been a
word, because [. . .] I started out finding that among Native people—'cause
I was finding out who I was as a Gay person at the same time I was trying
to learn more about my culture as a Cherokee—and then I heard through a
Cherokee that here amongst Native people, it's a non-issue. That we've
always had them in our society, and I thought, "Oh, this is incredible."
You know, I'd found this community that will accept me as a Gay person.
And then, as I started investigating it, I found out—not the case. We've
been so assimilated as a culture that a lot of them don't even know their

history and don't even remember. And so, I was angry and disappointed

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and very sad. Then I found out from another Cherokee, of the Eastern
Band, that yes indeed, we were accepted and that there was a name for us,
it was Two Heart.56 And I don't know how to pronounce that in Cherokee.
He wrote it down, but I don't remember how to pronounce it.

In response to a similar question, Corey said he hadn't heard a specific positive

term for Two-Spirit people in Cherokee contexts:

I would say that a lot of the words that you'll hear, they probably have
some sort of negative connotation. Because I haven't ever experienced or
haven't ever been informed of any position of reverence, we don't have a
pretty word for it—you know what I mean?—like some tribes do. There
just wasn't that. Not that I know of anyway. And a lot of the younger
people now—well, younger people anyway are the ones who cause a lot of
the issues or go out of their way to make people feel uncomfortable and
that sort of thing, or harass all of the Two-Spirited people, that sort of
thing. It's usually the younger people that do that. The older people have a
quieter way. And so, younger people nowadays, a lot of them don't speak
our language. And so for that reason they don't even know the words to
use other than English words. So I've never really had any experiences or
anything like that with being called negative or even positive words in the

Cherokee language that reference GLBT status or anything like that.

 

56 l have likewise been told of this term by an Eastern Cherokee. 1 have not included the Cherokee term
here because it was told to me informally, not in the context of an interview moving toward publication or

public performance.

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Robin and Corey's responses here lead to a core concept that all participants had
about Cherokee Two-Spirit histories and present lives: that the gender role and/or
sexuality of 3 Cherokee person is less relevant to their place in Cherokee communities

than the practices of being in reciprocal and balanCed relationship with—SCAG"

(duyuk'ta)—and productive cooperation with—SS? (gadugi)—those communities.

Questions about the traditional place of Two-Spirit people within Cherokee lifeways and

worldviews opened up discussions about larger obligations to community. When asked

what he thought our traditional place was in Cherokee communities, Daniel said:
I've asked a couple of elders this, both of whom said they don't think we
had a special place necessarily, or a culturally defined place, but they both
said that was because it just didn't matter, that it wasn't so different as to
require a distinctive role. Which surprised me. . .that wasn’t the answer I
was expecting. And I wonder about that, I think it's a real possibility that
as long as you were still contributing to the community, whether you lived
as a man or a woman or whatever, who you had sex with didn't matter.
Are you having kids? Are you adding to the safety and security of the
town? Are you fulfilling your obligations to your family? That mattered.
On the whole, not everybody had to have children. Are you contributing to
the welfare of the community? I think that's what mattered. That could
very well have been it.

Corey had a very similar answer to this question:
I haven't experienced a great difference between Cherokee and Creek

communities, and what I've learned from my experiences with all of those

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people is that there wasn't necessarily a place of reverence for Two-
Spirited people—necessarily. And there could have been, you know, I
mean all of our peOple teach different things, but it was told to us that
that's not how you're characterized. What's important is how you help out
your family and how you take care of your people, whether it be your
community, your family, your tribe—whatever circumstance. How you
treat the people around you and what you do to give back. That essentially

defines you as a person, and not who you choose for a partner.

Chad likewise emphasized the importance of community participation—88y (gadugi)——

to Cherokee identity rather than contemporary concepts of sexuality, gender, race, and
blood-quantum: "Traditionally we're told that you were Cherokee based on your
participation in the community and what you do for the community."
When I asked Robin what she thought our traditional place was within Cherokee
communities, she replied:
I have no idea. Like [Co-cké] was talking about—and that's what I found
in my research—because it's an eastern tribe, so much of it was
assimilated before people started getting it down on paper, that unless we
do old manuscripts, that the people who wrote down certain things or
know because it's been passed down orally or something like that. . .I have
no idea. I've heard that you were defined by your work role, so it could be
that. I mean, I know there were warrior women. Whether that meant they
were considered Two-Spirit or not, I don't know. I know there were

Cherokee warrior women, because I've read about them. Like Nancy Ward

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was considered sort of a warrior woman—Beloved Women—I know
there's that, but Beloved Women are not the same thing as warrior women
or Two-Spirit. I guess you could be both, but not necessarily, so, I don't
know. I'm still learning.
While Robin wasn't sure what place Two-Spirit people had within Cherokee communities
in the past, she was sure that Two-Spirit people were "a part of the circle," a part of the
larger whole of Cherokee community and lifeways:
Now I think we're struggling to get back in the circle. And then I think we
were part of the circle, and it was accepted and it was just a different way
of being, and unique to each individual, but all part of the whole
community. I like what they say about, we didn't throw away people, we
put them in their place.57 I don’t think that's true now. But I think we can

get back there. I'm optimistic.

Wahde's posts on MySpace about D4i'l' O’IIOV (asegi udanto) adds another layer

to a discussion of traditional roles:
It was out in the open, they often had specific Ceremonial positions set
aside for them. Same for women. It was more about gender roles than
sexuality. You took a man's role, a woman's role, or the "other" roll.
There is historical documentation, that I dont care to quote verbatim. . .that
found two men married, one living as a woman, the other a man, and it
was considered normal. Gender roles seemed to be more important than

sexual identity ("Matriarchy").

 

7 , . . . .
5' A reference to Co-cke's presentation at the Two-Spirit Gathering.

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Not surprisingly, participants in On the Wings of Wadaduga both subtly and
explicitly critiqued the Cherokee Nation's reaction to same sex-marriage, seeing the
CNO's actions as a detriment to "the circle." Participants countered these politics with

DAY (asegi) stories, unsettling and disidentijying'with notions of Cherokee DBC (ayetl)

that are reductive and exclusive. Robin spoke fairly extensively about the same-sex

marriage case and her own email exchanges with members of the tribal council. Robin

challenges the CNO's arguments and reasoning regarding same-sex marriage:
Our history as a people is evolving, just like all people's history, so that
was my big argument to the Nation council was (and is) that, I don't argue
with your right to say that you've decided at this point in time that—given
how you view the world or morality or whatever—that Gays shouldn't get
married, but I do argue with your denial of the fact the Two-Spirit were a
part and accepted as a valuable part of our people and our history. I mean,
go ahead and say that it used to be okay in the past but that you no longer
find that being gay acceptable or whatever, but don't pretend we didn't
exist.

Daniel likewise found moves toward exclusion and normalcy contrary to

Cherokee lifeways, experiences, and traditions:
I'd be a little hesitant to say that to be Cherokee is to be Queer, but I think
that we are in an anomalous position in a lot of ways in broader Native
America. I mean, we're hated in Indian Country 'cause we're supposedly
not Indian enough, but it's been our transformative Indian-ness that has

made us survive. And I find it really troubling that there are so many

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people in the Nation who would want to take away that transformability
out of some sort of weird misguided fear about cultural purity, when we've
always been inclusive, we've always been adaptive. Not always happily. I
think that's an important point, too,'but, that would be Queer. That's also
about being Queer. That's survival. And not just surviving, but thriving.
Corey made explicit and confrontational reference to the erasure of Two-Spirit

people by the Cherokee Nation's tribal council during the same-sex marriage case when I

asked him what he would want to say to future generations of Cherokee Two-Spirit

people:
There's a lot, a lot, a lot of Gay Cherokees and a lot of Gay Creeks. And
there always have been and there always will be. And anybody On the
tribal council that tells you different is full of fuckin shit. (Laughter). And
I want you to believe that. I want you to know that from us. [. . .] Just in
case you didn't hear it anywhere else, you heard it here. I mean that from
the bottom of my heart, because that's what our medicine people have
taught us. You guys aren't something new, you aren't some kind of
spectacle we never seen. They treat us as if it's a non-issue, they treat us
like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Because it isn't to us. And I wanna
make sure that that gets in there. Aaayyeee. ..

Participants' re-storying Two-Spirit history is nested within larger work to

remember Dity (asegi) stories that have been marginalized by some aspects of

contemporary Cherokee nationalism. Daniel looked to history to disrupt moves to

essentialize and simplify Cherokee "tradition" and "history." Part of Daniel's current

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scholarship, for instance, offers an Ddiy (asegi) narrative to the history of Little

Carpenter:

Yeah, Little Carpenter is a really interesting figure to me. We have a lot of
information on him but he's. . .he's kinda quirky. He's honored, but it's
clear that even in his own community of Chota he holds a somewhat
ambivalent or ambiguous position. He's the father of Dragging Canoe, the
great Chickamauga war chief. He's the uncle of Nancy Ward, Nan'yehi,
the great Beloved Woman. He's a Beloved Man who is an advocate for
peace. He was known as a very strong warrior before. But he disappeared
for a long time, he was a captive of the Odawas, possibly. There's also
some question that he might have been Odawa. He might have been of
another nation who was adopted into the Cherokee Nation. He was
renowned for his rhetorical skills, but he was also known to be very, very
strategic. He was an amazing politician who Worked very much for the
benefit of Chota, but not necessarily for other Cherokee communities. He
was very town centered. He was on one the first Cherokee delegation that
went to London, so he saw this force that was coming across the ocean,
and he had a really unique perspective that a lot of other Cherokees at this
time did not.

The pictures we have of him, and the descriptions we have of him
always that he was small, slight, and he's efferrrinized in a lot of these
representations, even if it's just kind of by an aside. He had a very intimate

relationship with a British military officer, I want to say John Stuart, but I

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don't remember exactly what his name was. Somewhere in memory they
did the "brotherhood ceremony," which seems to me to be kind of a nice
way of, or a very hetronorrnative way, of dismissing that intimacy.58 I
guess when Little Carpenter died, Stuart or whoever this man was, was
inconsolable with grief, which could be a brother situation, but just a lot of
things lead me to wonder. No evidence, I have no evidence that he got it
on with men. But just so many little things point to him being an
anomalous figure and a figure who—yeah, he had a son, we know
nothing, or very little, about his relationship with his wife. We do know he
was estranged from his son, which would have made some sense, because
the father would not have been any authority. But in their particular
relationship, they were both Wolf Clan—not sure how that happened.
They would have had a stronger relationship. And Little Carpenter’s
relationship with Nan'yehi—he was the uncle of Nan'yehi—he would have
had a significant influence over her. And she had a very strong and
contested relationship with Dragging Canoe. I also wonder—because we
don't know a lot about the women's roles in the council, there's scattered
bits and pieces. We know that there probably was a women's council. But
we know in other Iroquoian and some Muskogeean traditions, but
particularly Iroquoian, the women's council has a male representative to
men's council. And his relationship with the women seems to be very

strong. So I wonder if there was something maybe similar to that. And

 

58 I discuss this ceremony later in this chapter.

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who better than a Queer boy to bridge that gap between the women and
the men?

And, his nickname: Leaning Wood. It's really hard for me not to
see that as a pun. I need to talk to a language speaker to have a sense of
whether that would be the case, but things just point over and over to me
that he was family. And, so, he fathered a child. Yeah, and? That would
not in any way preclude him from being Queer. He's a Beloved Man at a
younger age than a lot of other Beloved Men, if memory serves. So what
does that mean? And just because he was a Beloved Man doesn't mean he
wasn't also a warrior. But, he supported the British. 1 would love to know
what was going on in England when those Cherokee boys were over there.
Did they visit a molly house? Not likely, but they certainly stayed in the
area of London where same-sex activities were notorious. I don't know. I

have a lot of research to do on this, but. . .you know?

Just and Daniel brought an DAY (asegi) interpretation to this part of Cherokee

history, he also challenges Cherokees to remember the role of the erotic in Cherokee
traditions, histories, and lifeways. Further, he argues that a denial of the erotic disrupts
Cherokee community:
Cherokees were incredibly sexual people, though not nasty about it. At the
Peabody Museum there's a pipe bowl from 3 Cherokee townsite, with a
man and a woman having sex, in explicit detail, with their genitalia
pointed right at the smoker. So, somebody's getting a little thrill looking at

that. Early European accounts were horrified about how sexually free

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Cherokees were, that young Cherokee women had sex, out of wedlock,
sometimes extra-wedlock. And young men. And, no mentions are—

I haven't seen any mentions at all or hints at all of same-sex intimacies.
But, people were very much sexual people. And frankly a lot of the fine
upstanding folks who don't want to admit it. . .I'm sorry, but you can either
deny your sexual desires and get in weird circumstances, or you can just
admit the fact that we love sex, we're very sexual people, and that doesn't
mean that we're crass about it. I think Cherokees would not have been
crass, and I think that even very sexual Cherokees today have personal
modesty, but it doesn't necessarily transfer always over to sexual prudery.
But, it's depending on the context. It's depending on who's around, and I
think that's okay. I think that's fair. I mean, walking around flashing your
click at everybody is not a nice thing to do. Not everybody wants to see

that. So, I think part of it is also just a basic consideration for one another.

Robin, Daniel, Corey, and Chad are pointing to an DBC (ayetl, nation/center) that

asks Cherokee people, now and in the future, to remember other stories, other histories,

that are inclusive—and in fact grounded—in counter-stories—D‘lty (asegi) stories—to

versions of Cherokee history, sovereignty, and nationhood that seek heteronormativity.
Robin, Corey and Chad all emphasized a past in which Two-Spirit people were "a
part of the circle." Healing the circle—healing historical trauma—was a central part of
the interviews with Corey and Chad. These conversations reflected the decolonial work
that Cherokee people and Two-Spirit people are currently involved. This revitalization

work critiques the queer/transphobia internalized by Native communities and

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simultaneously positions Two-Spirit people as necessary to the well-being of both Native
communities and the world: ’
CHAD
...I think that the basis of our work, fundamentally, is restoring what was
lost. And that's a very general statement, but it means a lot of different
things. Restoring what was lost as Two-Spirited people, restoring what
was lost as Cherokee Two-Spirited people, meaning traditions and
ceremonies. . .
COREY
Healing the part of the Cherokee circle that's been gone because these
people have ignored us and cast us out.
CHAD
Not just that but, healing and restoring what is lost in the world. And I
think our work is going to transition from regaining what we've lost in a
smaller prospective to restoring what was lost as a whole.
COREY
It's a part of a bigger healing that has to occur.

Corey and Chad's words here are reminiscent of other waves of Cherokee

resistance that place practice at the center of maintaining SC AG"(duyuk'ta) and the

continuance of the world. Like the Cherokee Ghost Dance movement that insisted on
reclaiming particular dances in order to maintain the world, and like the Redbird Smith

movement which worked to "get back what was lost" through the both the archive and

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the repertoire, Cherokee Two-Spirit people are looking to both archive and repertoire
both to "restore what was lost" and imagine and create a present and future.

Because the goal of On the Wings of Wadaduga is to both revise both the archive
and the repertoire, and explicitly to bring our stories in the present to Cherokee Two-
Spirit people in the future and to use our stories to imagine what we want our futures to
look like, I asked participants about our future as Two-Spirit Cherokees. When asked
what she would want our future to be, Robin replied:

That we'll get back into that place where we're accepted, protected, and
allowed to add our spirit and gifts into the circle of our people and our
community just like any other member of the tribe. I'd like to see all of us,
in all tribes, model to the rest of the world that Native Americans see
being Two-Spirit [. . .] as no big deal. It's just a different way of being,
like having blond hair or blue eyes, being tall or short.

Daniel replied to a similar question by also speaking of having a place within
what Robin, Chad, and Corey call "the circle:"

I want us to have a place on the grounds, with our partners, where we don't
have to worry or feel like our partners aren't gonna be welcomed. I'm not a
Baptist, but I don't imagine that one's partner would be welcome in the
Baptist Church. There are some grounds where we're welcome, though not
many. I want us to be healthy and happy and to not be seen as
compromising our Cherokeeness by living honestly and loving honestly. I
want that love and living to be seen as contributing to Cherokee

nationhood, not drawing away from it.

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While there are many ways that Cherokee Two-Spirits are regaining our places

within "the circle," one way we are doing this work is through concentrated work in the

archive in order to uncover D4IY (asegi) stories that have been forgotten or ignored.

Through this work, Two-Spirit people are "regaining what we've lost."

Splint .lloilY/Hisg/Five: Cherokee Two-Spirits in the Archive

One of the goals of On the Wings of Wadaduga is to revise historical memory
through both the archive and the repertoire. Certame all Two-Spirit people are currently
in a process of uncovering this history, but I think that for some Native people—

including Cherokees—that this process is more challenging than it is for others. Like the

near absence of 61.85 (Wadaduga) in recorded stories, I've encountered very little

reference to Cherokee Two-Spirit people in historical accounts, though such references

do exist. I want to share some of the references I have come across to Two-Spirit people

in Cherokee traditions, thinking about them as D4tY (asegi) stories, and imagining what

they might mean to us now.

I am certainly not the only Cherokee Two-Spirit person involved with uncovering
these histories, and I am sure that there is more documentation, published and not, than
these brief mentions that I am pointing to here. And—as expressed through the interviews
with Cherokee Two-Spirit people——much of this knowledge is held in the repertoire. As
Daniel insists:

A lot of families have this evidence, as they have Gay and Lesbian and

Queer kids, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, and so on. And they

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don't necessarily talk about it a lot, but we've all heard stories of very
public admissions from high-level people in the community. But these
acknowledgments haven't gotten written down. . .there's power in the
words. And there are very important traditionalists who have been very
vocal about it, some of whom are Queer. So, yeah, we have the evidence.
In addition to the fact that few records about Cherokee Two-Spirit people have
been recovered, the documentation that has been recovered is often based on European
colonists' reactions to Cherokee gender, who thought that all of our genders were
"variant." Colonists likely saw female warriors or women in positions of leadership as
living as men, even though these were acceptable—and important—roles for women in
Cherokee gender systems. Trying to glean from colonial accounts which of these female-
embodied people might now be called "Two-Spirit" and which were simply acting in
accordance with Cherokee traditions for women is very difficult. We must remember
these kinds of complexities as we continue to uncover our past and re-story our present. I
would like to spend some time talking about a few references to Cherokee Two-Spirit

histories from published texts and from my own archival research in order to provide

further D4IY (asegi) stories that can be coupled with the interviews with Cherokee Two-
Spirit peOple to reimagine DBC (ayetl).

In Hill's Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Women and Their Basketry, I found
a brief mention of male-embodied Two-Spirit people that suggests that males who lived
as women were as respected members of their communities as other women:
Pardo. . .saw among those subsequently known as Cherokees a man who

"went among the Indian women, wearing an apron like they did." The

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startled Spaniard summoned his interpreters and "many soldiers" to ask
the local chief about him. The man was his brother, the chief explained,
and was not "a man for war." With neither elaboration nor scorn for the
scribe to record, the chief said his brother "went about in that manner like
a woman," doing "all that is given to a woman to do." It is a slender thread
of history suggesting that among Cherokees, as among many native
peoples, gender and labor interwove to create identity (66).
Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 also
has some discussion of males and females we might now call Two-Spirit, though I
disagree about her conclusions about male-embodied Two-Spirits. While she writes that
it is "difficult to ascertain" Cherokee responses to gender "anomalies," some of her
information can be coupled with the brief mention of male-embodied Two-Spirits made
by Hill and perhaps shift Perdue's conclusions (Perdue 37). While there is very useful
information for Two-Spirit people in Perdue's book, she asserts that male-embodied Two-
Spirits were not well respected because of a lack blood rites via war or menstruation
(Perdue 39). This does not take into account the possibility of other blood rites existing
for male-embodied Two-Spirits via ritual scratching, tattooing, or other kinds of
activities. If blood rites defined Cherokee gender roles during this period, it only makes
sense that blood rites existed for male-embodied Two-Spirits to ensure they remained
part of the community. One must at least consider the possibility that male-embodied
Two-Spirit people who lived as women would still have a warrior tradition open to them,

just as it was open to other women.

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Purdue draws conclusions about Cherokee gender constructions based on gender
in other tribes, but lacks this sort of analysis when it comes to male-embodied Cherokee
Two-Spirit people. While broad generalizations cannot be made, the fact that in some
traditions male-embodied Two-Spirits engaged in simulated menstruation could suggest
that similar practices may have existed among Cherokees (Gay American Indians &
Roscoe 38). Certainly many contemporary Two-Spirit Cherokees go to great length to
ensure their physical bodies reflect their gender identities. Regardless of Perdue's
interpretation, her book provides important information about Cherokee Two-Spirits that
we can use to understand who we are in the present.

Walter L. Williams' The Spirit and the Flesh only marginally speaks about
Cherokees, but he cites a manuscript by CC. Trowbridge that mentions male-embodied
Two-Spirits. Williams quotes this excerpt from the Trowbridge manuscript: "There were
among them formerly, men who assumed the dress and performed all the duties of
women and who lived their whole lives in this manner" (4). During the roundtable
"Indigenous Politics and the Question of Same-Sex Marriage" at What's Next for Native
American and Indigenous Studies? Comsilk mentioned that this particular document goes
on to suggest that marriage was practiced by all Cherokees, including Two-Spirit people
(Kauanui 2007).

In my own archival research, I stumbled across two reference to Cherokee same-
sex union ceremonies in John Howard Payne's manuscript on Cherokee life.59 Payne

mentions this union ceremony more than once in his manuscript, which describes a

 

59 John Howard Payne was a EuroAmerican actor and playwright who lived for a period of time with Chief

John Ross in order to document Cherokee customs.

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particular performance to formalize "perpetual friendship." I am including a long excerpt
from his account in order to offer this information to other Cherokee Two-Spirits
uncovering our histories:
Taking an opportunity sometime during that feast, when the people were
seated in the council house, they arose, walked toward the fire, and then
turned and commenced dancing around the fire. . .each having on his best
clothes. While dancing, in the presence of all the people, who looking,
they exchanged one garment after another till each had given the other his
entire dress, even to legings, mocasins etc. and thus each of them publicly
received the other as himself, & became thus pledged to regard and treat
him as himself while he lived. Sometimes two women, and sometimes a
man and a woman contracted this friendship. Thus when a young man and
woman fell in love with each other but were hindered from marrying,
either by relation or by being of the same clan, they bound themselves in
perpetual friendship. While dancing round the fire as above stated, the
man threw his blanket over the woman, and the woman as soon as
convenient threw hers to the man. The man also, having prepared a cane
sieve, & hung it by a string over his shoulder, gave her that. He also
presented her with a pestle to pound corn with. The mortar he had for her
at home (Volume III, 49-50).
While Payne makes sense of this as a fiiendship ceremony, I doubt very much
that it was a ceremony only to cement a "friendship." The fact that Payne mentions

opposite-sex couples in love, but not able to have children because of clan laws, suggests

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that the same-sex couples were likewise in love. Perhaps what was common to both
opposite-sex and same-sex couples in this arrangement was the fact that they would not
be bearing biological children. The fact that the opposite-sex ceremony is not terribly
different than contemporary "traditional" Cherokee marriage ceremonies leads me to
think that the same-sex ceremonies were likewise a public ceremony to define a loving,
romantic, same-sex relationship. Keeping in mind that Cherokee constructions of
marriage and relationship have changed dramatically since invasion, it is important to
consider that those involved in this "friendship" ceremony may have very well also
participated in other "marriage" ceremonies, and that—just as occurred in marriage—it is
likely that the ceremony did not demand monogamous sexualities.

What do these fragments of archival history mean for us as Cherokee Two-Spirit

people now? I certainly cannot say. It is up to Cherokee Two-Spirit people, through SSY

(gadugi), to weave together these pieces of our past and to decide what they may mean in
our future. Part of the work of the future ensemble performance will be to collectively

imagine the place of these stories in our lives, and to use performance to shift embodied

cultural knowledge, as well as the archival record, to listen the DAY (asegi) stories told

through both archive and repertoire.

Splint ELF/Sudal/Six: Ghost Dancing the Repertoire

While we can look to the Cherokee Ghost Dance and other revivalist movements
as a model for decolonial historiographic work in the archive, we can also look to these
movements as a model for work in the repertoire. Performance can link the ghosts of the

past to the memories of the present through embodied practices, healing historical trauma

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through the restoration of cultural memories. My future work will utilize both the
interviews conducted through On the Wings of Wadaduga as well as stories from the
archive to create an ensemble decolonial performance that can transmit these stories back
into both the archive and the repertoire. This project will be rooted in grassroots
ensemble performance, drawing from theories and practices from oral history
performance.

Oral history performance, as well as other performance-based methodologies,
already have a precedent in academia, community activism, and theater. Perhaps the most
famous of these are Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Moisés Kaufman and the
Tectonic Theatre Company's The Laramie Project, and work by Anna Devere Smith
including Fires in the Mirror. More recently, and within queer of color scholarship, E.
Patrick Johnson has produced one-man performances based on his interviews, Sweet Tea:
Black Gay Men of the South. Because performance transmits embodied cultural
memories, it can be a central means with which to revise and challenge dominant cultural
memories that marginalize particular stories and experiences. As a practice that demands
embodiment, it lends itself to decolonial work that calls for particular practices to
become revived in the repertoire. Rivka Syd Eisner argues:

Performing memory is. . .about bearing witness. Bearing witness, however,
does not just entail carrying memory. Bearing the past is to allow it entry
into bodily consciousness and continuing social experience, so that living
with memory means giving residence to pieces of the past that in turn,

even in their painfulness, sustain and change one's own being (Pollock

124).

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An ensemble performance based in the D4IY (asegi) stories of Cherokee Two-Spirit

people, then, can do substantial and meaningful decolonial work that aids in struggles to
return Two-Spirit people to our places within the circle. It can help both the ensemble and
the audience carry cultural memories that can interrupt the erasure of Cherokee Two-
Spirit people.

By consciously transmitting cultural memory and resistance through performance
rhetorics, a future production of On the Wings of Wadaduga—like my archival
research—uses Cherokee revitalization movements as a model. Because of its
historiograhic work, On the Wings of Wadaduga can be seen as what Joseph Roach calls
"echoes in the bone" that are part of performative "politics of communicating with the
dead" and "refer not only to a history of forgetting but to a strategy of empowering the
living through the performance of memory" (34). By re-embodying past practices,
performance not only communicates with the dead, but also communicates with the
present and the future. On the Wings of Wadaduga aims engage with these "echoes in the
bone" by consciously looking at embodying the past for the well-being of future
generations. Chad and Corey's words reflect this consciousness:

COREY
What you're hearing right now is our grandmas. This is our grandmas
talking.

CHAD

This is Mary and Betty. No, I'm just kidding. (Laughter).

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COREY
It is, it is. We didn't make this shit up. This was taught to us. And this
comes from two generations behind us and two generations behind that.
And so that's what's so special about it, is that somebody our age can here
sit and tell you things that people who have been dead for a hundred and
fifty years can tell you.

Natalie M. Fousekis claims that in oral history performance "[t]he authority
comes not from the pen and written word of the historian, but directly from the voices of
our interviewees as performers embody and recreate their past. In this case, sophisticated
historical analysis emerges from the weaving of words, memories, and histories of
individuals into a performance" (Pollock 169). Oral history performance lends itself to
Cherokee Two-Spirit people's struggles to "regain what was lost" through a transfer of

both archival and embodied memories into the practices of the repertoire.

Keeping within methodologies and practices that emphasize SSY (gadugi)—

including the concept of a decolonial skillshare— a future performance will be an
ensemble, rather than a solo, performance that will weave together the splints of this
research into a doublewoven basket. The ensemble process opens the possibilities of a
decolonial skillshare in which ensemble members can learn and/or share particular
cultural practices—language, songs, dances, and material arts—even if these practices do
not appear in the final public performance. The design for a future ensemble production,
then, is doublewoven: an inner structure focuses on particular embodied practices as part
of larger decolonial struggles, while the outer structure delivers Cherokee Two-Spirit

stories to an audience through performance.

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Performance rhetorics are central to Cherokee resistance, healing, and
decolonization. Cherokee Two-Spirit people are linked to other histories of Cherokee

performative resistance through their D4IY (asegi) stories and practices that critique

dominant notions about who Cherokees are now,lwho we have been in the past, and who

we will be in the future. Through the performance of our stories, Cherokee Two-Spirits

imagine ways to heal a past that has attempted to erase us. Just as GLSS (Wadaduga) is

remembered and re-storied through our embodied memories, Cherokee Two-Spirits are

re-imagining our places within the larger stories of who we are as Cherokee people.

Daniel's words here imagine an D4IY DBC (asegi ayetl) that honors our past and future:

I think we are lorekeepers, we're story-holders, we're history bearers. We
are tradition bearers. We're transformers. We shake things up, in necessary
ways, hopefully. We're survivors. We're willing to face a lot of hard things
to be honest. I mean, one thing we often hear is, "Cherokees are honest
people." That honesty is important to us. And yet, the Baptist influence
has caused a lot of Queer Cherokees to lie, to have to lie about who they
are and what they are. Well, if we're honest people. . ..we're called upon to
be honest and that's sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do, but
that's what we're here to do.

So, I don't think what we are called upon to do is necessarily
different from what a lot of non-Queer Cherokees are called upon to do.
But I've not yet met a Queer Cherokee who hasn't been deeply devoted to
the people. And I've met a lot of non-Queer Cherokees who have not been

devoted. So that says something to me. That we have to fight to be

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recognized, but part of that fight is also the hard work we're doing in
cultural recovery and maintenance and not just looking back but also
looking forward. Positing a more humane and dignified future for the
Cherokee people. We have really good examples to draw on, but
sometimes a lot of weird ugliness comes up that we have to challenge.

And just by being ourselves we challenge that.

Splint SPVY/Gal'quog'lSeven: D4¢Y(Asegi) Stories Revising Our Futures

My own story as a Cherokee Two-Spirit person is woven tightly into the other
stories that Cherokee Two-Spirit people tell. It is woven into our past and into my hope
for future generations of Cherokee Two-Spirit people. Alongside the other splints I have
presented here, I would like to share some of the experiences that led me to search for the

stories of other Cherokee Two-Spirit people that I present in this chapter.

My search for GIISS (wadaduga) is nested within a larger story of my

experiences as a Cherokee Two-Spirit activist and poet. During my first year as an
undergraduate at the University of Northern Colorado, I read Chrystos' poem "I Walk in
the History of My People." Reading a poem by a woman who was both Menominee and a
Lesbian helped me realized that I didn't have to compromise any part of my identity. I
started to come out in 1994, and shortly thereafter purchased a copy of Gay and Lesbian
Poetry in Our Time edited by Joan Larkin and Carl Morse (1988). That collection
included the work of several Queer Native poets, including Paul Gunn Allen, Beth Brant,
Chrystos, Joy Harjo, Maurice Kenny, and Vickie Sears. Just as importantly, it included an

extensive bibliography that listed Brant's A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North

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American Indian Women and Gay American Indians'lW ill Roscoe's Living the Spirit: A
Gay American Indian Anthology as resources. I was hungry for representations of
Cherokee Queemess, both past and present, I became very interested in trying to find out
information about Cherokee "Two-Spirit" traditions, knowing that other tribes has
particular "roles" for Two-Spirit people.60

Frustratingly, representations of Cherokee Two-Spirit people were few and far
between. As mentioned, Larkin and Morse included work by Sears, as did Brant's A
Gathering of Spirit. Living the Spirit included some Cherokee contributors (Nola M.
Hadley, Joe Lawrence Lembo, and Anne Waters). However, there was no historical
information available about Cherokee understandings of gender "variance" or sexuality
before invasion, and Cherokees were not listed in the list of "North American Tribes with
Berdache and Alternative Gender Roles" at the end of the collection (217-222).

In 1997 two scholarly collections were published with similar titles: T wo-Spirit
People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men edited by Lester B. Brown, and
T wo-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. The
Brown collection, while there were some strong contributions, was mostly a
disappointment as a scholarly contribution. Further, it included little information about
Cherokees. The Thomas collection—while extremely valuable—also had hardly any
historical or social information about Cherokee Two-Spirit people. Scholars were simply

not focusing on Cherokee Two-Spirit folks, and there were few Cherokee Two-Spirit

 

6° "Two-Spirit" was not a term that l was exposed to until a few years after I came out. While "Two-Spirit"
was agreed on as an umbrella term in 1992, it was not in circulation in any discourse I had access to in

Greeley, CO, until later. I first remember encountering the term "Two-Spirit" in Chrystos' Dream On (93).

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creative writers publishing. Further, at the time I couldn't find any reference in books on
Cherokee history that mentioned same-sex relationships or non-biological gender
expressions. In response to these experiences, 0n the Wings of Wadaduga seeks to bring
Cherokee Two-Spirit stories to the public through performance, so that other Cherokees
will have access to these stories as a part of decolonial efforts. It is my hope that these
stories can be doublewoven into a Cherokee Ghost Dance that echoes the words of Si'ahl:

"the dead are not altogether powerless." A future performance of On the Wings of

Wadaduga can provide more Dilly (asegi) stories for our collective future. Corey and

Chad's words include a message of deep love and a commitment to Two-Spirit

communities that extends past this life. The spirit of these words, directed to our future

generations, are a Cherokee Ghost Dance on the wings of (11.85 (wadaduga) that pushes

the fire of our stories across the water for our collective future:

COREY
We love you. We love all of those of you that come after us.

CHAD
There's much love for you here.

COREY
We're bustin our asses tryin to make y'all happy. Aaayyeee. .. (Laughter).
No, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I say it jokingly, but I mean
every bit of it. We want this kind of thing to be here long after we're gone.
And we're not gonna be up there tellin' y'all y'all are wrong...

CHAD

No, but we will be watching. We'll be watching.

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CHAPTER FIVE

.Dfil‘hflcD PV'H‘GIHIYOHUNIHIYA, HEDOHALENA/T HIS IS YOUR PART,

START IT QUICKLY: PERFORMANCE, DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGY, AND

CULTURAL RHETORICS

Introduction

The same Cherokee stomp dance song that gives this dissertation its title also
includes these lyrics: "Hiyohunihiya/ hiyowohalena/ hedohalena." Charlotte Heth
translates this as: "This is your part/ this one, you start it/ start it quickly" (121). I would
like to echo this call, posing it as a challenge to rhetoric and composition to move to
decolonial, radical theories and practices. In the last four chapters I have argued for the
importance of embodied knowledge, specifically performance, as a critical tool in
Indigenous rhetorics and struggles for decolonization. This chapter argues for a
decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric, proposing performance as a radical
practice of cultural rhetorics that should be used within rhetoric and composition
classrooms and scholarship. In order to do this, I will analyze the ways in which the
discipline presents the history of rhetoric while offering decolonial counter-narratives to
these stories. I will then suggest cultural rhetorics as a way to re-imagine our scholarship,
paying close attention to how cultural rhetorics can disrupts our discipline's commitment
to maintaining binaries between rhetorics/poetics and archive/repertoire. I will then
argue for performance as a way to intervene in colonial pedagogy, and conclude by

arguing for cultural rhetorics as a way of disrupting our discipline's dominant narratives.

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Colonization, Decolonization and the History of Rhetoric
As pointed out by Powell, rhetoric and composition teaches a linear history of

rhetoric that begins in Greece and Rome, moves to Western Europe and crosses the
Atlantic in a process of European expansion and'US nation-building (2002). The
presence of people of color is mostly disappeared in these formulations, and when people
of color are present in token histories it is often only in highlighting their use of dominant
EuroAmerican modes of discourse. Both pre- and post-invasion rhetorical traditions of
the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific are mostly ignored in this telling of
the history of rhetoric. In "Blood and Scholarship: One Mixed-Blood's Story" Powell
writes:

I believe that rhetoric as a discipline has been and continues to be

complicit with the imperial project of scholarship in the United States. I

believe that rhetoric as a discipline does not see the foundation of blood

and bodies upon which it constitutes itself. ,I believe that many of us who

work within this discipline participate daily in un-seeing, in denying, and,

in doing so, perpetuate the myth of an empty continent. (Gilyard 11).
Powell challenges us to interrupt imperial projects through our scholarship, pedagogies,
and practices. A decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric can interrupt the constant
un-seeing of Native peoples and aid in struggles for our lands and the well being of our
communities.

While the field has largely ignored Indigenous rhetorical traditions, books and

other forms of literacy were widespread in the lands being called the Americas long

before the arrival of Columbus. The texts of the Inca, Mexica, and Maya Nations had to

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be destroyed in order for the Spanish to use lack of literacy as proof of savagery. Non-
alphabetic literacies of Indigenous people were also devalued and suppressed. Walter D.
Mignolo tells us that "the etymological meaning of text (weaving/textile). . .began to lose
its original meaning when alphabetic writing and the Renaissance celebration of the letter
obscured the more generous medieval meaning, which, as Renaissance people, they were
trying to conceal" ("Darker" 825). A master narrative of land-theft and genocide began,
one too seldom spoken of in our field, especially as an ongoing reality.

Mignolo speaks in depth about writing systems that existed in Central and South
America long before the arrival of the Spanish, and their subsequent use in the discursive
practices of Indigenous nations resisting the onslaught of European invasion, including
pictographic and logographic writing forms by Mexica and Mayan rhetors and Peruvian
quipus, a form of woven records ("Darker" 808-825). He writes that that the Mexica
word tonalpoa "is a verb which could be properly translated as 'reading the signs of the
world' according to a code based on numeracy instead of on (alphabetic) literacy"
("Darker" 814). The libraries of Mexico and Central America were destroyed by Spain in
an attempt to conquer the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. One of the colonials
during this first wave of invasion, Diego de Landa, wrote, "We found a great number of
books. . .and since they contained nothing but superstitions of the devil we burned them
all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain" (Mignolo 71).

Acts of violence such as this functioned (and continue to function) to create the
myth of the savage, and to paint European invasion as a merciful and benevolent act,
bringing with it the gift of literacy. The current story the field tells about its history is

one that perpetuates these colonial mentalities. In the most recent edition of Patricia

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Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg's The Rhetorical Tradition, for instance, Indigenous people
are barely present. No mention is made of the rhetorical traditions of Native people until
"the rhetorics of men of color" in the nineteenth century. While William Apess is at this
point mentioned, his work is not included in the canon. No other Indigenous people are
mentioned until a brief inclusion of Gloria Anzaldt’la almost at the end of the book—page
1582, to be exact. While Bizzell and Herzberg's work is of no doubt important to our
discipline and a deeply valuable resource, it also disappears the particular rhetorical
histories of non-Europeans. Further, in Enlightenment fashion, it lays claim to the
rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and Rome as European discourse without
acknowledging, as Martin Bernal has done, "the Afroasiatic roots" of those rhetorics.
(Bernal 1987; 1991; Moore 2001).

Similarly, Native people are only briefly mentioned in James J. Murphy's A Short
History of Writing Instruction in a section by Elizabethada A. Wright and S. Michael
Holloran problematically entitled "Education for Girls and Non-Whites," and are simply
not present in Sharon Crowley's Composition in the University. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein's
scholarship about the printing press likewise perpetuates colonial myths about the history
of rhetoric by glossing over the implications of the printing press in spurring processes of
land theft and invasion. She writes, "By associating printing with the providential
mission of a prospering new realm, English Protestants pointed the way to later trends—
to revolutionary messianism in the old world and 'manifest destiny' in the New"
(Eisenstein 147). While Eisenstein mentions "manifest destiny," she does critique or
analyze its implications and realities.

Eisenstein's closing image of the book, a 1620 engraved title page from Francis

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Bacon's Insaturatio manga of a European ship setting out for unknown terrain, tells
volumes about the entwined nature of print culture and colonial projects. Eisenstein says
of the image that it "was associated with the advancement of learning in the early
seventeenth century. Overseas voyages were linked to an expansion of data pools which
enabled modern investigators to outstrip ancient ones" (Eisenstein 258-259). The gaze of
the viewer remains on European land, watching ships embark to lands that cannot be
seen. Eisenstein's statement of "modern investigators" outstripping "ancient ones"
becomes intensely troublesome when read from a vantage point of colonization.
Eisenstein's work should be augmented by scholars engaging decolonial methodologies.
Scholars within the discipline—such as Haas, Powell, and Villanueva—offer counter-
narratives to colonial histories and mindsets. Hass' "Wampum as Hypertext," for instance,
"offers a preliminary hypertextual historiographical decolonial narrative that suggests that
the concept of hypertext and the rhetorical work it docs are not new—nor is it unique to
Western culture..." (82-83). Both Powell and Villanueva have both argued extensively in
their scholarship for the discipline to pay attention to colonial histories and contemporary
experiences in order to decolonize our practices.

An understanding of colonization can offer alternative histories related to but
diverging from the history Eisenstein and others offer. If we examine the ways in which
the colonization of the Americas financially benefited Europe through a slave industry
that exploited both Native and African peoples, and the theft of Native natural and
cultural resources—for instance—we may begin to see the print revolution as intimately
bound to the financial gains obtained through a process of invasion and genocide that

continues to this day. Our field, and all of academia in the Americas, is irrevocably tied

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to this legacy, and is thus responsible to engage scholarly and pedagogical practices that
interrupt this history and work for decolonization and social justice.

Approaching the history of rhetoric with a decolonial agenda carries important
questions, problems, and considerations. A decolonial approach must be cautious to not
replace one grands récits for another. Simply claiming a decolonial approach by using
rhetoric associated with decolonial movements is not enough, such a stance must be used
as a leverage point within systems of power and control. It potentially can shift the work
we are doing in the academy if our practices—not only our language—are decolonial.
Otherwise, we risk turning decolonization into what Lyotard calls a language game that
works to legitimize the academy as a colonial institution: "The language game of
legitimation is not state-political, but philosophical" (33). Indeed, we must not forget that
our presence in the academy supports what Althusser calls an ideological State
apparatus. He argues, ". . .one ideological State apparatus certainly has the dominant
role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This is the School"
(71). We must always, then, proceed with caution and care knowing that—however
radical—our work in the academy helps to fuel the ideological State apparatus.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes, "Decolonization. . .does not mean and has not meant
a total rejection of all theory or research or Western knowledge. Rather, it is about
centering our own concerns and world views and then coming to know and understand
theory and research from our own perspectives and for our own purposes" (39). A
decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric mustn't create a new story that displaces
stories already present, such approach would not be decolonial at all. Haunani-Kay Trask

defines decolonization as "[c]ollective resistance to colonialism, including cultural

I82

assertions, efforts toward self-determination, and armed struggle" (251). In academia,
Native people and our allies have taken up the arms of scholarship as part of such a
struggle, and while metaphors of war give me pause—particularly during bloody US
occupations of and wars against Iraq and Afghanistan—there are literal wars taking place
in Indian Country. The academy has a history of removing the rhetoric of radical
movements from their grassroots contexts, and as academics we must ensure that
decolonial struggles in the academy are connected with decolonial struggles outside of
the academy. Part of this is acknowledging the privilege scholars currently have in the
US, and further, to acknowledge that, as citizens of the US, people are—to be blunt—
being massacred in our name. A decolonial approach to scholarship cannot take place if
it ignores the connections between the struggles of Native people here and the struggles
of people being colonized elsewhere. June Jordan puts the necessity of acknowledging
privileges as well as common struggles powerfully in her 1982 poem "Moving Towards
Home:"

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the

red dirt

not quite covering all of the arms and legs

[. . .]

Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved

her baby

into the stranger's hands before she was lead away

[...]

I need to speak about living room where the men

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of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not

marched into a roundup that leads to the grave

[. . .]

I was born a Black woman

and now I am become a Palestinian...

[. . .]

It is time to make our way home (142, 143).

In other words, a decolonial approach to the history of rhetoric—indeed, a
decolonial approach to scholarship at all—commits itself in solidarity by acknowledging
and engaging with both the commonalities and the differences in experiences of
oppression and struggles for change. We must discuss both privilege and oppression if
systems of domination and colonization are to be made transparent and disrupted.

Decolonial movements are taking place on many fronts in the Americas, both
inside and outside of academia. They are movements attempting to correct colonial
history and heal the damages that invasion and genocide continues to cause. As I have
already made clear, my scholarship is meant to contribute to these movements. As a
discipline, rhetoric and composition can aid in this process through engaging with a

decolonial approach to our history, scholarship, and pedagogies.
Performing Cultural Rhetorics, Disrupting Binaries

Indigenous communities are practicing performance traditions that contribute to

decolonization and continuance. Despite major interventions in the discipline, rhetoric

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and composition has continued to do "a pretty good job of not doing a very good job of
critically engaging with Native texts" ("Survivance" 397). And despite numerous
critiques of the construction of oral/written, archive/repertoire, rhetoric/poetic, and
body/mind dichotomies, the field has mostly remained entrenched in and committed to
maintaining them. While the maintenance of such dichotomies may help to define and
ensure the current scope of our profession, it does little to engage with these critiques or
answer the calls of scholars of color (and other marginalized scholars) in the field. The
emergent discourses that we are calling "cultural rhetorics," however, are committed to
answering these calls. Cultural rhetorics deconstructs the dichotomies our discipline
clings to, and helps generate scholarship that is responsible to oppressed communities
and committed to social justice.

In 2005, Powell taught an "American Cultural Rhetorics" course in which she
collaborated with students to imagine and define what "cultural rhetorics," specifically
"American cultural rhetorics" (with a defiant s) is. Among the constellated core concepts
that Powell and students created was a clear rooting of cultural rhetorics within
Indigenous rhetorics of the Americas, a solid commitment to social justice and anti-
oppression, and rhetorical analyses that move beyond the "textual" to material, visual,
digital, and performed rhetorics. American cultural rhetorics is an answer Victor
Villanueva's call to "break precedent" from Eurocentric discourse ("Rhetorics" 659). In
order to break that precedent, our work as rhetoricians must move beyond the
archive/repertoire and rhetoric/poetic splits that dominant European discourse is

committed to maintaining and promoting.

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Rhetoric and composition, and much of academic discourse, has removed the
centrality of the body from our work. Our discourse too often excludes kinesthetic,
embodied knowledge from analysis. Our field's tendency to turn everything into "text"
further removes us from the realities of bodies and embodied knowledge as central to all
rhetorical work. We are, after all, bodies. The constant disembodiment of our scholarship
reinforces binaries that help maintain oppressive systems. To pay attention to bodies and
embodied knowledge would mean we would have to pay attention to both living bodies
of those injured or destroyed in colonial systems.

Paying attention to performance as both a site of inquiry and as an embodied
practice is one way that our discipline can restore the centrality of bodies to our work.
Performance studies is a discipline that can inform our scholarship. While rhetoric and
composition interprets everything it encounters from textual frameworks, performance
studies analyzes the ways a subject performs. Rather than using text, writing, argument,
and other rhetorical concepts as a metaphor to interpret non-textual subjects, performance
studies uses the body and performance as a metaphor for non-embodied subjects. In this
way it attempts to embody, rather than disembody, knowledge. "Any behavior, event,
action, or thing," explains performance studies scholar Richard Schechner, "can be
studied 'as' performance, can be analyzed in terms of doing, behaving, and showing"
(Schechner 32). The interstices of these two disciplines helps articulate a theory of
performance rhetorics that can aid in the restoration of kinesthetic, embodied rhetorics
into our discipline, and further, disrupt dichotomies between the archive and the
repertoire in relationship to rhetorical history and historiography. Looking to the

rhetorical work that performance does can shift the discipline to pay close attention to

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histories of rhetoric in a decolonial third space: "Genealogies of performance," Roach
argues, ". . .attend to 'counter-memories,‘ or the disparities between history as it is
discursively transmitted and the memory as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear
its consequences" (Roach 26). Performance rhetorics can provide analyses of the
complex relationships between embodiment and text and archive and repertoire that is
central to Native rhetorical histories that dominant histories of rhetoric too often deny.

Cultural rhetorics allow for the inclusion of performance into rhetorical
scholarship and methodologies. As an analytic lens, cultural rhetorics is an intervention
into the field's tokenization and/or disregard of particular communities and their
rhetorical histories. This poiesis that we are calling "cultural rhetorics" takes into account
the importance of poetics, arts, materialities, and bodies as imperative to rhetorical
understandings and radical cultural analyses. As such, it can "restore" performance to the
larger discipline while simultaneously critiquing dominant EuroAmerican versions of
rhetorical history.

Rhetoric and composition continues to rely on Aristotelian taxonomies in order to
argue for a clear distinction between rhetorics and poetics. While this makes sense in the
process of building our profession, it makes little sense for those who are interested in
addressing the modes of communication, expression, and civic engagement central to
most people's lives. Cultural rhetorics aid in subverting Eurocentric approaches to
rhetorical analysis by critiquing the rhetoric/poetic dichotomy. After all,

...the only difference between a history, a theory, a poem, an essay, is the
one that we have ourselves imposed. We have cut the wholeness of

knowledge into little bits, scattered them to the four winds and now begin

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to reorganize them into categories to enable empire by bringing order to
chaos and civilization to the savage (Powell, "Listening" 15).

Cultural rhetorics critique these perceived splits and pay particular attention to
rhetorical histories in which such splits do not exist. Cultural rhetorics pay close
attention to third space possibilities for the field to more deeply engage complex and
dynamic rhetorical work. "Poetics" are rhetorical, and several scholars including
Villanueva, Lathan, Powell, Royster, and Smitherman are already deeply engaged with
placing poetics into the center of rhetorical work, their pedagogy, and their scholarship.

Paying attention to the important rhetorical work of performance holds promise
for rhetoric and composition scholars working to disrupt colonial, disembodied
discourses. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that our field sees performance as on
the periphery of the discipline, considering colonialism's constant suppression (and
destruction) of bodies and embodied knowledges. Taylor writes,

The inaugural moment of colonialism in the Americas introduces two
discursive moves that work to devalue native performance. . .: (I) the
dismissal of indigenous performance traditions as episteme, and (2) the
dismissal of "content" (religious beliefs) as bad objects, idolatry. These
discourses simultaneously contradict and sustain each other (33).
The same colonial mindsets that push Indigenous peoples to the edge of discourse push
performance—particularly Indigenous performance—to the margins of inquiry. Powell
states:
Not only does the imperial power commit material acts meant to crush an

unruly indigenous population, but also its institutions of intellectual and

188

cultural exchange (i.e., universities) make the rules by which the first-
wave genocide will be studied, and these same rules apply to the study of
genocide survivors (Gilyard 4).
Not only do Indigenous people become tokenized and marginalized in the field, the
central rhetorical expressions of Indigenous people do as well. In our field, performance
is pushed to "poetics," which is constructed as an academic foil to "rhetorics."

The rhetoric/poetic split is one that pushes marginalized peoples' rhetorical work
even further into the margins of the "C&R Ranch" (Lyons 458). It is also one that
continues a dominant narrative of an European literate culture vs. an Indigenous oral
culture. The field replicates the contradictory and co-sustaining discursive moves
towards performance that Taylor identifies as part of the "inaugural moment of
colonialism:" on one hand rhetoric and composition's dominant story argues that poetics
are irrelevant to the field and outside the scope of analysis; on the other it treats poetics—
and often "content" (the common language with some composition pedagogical moves
and colonial projects is worth noting) as rhetorical "idolatry".6|

Regardless of the efforts of the field to define a clear difference between rhetorics
and poetics, many radical scholars and activists of color have insisted that rhetorics and
poetics are firmly woven together. In his essay "Memoria Is a Friend of Ours,"
Villanueva argues for and demonstrates a scholarship that places personal narrative and
poetry at the center: "The narrative of the person of color validates. It resonates. It

awakens, particularly for those of us who are in institutions where our numbers are few"

(15). Poetics serve very specific political and rhetorical functions that are, in fact, the

 

6' GV (Wa 'do) to William maria rain-shadid for pointing out some of these parallels in personal
conversation.

189

center of discourses for marginalized communities, and certainly most communities
outside of the academy. Audre Lorde has famously insisted, "For women. . .poetry is not
a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within
which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into
language, then into idea, then into more tangible action" (Sister 37).

Powell's work has highlighted over and over again that "inside that great, long
story that our discipline tells about itself“ ("Survivance" 397) that we insist our work and
lives are divorced from poetics, and create fictions in which poetics are not important to
our lives. In one of her endnotes to "Rhetorics of Survivance," Powell tells us that stories
and storytelling are not important to her work only because she is Indian or that her
scholarship places Indigenous people at the center, but also because story is central to all
of our lives:

...[W]hile I don't deny the importance of storytelling to the Native peoples
of the Eastern Woodlands community of which I am a part, neither would
I want to overlook the way storytelling works in both the rural midwestem
farm community in which I was raised, the "postmodern" academic
communities in which I participate, and the dominant narratives used to
create and imagine "America." In other words, storytelling isn't just an
"Indian" thing for me; it is essential in the creation of all human realities
(429).

Warrior has used the work of Native poets as a model of intellectual sovereignty:
In developing American Indian critical studies, we need to practice the

same sort of intellectual sovereignty that many Native poets practice. As

190

many of the poets find their work continuous with, but not circumscribed
by, Native traditions of storytelling and ceremonial chanting, we can find
the work of criticism continuous with Native traditions of deliberation and
decision making (118).
Similar to Lorde's, Powell's, and Warrior's attention to the necessity of poetry and story to
our lives and work, Augusto Boal posits:
Theatre is born when the human being discovers that it can observe itself;
when it discovers that, in this act of seeing, it can see itself—see itself in
situ: see itself seeing. [. . .] The human being not only ’makes' theater, it
'is’ theatre. And some human beings, besides being theatre, also make
theatre" (l3, italics in original).

More than considering poetics central to modes of resistance and expression for
people of color and marginalized people, cultural rhetorics understand poetics as central
to all rhetorics. To ignore poetics in rhetorical work is to ignore the central rhetorical
tactics of oppressed communities, most communities outside of academe, and—well—
most of the planet. Cultural rhetorics revise dominant Eurocentric approaches to our
discipline, and by including poetics as rhetorical work we are able to engage responsibly

with marginalized communities and intervene in oppressive systems.

Embodying Rhetorics, Performing Pedagogy
Performance is a means to revise a history of rhetoric and pursue decolonial
scholarship, activism, and pedagogy. A radical, decolonial pedagogy acknowledges the

body as a center of meaning-making and aids in larger struggles for decolonization of the

191

Americas, both inside and outside of the university classroom. Performance's explicit
centralization of the body potentially aids in radical, decolonial struggles within our field.
Further, performance is a means to not only restore both memory and delivery to the
rhetorical canon, but to indigenize them as a way of re-centering discussions of rhetoric
to address Native rhetorical traditions. Performance disrupts a dominant history of
rhetoric and provides additional stories, histories, methodologies, and practices into the
field.

If embodied practice and memory are central to the rhetorics of Indigenous
people, then incorporating performance into the classroom within a context of broader
decolonial struggles helps to re-root rhetorics within the Americas. While performance
helps to "recouperate" the canons of memory and delivery into our discipline—a project
that I'm invested in because of the particular relationships these canons have with the
rhetorics of Indigenous people, people of color, Queer and Trans people, and other
traditionally marginalized people—I also want to approach this project with an edge of
caution. Memory and delivery are only "lost" canons of rhetoric within the particular
histories of rhetoric and composition in the US in which we are embedded. Both are alive
and well and living in other disciplines. I worry that work to reclaim these canons
validate a particular nostalgia our discipline has for a "classical" rhetorical education,
firmly rooted in an Enlightenment construction of a mythic Greco-Roman past. I am
interested in both memory and delivery because they open up discussions to include
Indigenous rhetorics fi'om the Americas and elsewhere into our field, as well as other
marginalized rhetorics. Obviously, using performance in the writing classroom is not

specifically Indigenous. Work to re-embody rhetorical practices, however, can be grafted

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on to decolonial and radical practices that can aid in larger decolonial and anti-oppressive
struggles.

At the forefront of my pedagogy and scholarship is a struggle for social change
and "critical consciousness." My understandings of "critical consciousness" are rooted
within my involvement popular education movements of communities of color and
Queer/Trans communities. These movements have been highly influenced by the work
of Freire and hooks, and my own work has also been rooted in Boal's "Theatre of the
Oppressed" (TO). I find the incorporation of Boal into a pedagogical practice useful in
radical and decolonial struggles, even while I remain critical of both Boal and Freire.62

T0 is an intellectual sibling to F reire's "pedagogy of the oppressed." Like Freire's
work, T0 was developed in order to provide a tool for communities to imagine solutions
to their own oppressions. Unlike Freire, however, Boal has not been widely incorporated
into the university classroom. I imagine that this is because Boal's work focuses on
embodiment and practice in a way that many academics—eat least within disciplines that
tend to ignore embodiment—perceive as threatening. Freire's pedagogy can be practiced
while still ignoring embodiment in the classroom. Boal's, however, cannot. Elsewhere I
have addressed the potential for T0 to be used within decolonial struggles and the
healing of historical trauma because of its attention to embodiment ("Mothertongue"
2003; "Theatre" 2008), as well as offered critiques of some of the problematic aspects of

Boal's work ("Theatre" 2008). I do not want to be redundant here, then, but would like to

 

62 Briefly, 1 am concerned with the colonial and missionary implications of the literacy projects in which
both Boal and Freire. I feel that there is a lack of analysis of Indigenous issues in their theories, and further,
that there are Indigenous genealogies to their practices that neither acknowledge. For more on my critiques

of Boal, see "Theatre as Suture" (2008).

193

add that attention to Boal (and certainly techniques of other performance movements) is a

way of incorporating the repertoire into a field that is currently obsessed with the

creation of the archive. Performance helps to bring SCAG“ (duyuk'ta) to our discipline.

TO enables kinesthetic engagement with issues discussed in class and brings personal
experiences with and issues of systemic oppression to the center of discussion. It also
subverts traditional educational techniques by asking students to pay close attention to
their bodies, rather than ask them to divide their bodies from their intellects.

Geoffrey Sirc’s English Composition as a Happening is one of the few works in
the discipline that supports performative moves in composition classrooms. Sirc
encourages us to "(alter) the conventional spaces of a writing classroom, allowing the
inhabitants a sense of the sublime, making it a space no one wants to leave, a happening
space" (1). Using the Happenings as a model for the composition classroom he insists,

Now this is composition. In its explorations of technology; its
collaborative nature, its use of imaginative materials, juxtaposed in
interesting, poetic ways (as well as its faith in an audience's ability to
make sense of the resulting text); its struCture as more performative
gesture than hierarchical form (working by intuition and impression rather
than by received standards);. . .it represents everything I value in
composition. And my challenge as a teacher becomes trying to establish a
performative space inflected according to such exciting possibilities (122).

As someone who has been using T0 extensively in my communities for the past
several years and has incorporated TO into my own pedagogical practice in the

university, it seems logical to employ TO to establish the composition classroom as a

194

performative space. T0 not only disrupts the often mundane patterns in composition
pedagogy, but also engages students with issues of social justice. T0 is a means of
reincorporating delivery into rhetorical practices and pedagogies into our classrooms
within radical political frameworks.

Virigina Skinner-Linnenberg's Dramatizing Writing: Reincorporating Delivery in
the Classroom likewise calls for performance's place within rhetoric and composition
courses, and her call remains largely unanswered:

By its very nature, performance incorporates or blends the physical and
the noetic processes of delivery, and. . .can be a valuable tool in the writing
classroom. [. . .] ...[W]e can incorporate performance into a re-visioned
theory of delivery, one that reunites the physical and the noetic, and, thus,
employs a strategy that has been underused in the classroom (52).
While Skinner-Linnenberg's analysis and methodology are not decolonial, if we
doubleweave such calls to a very conscious decolonial theory and practice, the radical
and decolonial possibilities of performance in the classroom are brought to the surface.
Performance disrupts dominant histories of rhetoric both by pointing to the original
centrality of performance within the Greco-Roman tradition, as well as looking to
performance as vitally important to Native rhetorics, rhetorics of color, and other
marginalized rhetorical traditions. Performance reminds us that writing is only one way
to engage the world, make meaning, and build arguments. Embodied rhetorics are just as
important to most people's lives—if not more so—than written texts. In order for our
field to remain accountable to the lived experiences of our students and the larger public,

we must ensure our discipline, practices, and pedagogies pay attention to embodied

195

rhetorics. I'm not arguing for our disciplines to replace writing with performance, but to
shift our perspectives in order to understand the relationships between writing and other
rhetorical work. As already discussed, Indigenous rhetorics in the Americas have not
forced a binary between compositions and perfOrmance. An Indigenous, decolonial
approach to rhetorical pedagogy intentionally disrupts these binaries, looking at the way
compositions (including alphabetic, visual, digital, and material) and performance can be
used in tandem to make meaning.

Incorporating performance into the classroom using intentionally anti-oppressive
frameworks creates classroom practices that enable participants to imagine tactics for
survival and resistance both inside and outside of the university. Boal writes, ". . .if the
oppressed-artist is able to create an autonomous world of images of his (sic) own reality,
and to enact his liberation in the reality of these images, he will then extrapolate into his
own life all that he has accomplished in the fiction The scene, the stage, becomes the
rehearsal space for real life" (emphasis mine) (44). Peggy Phelan, within the context of
Queer performance, also argues for performance as a radical space:

As an art form whose primary function is to meditate on the threshold that
heralds between-mess, theatre encourage a specific and intense cathetic
response in those who define themselves as liminal tricksters, socially
disenfranchised, sexually aberrant, addicted, and otherwise queerly
alienated from the father (16).
Radical performance techniques help put into specific embodied practice the pedagogical
theories of Freire and hooks. Performance enables students to have a visceral and

embodied experience with the subject matter, not a merely intellectual experience. This in

196

turn can be a way to spur further writing from the students as they reflect on their

experiences in a performative space and to understand the relationship between embodied

and composed rhetorics. TO also becomes a means to build community—581

(gadugi)—within the classroom. Hooks writes, "Working with a critical pedagogy based
on my understanding of Freire’s teaching, I enter the classroom with the assumption that
we must build 'community' in order to create a climate of openness and intellectual rigor"
(40).

Using performance in the classroom rebalances and disrupts the perceived split
between the archive and the repertoire by including the embodied knowledge—and
remembering the physical bodies—of classroom communities. If framed within radical
decolonial pedagogies, performance can be a means to "break precedent" by privileging
the rhetorical traditions rooted in the Americas. T0 is one of many performance
techniques that has the potential to radically shift classroom practices. An attention to
performance alters our understandings of rhetoric in our field, revises the dominant
history of rhetoric that we teach, and changes pedagogical practices as part of decolonial
struggles. Performance rhetorics contribute to an ongoing shift in the discipline towards

cultural rhetorics.

Conclusion: Imagining Cultural Rhetorics

As a field still being created by scholars, cultural rhetorics has enormous potential
to put social justice at the center of discourse and action. We must root our work (and I
believe many of us do) within activist methodologies, using it as part of struggles for

social transformation and decolonization. As a field still being defined, we can learn

197

from hooks' critique of cultural studies: "We need to actualize the politics we are trying
to evoke" (Nelson et al 171). Or, as rephrased by Stuart Hall, "Against the urgency of
people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies" (Nelson et
al 284)? Or, as articulated by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, "In a decolonizing framework,
deconstruction is part of a much larger intent. Taking apart the story, revealing
underlying texts, and giving voice to things that are often known intuitively does not help
people to improve their current conditions. It provides words. . .but it does not prevent
someone from dying" (Smith 3). Cultural rhetorics has the opportunity to address these
issues with intentionality, to design a discipline that places social justice at the center.
What is the point of our work against the urgency of the material conditions of oppressed
peoples? What is the point of our work against the urgency of the mass destruction of
the planet? And further, how can our work as scholars, teachers, and activists create
discourses and performances of opposition and hope? My scholarship attempts answer
these questions through a commitment to radical, decolonial work.

It is true that I am interested in Cherokee performance rhetorics on scholarly
levels, but that interest stems from a cormnitrnent to the practice of Cherokee
performance in decolonial struggles. Our songs, our stories, our language, and our dances
are part of our ongoing memory as a people. Through their use, we survive and continue.
Taylor's words here on Mexica performance traditions can also be said of Cherokee (and
other Indigenous) performance, the importance of "the active role of human beings in
promoting the regenerative quality of the universe, of life, of performance—all in a
constant state of againness" (39). I am concerned with Cherokee performance because I

am concerned with the well being of Cherokees and other Indigenous peoples. I am

198

concerned with radical performance rhetorics because they are a central means of

healing, decolonization, and continuance. I am concerned with Cherokee performance

rhetorics because I'm committed to maintaining SGAG' (duyuk'ta). Cultural rhetorics

allow us—demand of us—engagement with both intellectual and embodied knowledge as
part of struggles for social justice that exist simultaneously inside and outside of the ivory
tower. For those of us who are part of oppressed communities, it is our bodies—first and
foremost—that disrupt and disturb oppressive systems because, as Lorde reminds us, "we
were never meant to survive" (Unicorn 32). Cultural rhetorics have a responsibility to
bodies, lives, and communities. As scholars, we all have a responsibility to survivance
and continuance.

Hooks challenges cultural studies scholars when she says, "I felt. . .terror about the
danger of Cultural Studies approaching issues of race, gender, and sexual practice, and
then continuing to hurt and wound in that politics of domination" (Nelson et al 294). I
feel the same terror when I think about rhetoric and composition addressing issues of
power and oppression. What cultural rhetorics must do, then, is to approach our work
consciously, critically, and accountably. Theories of oppression and liberation emerge
from the lived experiences of oppressed people. I want our practices and continuing
scholarship to treasure these lives—my life, the lives of those I fiercely love—to
understand the material conditions of oppressed peoples, and to commit itself to social
transformation. Much of my work is informed by feminist politics and activism that
demands putting theory into practice and links the personal and the political. We have no
hope of changing systems of oppression if we cannot change ourselves. Cultural

rhetorics is a means to do just that, to change ourselves and our discipline.

I99

Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, and Lawrence Grossberg note Hall's assertion
that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham had as a goal "to
enable people to understand what [was] going on, and especially to provide ways of
thinking, strategies for survival, and resources for resistance" (Nelson et a1 2). I believe
that this is an important goal for cultural rhetorics, and in addition, to acknowledge the
ways in which people already have complex understandings of their experiences with
oppression, have traditions of thinking about their experiences, and have
intergenerational tactics for survival and resistance. Perhaps this is one of the ways that a
rhetorical approach to culture can offer tools for liberation that cultural studies sometimes
falls short. Cultural rhetorics should not only attempt to engage with creating resistance
tactics, but also put at the center tactics already in the repertoire. It is our responsibility
to design a discipline hat deeply engages in both theory and practice, both the personal
and political. It is our responsibility to imagine a discipline that engages issues of critical
consciousness, radical social transformation, opposition, and hope.

Performance is a means to potentially shift our understandings of rhetoric,
meaning-making, memory, delivery, and pedagogy towards radical, decolonial, and anti-
oppressive practices as scholars and teachers. Performance contributes to shifting our
discipline toward cultural rhetorical analyses that are more capable of exposing and
dismantling systems of power. Our field too often privileges texts over living bodies,
alphabetic writing over other compositions, and—despite calls from radical scholars—too
often dismisses the histories, rhetorics, and lived experiences of Indigenous people and
other people of color. The discipline continues to ignore the "foundation of blood and

bodies upon which it constitutes itself." Decolonial performance rhetorics can help to

200

reveal that foundation, one that haunts the cultural memory of all people in the Americas,
while re-rooting scholarly and pedagogical practices in the traditions of the Americas in
order to interrupt ongoing colonization. It is our responsibility as both Native and non-
Native scholars and educators living on occupied land to disrupt colonial projects through
our work. It is our responsibility to provide spaces in our classrooms for students to
"rehearse" tactics, to use the classroom as a decolonial skillshare in order to intervene in
systems of oppression both inside and outside of academia. It is our responsibility to put

into practice activist scholarship that aids in decolonization and radical social change.

.Ofil‘hflcf). .BfiQ9D6'9. PV'H'B. Hiyohunihiya. Hiyowohalena. Hedohalena. This is

your part. This one, you start it. Start it quickly.

201

APPENDICES

202

APPENDIX A
ARCHIVAL NOTES FROM THE CHEROKEE HERITAGE CENTER ARCHIVES,

CHEROKEE MALE SEMINARY RECORD BOOK

Cherokee Heritage Center Archives, Seminary Record Book [acc 96.1.71 TE 1413].
[Page 6]

May 2‘“, 1899
At a meeting of the Faculty held May 2nd the following business was transacted.

A student, Henry Dameron was deprived of all privileges from this date until June
lSt '99, as a punishment for leaving the school-building after nine 'o' clock pm. for town.

Further discussion during concerning the Annual May Picnic was held and the
Principal was requested to confer with the Principal of
[page 7]
the other Institution Concerning the arrangements, etc.

The proposition to give an entertainment, the proceeds of which to be given as a
subscription to the erection of a statue in the memory of Sequoyah, was heartily
supported and the details of the work allotted to the several teachers. The meeting closed
with a review of the work accomplished since last meeting.

May 19'“, 1899
Meeting held May 19th for the purpose of making final arrangements concerning the
'Sequoyah Monument' Entertainment.
The teachers were assigned duties to be performed and the meeting closed. R. K.

Adair absent.

203

[Page 8]
June 9‘“, 1899
At a meeting of the faculty held June 9th a financial statement concerning the

aforementioned Entertainment was made and is here appended:

RECIEPTS Sale of tickets, W.J. Richards'.
per Dameron $1.25
" " " Female Sem. 4.95
" " " City Drug Store
per Prof. Hough 11.25
Proceeds at Store, per
J.G. Hough 4.05
Sale of ice-cream per

Miss Finley 10.45

31.95

EXPENSES

Printing 200 Admission $2.00

Tickets and 300 hand-bills

Paid for Use of Piano 2.50
" " Moving 3.00
Rent for Opera House 1.50

204

Expenses for ice-cream 3.85

12.85
[Page 9]
Received $3 1.95
Expended 12.85
Proceeds l 9. 10
Received
Tahlequah I.T. June 10th 1899
of George Cox Agt Male Seminary
Nineteen and 10/ 100 Dollars
Proceeds of Entertainment, for benefit
of the Sequoyah Monument [Illegible]
$19.10 [E.M. Spudren Chair? Illegible]

[Page 49]
Male Seminary,
Tahlequah. I.T.

Feb. 18,190]

205

At a meeting of the faculty a committee of six from Cherokee and Sequoyah
societies, was present waiting permission to give an entertainment about the first week in
April 1901, for the benefit of the Athletic Association. Permission was given upon the
condition that a copy of the program be presented to the faculty for its approval.

Jesse Covel [?] came before the faculty asking for admission as a pupil. Motion
made and recorded: That on account of this former conduct while connected with the
school in 1900, and on account of his reputation in general, that the application be
rejected. Motion carried.

L.M. Logan
Pres.

W.P Thorne, Secy.

206

APPENDIX B

INTERVIEW WITH CAT

CAT
I was really little, I was probably about four or five, it was right before my grandma died.
And, we went down to the creek in the morning. And I think we were either looking for
crawdads, or we were gonna go get pawpaws from under the trees down there. And, we
were watching the water spiders on the surface of the creek, and the dragonflies. And I
was talking about how pretty the dragonflies were, and I always loved the water spiders.
So my grandma started telling me the story about how we got fire, and how the water
spider brought fire in a little bubble on her back. But her story was a little different from
what I've heard since, because what she said was along with all the other animals who
went and tried and failed and came back different, Water Spider tried and didn't make it
because it was just too far. So, Dragonfly offered up her back. And Water Spider got up
on the dragonfly's back and flew to get the fire, and Water Spider got the fire, got back up
on the dragonfly's back, and when the dragonfly got tired she sat down on the surface of
the water and the water spider got the rest of the way.

So, the story's a little different from how I've heard it told since. And it's very
different from what I've read. And I don't know if my grandmother was doing that
because she wanted me to appreciate the dragonflies for what they were, or simply
because that was the way she'd heard it. But the other thing she said about the dragonflies
after she told the story was we were watching them and I was admiring their color, how

beautiful they were and she said that I always had to appreciate them because no matter

207

how frail and delicate they looked, that they were very strong. And that they were very
fierce hunters and fighters and lovers. And I was a very little girl when she told me that
story, and ever since I've never forgotten that, and I've always admired the dragonflies
because of that story. And I've always thought of myself that way sometimes. When I get
a little afraid or a little. . .you know. . .about the way the world is around me, I think back
to that time that was a little more innocent and the power of that moment. And I think of
that dragonfly and I think I need to be like that. Because that was my grandmother's
lesson for me, was to tell me that that's what I needed to understand, that was no matter
how fragile things seem, that they're stronger than we think. So I think that was about it
of the story, that I can really tell you. I mean, I could go through the whole story about
the different animals who went to the tree to get the fire, but somehow that doesn't seem

right to tell you that right now. But that's my story.

208

APPENDIX C

FIRST INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN FARRIS

[Electronic data damaged]
QWO-LI

How do you identify? Do you identify as Two-Spirit, or...

ROBIN
Two—Spirit.

QWO-LI
As Two-Spirit?

ROBIN

When I'm amongst my white friends, white community, then it's, you know, Lesbian.
But, that's part of me, so it's both/and.
QWO-Ll
You grew up in Missouri?
ROBIN
No, I grew up all over. Most of the last 20, 30 years of my life have been in Missouri.
Southwest Missouri.
QWO-LI
What do you think it means to be a Two—Spirit Cherokee person for you?
ROBIN
Well, I'm in the process, I'd say, of interweaving the two roles. First I identified as

Lesbian, and I'd always known I was Cherokee, but as I grew to know myself as Lesbian,

209

then it was like, finding out, of course that the white culture doesn't accept that at all, and
I was so proud of hearing through other Cherokee that amongst our people, even when I
came here to this museum, that it was a non-issue. So I though, oh, this is wonderfiil,
here's a group of my own people that accept me at who I am fully. . .. And then I was
shocked at hearing about the Lesbian couple and that the Cherokee Nation, before
anybody else was introducing that whole policy about marriage only being between a
man and a woman. So, I've been in the process in the last several years of integrating who

I am and what I am and where that fits in with two different cultures.

QWO-LI
How do you think it does fit in?
ROBIN
How it does or how it should?
QWO-LI
How it should.
ROBIN

Well, that we have a lot to contribute to our community, and we've always had a lot to
contribute to our community and the Great Spirit makes us as we are and who we are and
that it should be a non-issue. You know, my own research has shown that many Native
American tribes had more than two genders, they have three and four and five genders
and it's only been a European Christian that had a dichotomous view point of black/white,
right/wrong, male/female. ...And I can't quite keep my head around why. . .how you

could keep things in two polar opposite camps and not have any interwoven-ness.

210

QWO-LI
So, when did you start doing research on what Two-Spirit was?
ROBIN
I was in a counseling program at the university and getting my Master's degree in

counseling and I [Recording ends]

211

APPENDIX D

SECOND INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN FARRIS

Tulsa Two-Spirit Gathering, 2008
ROBIN
Are there questions you want to ask?
QWO-LI
I'm trying to remember some of the stuff we did before, but I think what I started by

asking last time is what words do you use to describe yourself, and why, and in what

contexts?

ROBIN
Right. In terms of being Gay, right?

QWO-LI
Yeah.

ROBIN

Well, Gay, obviously, I just used it. I would say I use Gay as a universal, overreaching. . .I
would call myself a Lesbian, I don't care about that, some people do. Two-Spirit depends
on where I'm at, 'cause so many people don't know what that is and depending on who
you're with. Obviously if I'm with Natives I would, if I thought they'd understand it. So,
I'd say those three terms. I don't recall that I've ever defined myself by something else. I
don't like the word homosexual, that's for sure.

QWO-LI

No?

212

ROBIN
No, it sounds like a Christian sermon word to me. It's derogatory, it's meant to separate
and define who's doing something they're not Supposed to. I like what they said to today,
about the fact that T wo-Spirit embraces more that just sexuality, that it embraces the

whole spirit part of who we are as a person, honoring and being genuine to who we're

born as.

QWO-LI
Did you grow up in Missouri?

ROBIN
No.

QWO-LI
No?

ROBIN

I was born in New Hampshire, and grew up all over. My parents—my mom and step-
father—moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I think by the time I graduated I'd gone
to something like thirteen different schools in seven different sates. Kind of all over the
place. I came to Missouri because my grandfather lived here, he retired here, and—long
story short—I ended up living with him out of high school before I started college. And I

like Missouri a lot.

213

QWO-LI
I remember that one of the things we talked about last time is, what do think it is to be
who we are, whatever words we use for that within Cherokee contexts now, and what do
you imagine they've been in the past, what haVe you been told or...

ROBIN
Well, I liked finding out from another Cherokee when I was writing my paper that there
had been a word, because I think as we discussed before I started out finding that among
Native people—cause I was finding out who I was as a Gay person at the same time I was
trying to learn more about my culture as a Cherokee—and then I heard through a
Cherokee that here amongst Native people, it's a non-issue. That we've always had them
in our society, and I thought, "Oh, this is incredible." You know, I'd found this
community that will accept me as a Gay person. And then, as I started investigating it, I
found out—not the case. We've been so assimilated as a culture that a lot of them don't
even know their history and don't even remember. And so, I was angry and disappointed
and very sad. Then I found out from another Cherokee, of the Eastern Band, that yes
indeed, we were accepted and that there was a name for us, it was Two Heart. And I don't
know how to pronounce that in Cherokee. He wrote it down, but I don't remember how to
pronounce it. So, anyhow, then. . .the then and now question is, now I think we're
struggling to get back in the circle. And then I think we were part of the circle, and it was
accepted and it was just a different way of being, and unique to each individual, but all
part of the whole community. I like what they say about, we didn't throw away people,
we put them in their place. I don't think that's true now. But I think we can get back there.

I'm optimistic.

214

QWO-LI
How do you think we get back there?

ROBIN
Part of it's gonna mean that each individual is gonna have to be kind of courageous, in
stepping out, in stepping up and letting people see who we are and letting us contribute
and that we're not weird or scared or afraid or something to be. . .you know. We're just
people, like everyone else with things to contribute. I think seeing us and us keeping it in
the forefront and educating people is gonna be what gradually. . .each generation. . .I think
to have more of that to bring to the whole, and eventually I think we will come back into
it. Knock on wood.

QWO-LI
Yeah. What do you think our. . .I guess. . .what do you think our present work is Cherokee
communities or in Native communities in general or outside of those communities?

ROBIN
I think it's probably education, because I think we're having to educate each other and our
little ones not only about our culture as Cherokee people, but then as part of that is the
place of the Two-Spirit. It's part of the whole picture, it's not like two little separate
things. It's just part of the whole picture. So, that, I think, educating and. . .like he [John
Co-cke'] said, just enlightening that pilot on the plane by saying, "Did you know chief is a
derogatory term and you're dishonoring what it is and what it's come to mean," and all
that. I don't think people know that. And so I think sometimes you just have to kind of
teach them. So education. I think education. Being who we are and not being so afraid of

to be who we are.

215

QWO-LI
How long have you been doing beadwork?

ROBIN
Just started a couple of years ago. A couple years? Maybe not even that long. Yeah, I'd
say a couple years ago. I started with a bead loom. And then someone showed me how
you could do jewelry. Actually, I think I stumbled into a bead place in New Mexico. And
I was like, "Oh!" I thought "Oh my gosh, I could spend a fortune in here." And then
somebody showed me how to do jewelry, and then I thought. . .I wanted moccasins, and
like I told you I got online with Martha Berry and she had this long waiting list for
moccasins and I thought, "Well, you know Robin, just get in there, get a pattern, and just
make yourself cut the leather and just do it." So, that's what I did. And I'm very, very
much enjoying it. It's like I told Deb, the thing is now I'm getting almost done with my
first pair and I want to do another pair. I want to make another design, and keep going.
I'm trying to make her wear some. She hasn't said yes for sure yet. She wants high-tops.
But we've talked about making wedding moccasins. So, anyhow, I just think it's
incredible.

QWO-LI
Yeah, it's beautiful. I like that you bring in the four colors.

ROBIN
Well, this particular thing: I thought about doing the four direction colors, and I wanted
to go traditional, maybe, rather than modern. But I couldn't find brown beads. And then,
the elders that teach me have taught me that unlike the Western tribes that talk about the

red path, the red road, the ancient Cherokee it's the white path. So, I thought, you know

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my feet, I'm walking a path, and so I wanted to put this white path here of diamonds in
there to kind of remind me, to kind of remind myself that I need to live a spiritual since
it's such a spiritual thing, and it's just spiritually true. So, the rest of it's just colors that I
like.

QWO-LI
So this is your first time at a Two-Spirit gathering?

ROBIN
Yes. I had heard about the international one, but I didn't know it was so close to home till
I got online. And I told Deb, I said, "Oh, Deb. They've got one right..." We're still
learning about the culture and about the pow-wow and the proper etiquette and the
balance of things and dances and stuff like that, and we're aware that as a Gay couple we
can't just be out there. And it's kind of like, what can we wear, what can we not wear,
what could we wear that might be not exactly what most straight people would do but
wouldn't be so disrespectful that we're. . .because we're trying to balance being Gay and
being Cherokee. So, we heard about this and we thought, "This is an incredible
opportunity to just be who we are as Gay people, but also learn more about our tradition,
and take part in that."

QWO-LI
Yeah. So how have you negotiated in other non-Two-Spirit spaces? How has that been?

ROBIN
You mean as far as Native gatherings that aren't Two-Spirit? It's like being in the
heterosexual world. It's kind of like, don't get too far out there. We sit together but we

don't hold hands like we were here. And right now we're still kind of in the observational

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mode, and enjoying the crafts and the art and learning more about the culture part of it,
and not really addressing directly the Two-Spirit part.

QWO-LI
What do you think, or what have you heard, are our traditions around Two-Spirit?

ROBIN
You mean the Cherokee tradition? I have no idea. Like he [Co-cké] was talking about—
and that's what I found in my research—because it's an eastern tribe, so much of it was
assimilated before people started getting it down on paper, that unless we do old
manuscripts, that the people who wrote down certain things or know because it's been
passed down orally or something like that. . .I have no idea. I've heard that you were
defined by your work role, so it could be that. I mean, I know there were warrior women.
Whether that meant they were considered Two-Spirit or not, I don't know. I know there
were Cherokee warrior women, because I've read about them. Like Nancy Ward was
considered sort of a warrior woman—Beloved Women—I know there's that, but Beloved
Women are not the same thing as warrior women or Two-Spirit. I guess you could be
both, but not necessarily, so, I don't know. I'm still learning.

QWO-LI
Where do you hope we can go, and why do think, I guess. . .what do you imagine for us as
Cherokee Two-Spirit people? What do you want our future to be?

ROBIN
That we'll get back to that place where we're accepted, protected and allowed to add our
spirit and gifts into the circle of our people and our community just like any other

member of the tribe. I'd like to see all of us, in all tribes, model to the rest of the world

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that Native Americans see being Two-Spirit (Gay) as no big deal. It's just a different way
of being, like having blond hair or blue eyes, being tall or short.

QWO-LI
During the discussion today, you had said something about being treated as an
abomination?

ROBIN
Yeah. He [Co-ké] asked the question about "What do people say when you come out?"
That [reference to abomination] is the kind of response I've experienced from many in the
Christian community. Even if certain individuals don't say it themselves, there's this quiet
agreement of it by not saying: I don't agree with that. The whole national (including the
Cherokee Nation, I'm sorry to say...) mindset that voted in these "marriage is only
between a man and a woman" thing... That angers me.

QWO-LI
Is that what's happened to you?

ROBIN
Yeah, I mean my sister quoted the scripture for me. . .She does the "love the sinner but not
the sin" thing. That's just another way to me of trying to appear loving and accepting, but
really you're not.
[Interview interrupted by an elder looking for scissors to cut a child's jeans into shorts]

ROBIN
I forgot where we were at.

QWO-LI

You had mentioned your sister quoting scripture...

219

ROBIN
Oh yeah, about the abomination. Yeah. She said, "The Bible's clear on that." And she
quoted it. So, whatever...

QWO—LI
Well, part of what this project is, is to just kind of have people tell their own stories. So, I

guess I'm curious about what story or experience that you would want to...

ROBIN
Do I get to talk about Deb? (Laughs).

QWO-LI
You can talk about whatever you'd like.

ROBIN

Let's see. I was a late bloomer. I came out late in life. One of the things that I think is
important—whether you're Cherokee, white or whatever—is that kids have got to be
allowed to date in high school—Deb and I were talking about this—so you find out who
you are and how you relate in a relationship. You know, we do the whole academic thing
and the whole finding out what you want to be when you grow up thing, but my daughter
at sixteen knew more about herself in relationship to significant others than I did at thirty-
eight. All I knew was that I didn't respond to men very well, to men at all. I mean, I liked
them as people... I, you know, had emotional attachments, but I couldn't
physically/sexually get attracted. I had myself compartmentalized. . .and it never occurred
to me at the time I married my husband, that "sex" is a huge part of a marital and intimate
relationship. To me, sex didn't matter and I couldn't understand why it meant so much to

my husband (at the time). Later on, I realized how totally unfair this was to him and to

220

me. He needed someone who could relate to him sexually, and so did I. I also didn't
seem to fit in with straight women socially. It was like I could never quite "get" their
worlds or how they related to them. . .like I didn't quite speak their language. I was in my
forties. . .and online one evening having a conversation with a woman who it turned out,
was Bi and all of a sudden we were flirting with each other, basically. And it's like the
lights all went on. You have to understand this was amazing to me. My husband had
often asked me to flirt with him. . .and it was like. . .I don't get it. What is this flirting thing
and how does one do that—actually? So, long story short, I explored that and realized it
fit me. Suddenly everything made sense and the missing puzzle pieces kind of all fell into
place. And it was more than just a sexual thing. It was sexual and physical and mental
and social more than anything else. There's a group of people now that I just feel in sync
with, I feel like I'm on the same page with. And it's just totally different. You almost have
to be there. Anyhow, that's probably my whole experience in a nutshell. But then, here
you are in your forties suddenly really dating for the first time. And I had a so much to
learn, that there was a lot to making a relationship happen besides just finding the correct
gender. And that's why I thought, "Man, if I had known this when I was a kid...." I mean,
I don't regret my path because I do have my kids out of it, and so on. But if I had known
this, what a difference. You know, being in high school. I might have had redheaded
children [Deb has red hair]. (Laughs).

I don't know. I can't think of anything else related to the experience. I talk to
people who are curious about what it means to be Gay. . .genuinely interested, not
condemning. . . just trying to understand. A former professor asks me to come talk to her

multicultural classes now what it means to be Gay and I do. It's a way of empowering

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myself, being a voice for others that haven't yet been able to come out and accept who
they are as unique and valuable individuals. It's also a way of giving back to my
community of Gay women. Gay men, too, but I can't speak to their experience. You
know, trying to present to a class of straight people who may not have had any exposure
to what it's like to be a Gay person, and what kinds of issues they may encounter in
counseling others that are different that they need to be sensitive to. So, in part I speak
where I can to empower myself, but in part I do that for my community to try to give
voice to people who still are voiceless, and to help foster understanding and acceptance.

QWO-LI
I guess. . .I know I'm kind of free-flow with the questions...but what were experiences like
growing up as a Cherokee person and as a Queer person?

ROBIN

As a Cherokee person, I knew. . .my mom had told me, she must have told me really
young that we were Cherokee. Because all I remember is that I identified with it all of my
life. It was probably my earliest identification of who I was as a person, before even
accepting the fact that I was a girl... and I remember "being" Cherokee at age five and
six. My grandfather gave me an Indian name of "Laughing Eyes" and I took that pretty
seriously I think. My Mom says, "You always wanted to be an Indian brave. You never
wanted to be a princess." That should have said something about whether I was Gay or
straight, maybe. . .but at the time none of picked up on that. Anyhow, I played Indian
constantly. I did not care that everyone else wanted to be a cowboy. I was gonna be an
Indian. I wanted bows and arrows, I wanted tom-toms, I wanted feathers, I wanted it. . .I

did that all as a kid. And it was more than just "play," I related to the world differently in

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a more Native American way I think. I remember crying one time, because our
neighbors cut this big limb off a tree. . .because it was in their way as I recall. And it was
so painful; it felt like someone had taken an arm off somebody. It's like, "Why? Because
it's inconvenient to you. You whack this arm off." I still remember that. It felt bad.
Anyhow, our problem is, there isn't a lot whole lot we know about our family, our
ancestors. . .Why they ended up on this side of the Mississippi? Did they come here
before the Trail or on it? My mom and I have been on this genealogical search for years
trying to discover who Lee Rogers' parents were and what his story was, and we're
having a very difficult time of it because there's not a lot of records that our family had a
hold of. And in all that search, I've found that a lot of our ancestors who could pass as
white, did so... and so part of all the sorrow and anger of being Cherokee is recognizing
and feeling the huge loss of our heritage and the impact of being annihilated as a culture.
I was very angry at white people for awhile. . .and you know, I look white myself. . .but I
just don't relate well to the parts of me that are German and English... I'm still struggling
with the shame of all of that, and trying to recognize that like my Cherokee ancestors, my
European ancestors were individuals, and as individuals they were just people, but as a
government. . .I have a very hard time with the whole arrogance and white/American
supremacy thing. I'm finding out in talking to the elders and in my own discernment
though that I don't think all of this journey and searching is about finding out who my
great-grandfather was. I think it's more. . .I think it's about the discovery itself. . .and our
traditions and history. . .you know, from a Cherokee and Native perspective, and so I
think there were things that I was meant to learn and that my ancestors wanted to teach

me and this is how they're teaching me, is by making this a journey and not a quick-

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answer of just names and dates. They are and continue to teach me. I believe that my
ancestors. . .my Cherokee heritage is alive to me and available to me in a here-and-now
way. . .I really do believe in the ancestors.

I didn't know I was "Queer," if you can use that word, when I was little. I've gone
back and looked at things now with the new eyes that I have of who I am and, you know,
you start thinking, the teacher and the girls I was attracted to in grade school even. What
was that all about? I remember this one girl in particular—this was about the fifth
grade—and she had this really beautiful long blond hair, she had a Scandinavian
background of some kind in her family, and I just thought she was gorgeous. Now I look
back on that and wonder if that was a sign that I was Gay. But then my whole sexual
development got derailed when I was sexually abused (It started when I was 12. . .and
didn't stop until I turned 18) and the abuse just sort of knocked out that whole concern. I
was too busy surviving to start exploring who I was sexually. So, the whole journey just
got halted, absolutely halted, and psychologically fiozen, and it was only in counseling in
my forties in trying to heal through my childhood trauma that I started waking up to the
sexual part of myself, that part that I think most people come to an understanding of in
their pre-teens, pre-puberty era. "Experiencing puberty in your forties is real
embarrassing," but it was also an energizing and exciting time. (Laughs). I got to actually
experience the whole hormonal connection. Everything that had been just frozen at age
ten, suddenly—you know—like, I'm forty-two and I feel like I'm eighteen, you know?
(Laughs).

[Side conversation with Deb].

224

I'm not sure if that answered everything. Regarding the whole Gay thing that you
were asking about. Now, my mom said, when I came out to her finally, that it made
things that I had done and ways I had been in my childhood, early childhood—it made
sense to her now. She said she used to tell people that she had three boys and a girl and
her girl was more boy than her boys were. And I was such a tomboy. . .much more
interested in being outside and climbing trees, running and wrestling with my brothers
than I was in dolls and stuff. Mom says that I've changed a lot socially now too, that the
way I am seems more connected. She says "You always seemed to be on the outside
looking in," and now. . .once I came out as a Gay person she noticed that I changed a lot,
and she feels like I look like I fit in more with people, that I'm more comfortable in
myself, that I'm more calm. One of my professors, who watched my whole coming out
process, said the same thing recently, that the difference between me when she first got to
know me as a new student and now—four—five years later—is totally different. Totally.
And. . .it's been helpful to have people who know me. . .validate my experience. I know it
as genuine, but it is empowering when others experience it in the same way. Which is
something you miss if you stay closeted. Because nobody knows.

QWO-LI
And so you've done your own research on Two-Spirit.

ROBIN
Yes. As I was integrating myself as a Lesbian, I was also reclaiming more of my identity
as a Native American, a Cherokee. When I had first visited Tahlequah, a Cherokee man
there told me that being Gay was "a non-issue." That's what I had heard, that Natives are

much more accepting of the different ways of being in this world than the white-Euro

225

conservative Christian element. So, I was shocked. . .hurt. . .angry when I found out that
the council of the Cherokee Nation passed. . .even before the rest of the US. did. . .that
one-man/one-woman marriage amendment to their law and constitution. I felt
betrayed. . .and very, very hurt. I tried to communicate with Chief Smith and the council
members about this and most of them would not even reply. And, as you know, in Native
culture, not speaking is speaking. It is saying something. And I got it. So, I decided to
research why and where we had lost this understanding of ourselves as a people—
a tribe—and that's what came out: my seminar paper on being Two-Spirit and how that is
just another aspect of the genocide/assimilation of most Native American cultures. We've
completely lost so much of our history. What we have now, that so many Cherokee
believe in as accurate, is a white interpretation of our history, and so much of it is so
inaccurate.

QWO-LI
What kind of research, what kind of work or questions, do you have about Two-Spirit
traditions or people that you're looking at or wanting to look at?

ROBIN
My biggest concern regards our own history and tradition, because we've lost so much. I
don't even know if or how much we an ever get back. What we have now that is out for
the general public is white interpretations and white writings on what we did and why...
like this whole thing about Sequoyah having "invented" the Cherokee alphabet. I have a
problem with that. I think it was there long before Sequoyah. So, unless you can find
elders who have been taught the history, teachings, stories and traditions as they really

were, and who are willing to pass them on, and that people will listen to, we're going to

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continue with this assimilated version of what it meant and means to be Native American
and Cherokee. Our history as a people is evolving, just like all people's history, so my
big argument to the Nation over my Two—Spirit paper was (and is) that, I don't argue with
your right to say that you've decided at this point in time that—given how you view the
world or morality or whatever—that Gays shouldn't get married, but I do argue with your
denial of the fact the Two-Spirit were a part and accepted as a valuable part of our people
and our history. I mean, go ahead and say that it used to be okay in the past but that you
no longer find that being Gay acceptable or whatever, but don't pretend we didn't exist.

QWO-LI
Could you say about. . .did you write to the council?

ROBIN
Yeah, I emailed them. First, I started off emailing them questions. And I actually got two
or three different council members to respond. The chief never responded, which hurt. I
felt like he could have at least acknowledged my email, but he didn't. And then in
continuing to write, only one of those three even kept up a correspondence. And even that
person had to say, "Don't identify who I am, because it could cause problems." This
person had to hide their support and response to my questioning. I think that's a pretty
sad commentary on our Tsalagi culture. When I finished my seminar paper I emailed
them all a copy and asked for their opinions. I received one response. No one else even
acknowledged my having sent it at all. It was very disheartening, you know, because
they're the leaders of our people. They're the ones that are fashioning and creating
cultural language and societal definition and stuff. I guess I shouldn't have been

surprised, but I was. . .at the time.

227

QWO-LI
And this is around the same-sex marriage case?

ROBIN
Yeah, it started out when a lesbian couple wanted to register their marriage with the
Nation, and they wouldn't let them. . .but there was no rule that said they couldn't. So they
seemed to quick add this piece to the Tsalagi constitution that "defined" marriage. This
was months before the rest of the country went in for that. I mean, that's what shocked
me. I thought, "You've got to be kidding me." You know? I thought, "No. Not the
Cherokee." I thought I misread it, or misunderstood. Then I started realizing just how
much our culture has been assimilated into the white-Euro Christian way of defining who
we are and what is accepted. There are a few elders and people who tell me that it wasn't
always this way. But most Cherokee today deny that the Two-Spirit were ever even a part
of our heritage. They are being taught the white way and the Tsalagi way is forgotten
and denied.

QWO—LI
What other things do you wanna add or say? Or was there anything from last time that
you remember that we didn't talk about this time?

ROBIN
No, I don't remember. I don't remember about last time. No, I can't think of anything. I
think we covered it. I think we did a better job of it this time than last time.

QWO-LI

I think so too.

228

ROBIN
It seemed more formulated. As I recall it was your first interview last time.
QWO-LI
It was, yep.
ROBIN
And you really hadn't had really quite the time to sit down and figure out exactly where
you wanted to come from.
QWO-LI

Yeah. Okay, wa'do.

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APPENDIX E

INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL HEATH JUSTICE

QWO-LI
I think maybe I wanna have you just start telling any sort of story you want about your
life or your experience as 3 Cherokee Two-Spirit/Queer. Well, first of all, how do
you. . .what words do you use?

DANIEL
I tend to go with Queer. I actually don't use T wo-Spirit very often. Queer works really
well for me. I like its ambiguity, and I like that it kind of shakes things up a bit. For
myself, I think T wo-Spirit is a bit. . .I understand the reasons for connecting it to a
spiritual tradition and I think that's important, but I think in some ways it normalizes in
ways that I don't know if necessarily we need to be normalized. I like the idea that
whatever roles we may have had in the past are roles today, that we could be really
important in shaking up complacency and conservatism and reactionary convention, and
reminding people that being Cherokee is about a lot more than blood and it's a lot more
than breeding. There's a lot to being Cherokee that is really exciting and powerful and
disruptive and beautifully quirky and weird and anomalous. So, I'm very happy with
Queer. I probably identify myself much more as Queer than Gay.

QWO-LI

Why?

230

DANIEL
I think 'cause Gay sounds. . .it's about Gay bars and a bunch of Gay white guys. Not that
there's anything wrong with Gay white guys, but. . .. Queer feels very much in keeping
with being Cherokee to me. And Gay is weighted by a lot of representational burdens.

QWO-LI
How do you think that being Queer...how did just you say that?...feels in line with being
Cherokee?

DANIEL
Cherokees as a rule have always been. . .weird. For our neighbors. So, in the Southeast we
were the only Iroquoian speaking people. We were the people who lived in the
mountains. Socially we were similar to the Muskogeean peoples in a lot of ways, but we
were also anomalous in a lot of ways. And anomalies are such a big part of our tradition.
I mean, you have Uktena, you have Wild Boy, you have. . .even Thunder in some ways is
anomalous. These are figures who cross between worlds and represent a lot of different
realities. That's been a Cherokee experience. Our history of intermarriage, our history of
adaptation. . .we adapted pretty readily. Even traditionalists who didn't speak English
adapted to changing circumstances. Not necessarily gladly all the time, but pretty
practically, so, we've always been able to adapt and shift and. . .move ourselves as
necessary, and I think Queer is a term that really gives us that as well.

I'd be a little hesitant to say that to be Cherokee is to be Queer, but I think that we

are in an anomalous position in a lot of ways in broader Native America. I mean, we're
hated in Indian Country 'cause we're supposedly not Indian enough, but it's been our

transformative Indian-ness that has made us survive. And I find it really troubling that

231

there are so many people in the Nation who would want to take away that
transformability out of some sort of weird misguided fear about cultural purity, when
we've always been inclusive, we've always been adaptive. Not always happily. I think
that's an important point, too, but, that would be Queer. That's also about being Queer.
That's survival. And not just surviving, but thriving.
QWO-LI
So, when did you. . .know that you were Queer?
DANIEL

Well, I always knew that I was a weird little kid. I was a total cross-dresser as a child.
Wonder Woman, Teela from He-Man. In Oz, I was Ozrna, I loved Ozma. Never much
cared for that bitch Glinda. I loved dolls as a little boy. And it never seemed odd to me
that I could play a male character one day and a female character the next day. Why not?
What was it about girls that made them so special that they could play these fantastic
characters and I couldn't? And all of my main friends were girls. So, that was just. . .we
got each other. We loved beautiful toys and we loved having fun, we loved dress up. And
we would also play with He-Man toys, I mean it was not just Barbie. But gender didn't
really have. . .gender was very malleable. And fun. And of course, once I started going to
school and realized that not all kids appreciated that, that's where I really started to kind
of pull back from some of that. But, from a very early age I was never a conventional
boy.

You know, I would go with my dad, and we'd go camping, and I'd go out with my
little cowboy outfit and everything, and I'd be all butch. And then dad would be taking

pictures and I'd pose in my little cowboy outfit. And I still have some of those pictures,

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they're really cute. But it's a real indication to me. I loved the dress up of being a boy,
too. I loved the boy drag. It was very fluid, as far back as I can remember.

QWO-LI
How did your family react to that?

DANIEL
They were indulgent, but to a point. I had this Dolly Parton doll. The first doll I ever had.
And I couldn't understand why it kept ending up in the trash. And then one day it just
disappeared. And I remember my dad was not pleased when one of my little girl friend's
parents bought me a doll for my birthday, because I really wanted one. It was one of this
little kinda half-size dolls that their daughters had and I really wanted one, and I got one
for my birthday. And Dad wasn't happy about it, but he never. . .I never felt like I was
being pushed into a model of a particular masculinity, since my dad was really indulgent,
and so was my mom. I was my mom's only, I was my dad's baby, and they always knew I
was a very imaginative kid at an early age. And, I think if I had been my dad's first, like
my eldest half-brother, I think it would have been a really different situation. But my dad
had mellowed out a lot by the time I came along. So I knew that they weren't. . .overjoyed
about my gender play, but they didn't. . .it was never punished, it was never made a
pathology. It was just. . .I was a little boy so I knew that they wanted me to play little boy
things, so I did. And then when I was by myself, I did dress up. And I don't remember
feeling at all conflicted about that, like I was doing something wrong. It was only when I
went to school and was starting to experience abuse from other kids, that's when it was a

different situation. But never at home.

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QWO-LI
When did you start coming out?

DANIEL
Oh, that was. . ..I came out to myself. . .well, I don't know. I first had a really good inkling
when I was about seventeen, and a female friend of mine. . .her aunt had bought her a
Blueboy magazine. And this friend showed it to me. I've never asked her, we've lost
touch, but I've been really curious as to why she showed that to me. What was it that she
had an idea before I ever articulated it? I made up some lame excuse to borrow it. I have
no idea how. . .because of course I was "straight." And I just remember looking at it.
When I was going through school, kids would always call me a fag and stuff and I would
think, "Well how could I be Gay? I love women." I was not sexually attracted to them,
but I loved being around women. I was just a "nice" guy. I was a nice straight guy, and I
had no sexual interest in the guys around me——at all. Well, in retrospect I really
understand that, 'cause they were not necessarily. . .I still wouldn't have any interest in
them. But when I looked at this magazine I was completely. . .jolted. 'Cause these were
beautiful men. Who were unashamedly sexual. And they'd look out at the camera with
this just smoldering desire. I was like, "Holy Shit! I get it."

But of course, I didn't want to admit it. I didn't want to admit it to myself. I didn't
come out to myself until I was twenty-one. Even though I was buying Gay porn pretty
regularly, and all of my fantasies were about men, it wasn't until I lost my virginity to a
woman and ended up having dry heaves in the bathroom afterwards, that I fully realized I
was Gay. But then it was a couple of years after that before I was actually with a man.

And then immediately after being with him. . .I was at a conference. . .came back from the

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conference, and the day after I got back I was telling people. Also, I had a massive hickey
on my neck, so I pretty much had to explain that somehow and lying just seemed. . .it just
was not something to lie about. I wasn't ashamed.

QWO-LI
I know, since I know you and all, that you're Oklahoma Cherokee. What is your family's
experience? I mean, I know you can't just summarize that, but. . .I don't know. ...what do
you want to talk about with that?

DANIEL
You mean my family's experience being Cherokee?

QWO-LI
Or, whatever you want to talk about.

DANIEL
I was born and raised in Colorado, and my dad was born and raised in Colorado. My
grandparents moved from Oklahoma. I didn't actually. . .I never set foot in the Nation
until I was probably twenty-three. So, our experience was always at a distance. . .but we
knew we were Indians. I didn't really want to be when I was a kid, because Indians to my
mind. . .you know, they were the savages who ran around and killed nice little kids and
white women, and. . .I remember when I was three years old was when I found out we
were Indians. My mom and dad and I and one of my dad's fiiends fi'om his trucking days
were out having breakfast, I think in Deckers or someplace in Colorado. And this fiiend
of Dad's was Lakota, and phenotypically. I mean he had the long hair, he had the dark
skin, and the whole meal I just glared at this guy. And like my mom says, she knew I was

gonna say something, but you can't slap a kid before he says something. So, Mom got up

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to take me to the bathroom, and I walked over and I poked the guy, and I said, "Hey. My
daddy doesn't like Indians." And of course, they all just roared—they thought it was
hilarious. And my mom said, "But honey, your daddy is an Indian." And I threw a wall-
eyed fit, screaming and crying, "My daddy is not an Indian! My daddy is not an Indian!"
Snot and tears dripping down my face. You know, my dad has a buzz-cut, and he has
phenotypically Native features. . .people know he's not a white man. But he also wears
flannels and. . .he's not like the Indians on TV. But for me, as a kid. . .the revelation was
horrifying. My mom said, "Yes, he is an Indian." She kind of grabbed me a shook me,
and she said, "And that makes you an Indian too." And I said, "Oh, so I'm a little Indian
boy, huh Mama?" And then it was okay, there was no problem. But I've always kind of
come back to that moment and thought, "At three years old, why would I have been so
terrified of the idea that my daddy was an Indian?" And that really shaped the way I
approached our ancestry. . .I was "part Indian." But it wasn't something I. . .I wasn't
ashamed, particularly, it was just not something I claimed. I wanted to be a British
professor. I wanted to teach at Oxford, wear jackets with patches on the sleeves and
smoke pipes, and sit in oak-paneled drawing rooms and pontificate about the grandeur of
the Romantic era of British literature.

And my dad had a really hard life. His mom and dad divorced when he was a boy,
and she was the tie to the Nation, and she had tuberculosis and ended up in a tuberculosis
sanatorium in Colorado Springs where she died when my dad was fourteen. And that
was the last time he saw his grandfather, when his grandfather came to collect the deed to
her house and then just left. But Dad had actually been really close with his grandfather

before then. Amos Spears was his name. And, my grandmother's family just kind

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of. . .they never were in touch or anything. So my dad lived his life as a pretty isolated
Indian kid on the Colorado plains. His sister could pass pretty easily, but he couldn't. And
he had to fight all the time, and he was a he was a scrappy little kid, but he was little. He's
a short, slightly-built man. But he learned how to fight, and he learned how to give back
as good as he got. He was always very proud to be Indian, I mean he was kind of like,
"Well, if you assholes think it's a bad thing, then it must be a good thing." But he didn't
really know what it was to be Cherokee in a cultural way. He knew what it was to be an
Indian in a very anti-Indian world. But he was always proud of it, but it really wasn't until
I started reclaiming that, that together we. . .and I started to ask him questions and I
started to get all these stories, that I'd never heard before and that he'd really never had
the receptive audience for. So, in a lot of ways our. . .we've had to do a lot of cultural
recovery. We have Oklahoma Shawnee ancestry, too, but don't know much about it—it's
the Cherokee that's shaped our history. My mom's family claims Native ancestry, either
Cherokee or possibly Chickasaw, although there are some questions about the enrollment
records. These could have just been white folks trying to get Chickasaw land, could have
been Chickasaw, could have been Cherokees, who knows? So my mom has kind of
walked this path as well, with a much less clear sense of what that is for her. But for
Dad's line, we know who our family line is. We know we're one of the old families. We
had family members who walked the Trail, so. . .but a lot of that is recovery, and also just
asking questions.

My aunt Alverta, she just recently died, just last month. Got a lot of information
from her. I actually have photos of my great-grandparents now and I have photos of my

grandmother. And my grandmother, she was sixteen when she got married, she started

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having babies right away. I think she was seventeen or eighteen when my dad was born.
When she got divorced, she ended up having a child out of wedlock who ended up at the
Stratton Home in Colorado Springs. She'd been a Cherokee girl in a shitty marriage with
my grandfather. And on the eastern plains of Colorado? Prime Klu Klux Klan territory.
She was a Catholic, of all things, which the Klan didn't like them, and she was a loose
woman, who smoked and drank. So, all of these things are so dangerous. She didn't want
her kids to be Indians. She wanted her kids to survive.

Our experience is absolutely a Cherokee experience, but it's not a land-rooted,
ceremonial Cherokee identity. It's the Cherokee identity of being outlanders of the
diaspora and the scattering of the Nation. Very much a Cherokee experience, but it's not
the language experience, it's not the cultural experience, except as the culture of
fragmentation and recovery. So we've been able to reconnect with a lot of that history,
which has been really rich and beautiful. But I was Cherokee in name only, in a lot of
ways, and have only been finding my way to a stronger cultural and historical sense of
Cherokeeness since I've been an adult. My first experience with Cherokee pride was
reading Asa Carter's The Education of Little Tree, which is sick and twisted, but it makes
some measure of sense. That was the first time I read a book that was actually made me
proud to be a Cherokee man, even if that pride was found in a fake autobiography by an
unredeemed racist.

QWO-LI
We've had so many conversations for so long, it's hard to figure out what things to ask in

such a small amount time. But I know that last time we saw each other, we started to talk

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about Uktena, I think and other sorts of precedents in Cherokee stories that. . .I guess
Queer precedent in stories. . .do you know what we talked about?

DANIEL
Yeah. Uktena in particular, but there are a lot of other figures who are really kind of odd
in a very highly stratified society that. . .a society that places a very high emphasis on
purity and separation of certain things from other things and maintaining pretty clear
divisions between different categories. And yet there are all of these ways in which those
divisions are penetrated. And they're very much embedded within the national
consciousness. So, yeah, I think we do have a lot of really fascinating figures in our
history. Whether they're a Two-Spirit precedent, I don't know. And I don't know that it
matters much. I think we can make them ours. Uktena is a dangerous, dangerous monster.
But it's also a really important monster for medicine. Just like Stone Jacket is a brutal,
carnivorous, bloodthirsty beast. But we got our medicine songs from him after he was
killed. There are all of these different ways that those binaries are not necessarily
arbitrary, but they're conditional. And I think that we're conditional people. I think that's a
really powerful and empowering place. It's a scary place, especially if you're a light-
skinned, balding mixedblood who wasn't raised in the geographic boundaries of the
Nation. If you don't have the language, if your family experience as an Indian is not
necessarily the tribal, cultural experience. Except as the last ten years. So, a third of my
life. . .well, actually, I started when Iwas nineteen really reclaiming being Cherokee,
which is a process that you helped with very much. So, over a third of my life I've been a
proud Cherokee. And there's still under two-thirds that I didn't really know who or what I

was. I knew what I didn't want to be, and I was trying to fill that void with a lot of

239

pretense and a lot of very class-oriented wannabe desires. So it's a scary thing to be in a
conditional state, but I don't think conditional means. . .I don't think it means expendable.
But I think we have important roles to play. And I think we're doing that.

QWO-LI
What are they? What are we doing, do you think, is going on?

DANIEL
Well, we are memory-keepers. We're memory keepers for our families, a lot of us are
scholars who work in literature and in history and in rhetoric and in anthropology. We
know the history better than a lot of other folks, because we've had to. Sometimes
because we're looking for ourselves in that memory, and sometimes just because that's
what we're called upon to do. Some people who are raised on home ground, they have a
particular experience which is important and very valid, but they don't have to work at it
the same way. Some people, that's just what they're raised in. And that's a beautiful thing
and I think that's an important thing, but I think that there's also something beautiful and
important about working at it and having to confront the absences in our past and being
forced to confront the realities of colonization that have effected us very explicitly. And
to know that we have a lot of family members who didn't find that balance, who weren't
able to embrace who they were. . .they were just trying to survive and they were trying to
get their kids to survive. I'm very blessed that I'm enrolled, because that enrollment
validates that history for me in ways that other people don't have that privilege. But that's
not what makes me Cherokee; the experiences and the history and the commitment and

the ancestry, that's what defines our Cherokeeness more than anything.

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But I think we are lorekeepers, we're story-holders, we're history bearers. We are
tradition bearers. We're transformers. We shake things up, in necessary ways, hopefully.
We're survivors. We're willing to face a lot of hard things to be honest. I mean, one thing
we often hear is, "Cherokees are honest people." That honesty is important to us. And
yet, the Baptist influence has caused a lot of Queer Cherokees to lie, to have to lie about
who they are and what they are. Well, if we're honest people. . ..we're called upon to be
honest and that's sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do, but that's what we're
here to do.

So, I don't think what we are called upon to do is necessarily different from what
a lot of non-Queer Cherokees are called upon to do. But I've not yet met a Queer
Cherokee who hasn't been deeply devoted to the people. And I've met a lot of non-Queer
Cherokees who have not been devoted. So that says something to me. That we have to
fight to be recognized, but part of that fight is also the hard work we're doing in cultural
recovery and maintenance and not just looking back but also looking forward. Positing a
more humane and dignified future for the Cherokee people. We have really good
examples to draw on, but sometimes a lot of weird ugliness comes up that we have to
challenge. And just by being ourselves we challenge that.

QWO-LI

I know that you and I have had conversations about this, too, and you have editorial
control of this in case it's something you want to do my research on before it's out in the
world, but I know you've talked about Little Carpenter, as someone you're interested in

learning more about.

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DANIEL
Yeah, Little Carpenter is a really interesting figure to me. We have a lot of information
on him but he's. . .he's kinda quirky. He's honored, but it's clear that even in his own
community of Chota he holds a somewhat ambivalent or ambiguous position. He's the
father of Dragging Canoe, the great Chickamauga war chief. He's the uncle of Nancy
Ward, Nanyehi, the great Beloved Woman. He's a Beloved Man who is an advocate for
peace. He was known as a very strong warrior before. But he disappeared for a long time,
he was a captive of the Odawas, possibly. There's also some question that he might have
been Odawa. He might have been of another nation who was adopted into the Cherokee
Nation. He was renowned for his rhetorical skills, but he was also known to be very, very
strategic. He was an amazing politician who worked very much for the benefit of Chota,
but not necessarily for other Cherokee communities. He was very town centered. He was
on one the first Cherokee delegation that went to London, so he saw this force that was
coming across the ocean, and he had a really unique perspective that a lot of other
Cherokees at this time did not.

The pictures we have of him, and the descriptions we have of him always that he
was small, slight, and he's effeminized in a lot of these representations, even if it's just
kind of by an aside. He had a very intimate relationship with a British military officer, I
want to say John Stuart, but I don't remember exactly what his name was. Somewhere in
memory they did the "brotherhood ceremony," which seems to me to be kind of a nice
way of, or a very hetronorrnative way, of dismissing that intimacy. I guess when Little
Carpenter died, Stuart or whoever this man was, was inconsolable with grief, which could

be a brother situation, but just a lot of things lead me to wonder. No evidence, I have no

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evidence that he got it on with men. But just so many little things point to him being an
anomalous figure and a figure who—yeah, he had a son, we know nothing, or very little,
about his relationship with his wife. We do know he was estranged from his son, which
would have made some sense, because the father would not have been any authority. But
in their particular relationship, they were both Wolf Clan—not sure how that happened.
They would have had a stronger relationship. And Little Carpenter's relationship with
Nan'yehi—he was the uncle of Nan'yehi—he would have had a significant influence over
her. And she had a very strong and contested relationship with Dragging Canoe. I also
wonder---because we don't know a lot about the women's roles in the council, there's
scattered bits and pieces. We know that there probably was a women's council. But we
know in other Iroquoian and some Muskogeean traditions, but particularly Iroquoian, the
women's council has a male representative to men's council. And his relationship with the
women seems to be very strong. So I wonder if there was something maybe similar to
that. And who better than a Queer boy to bridge that gap between the women and the
men?

And, his nickname: Leaning Wood. It's really hard for me not to see that as a pun.
I need to talk to a language speaker to have a sense of whether that would be the case, but
things just point over and over to me that he was family. And, so, he fathered a child.
Yeah, and? That would not in any way preclude him from being Queer. He's a Beloved
Man at a younger age than a lot of other Beloved Men, if memory serves. So what does
that mean? And just because he was a Beloved Man doesn't mean he wasn't also a
warrior. But, he supported the British. I would love to know what was going on in

England when those Cherokee boys were over there. Did they visit a molly house? Not

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likely, but they certainly stayed in the area of London where same-sex activities were
notorious. I don't know. I have a lot of research to do on this, but. . .you know?

QWO-LI
Yeah, one of the things that reminds me of, too, that we've talked about, is kind of how
there's an image that some Cherokees want to create for Cherokee culture being like, very
sexually modest, and have internalized all this stuff about sexuality, that doesn't actually
make sense historically or even linguistically or culturally or anything—it doesn't make
sense. So, I'm kind of curious about what you think in general from your research and
stories or whatever, what kinds of ways Cherokees viewed eroticism and sexuality in
general before Christian shame-based things started to be enforced.

DANIEL
Cherokees were incredibly sexual people, though not nasty about it. At the Peabody
Museum there's a pipe bowl fiom a Cherokee townsite, with a man and a woman having
sex, in explicit detail, with their genitalia pointed right at the smoker. So, somebody's
getting a little thrill looking at that. Early European accounts were horrified about how
sexually free Cherokees were, that young Cherokee women had sex, out of wedlock,
sometimes extra-wedlock. And young men. And, no mentions are—I haven't seen any
mentions at all or hints at all of same-sex intimacies. But, people were very much sexual
people. And fiankly a lot of the fine upstanding folks who don't want to admit it. . .I'm
sorry, but you can either deny your sexual desires and get in weird circumstances, or you
can just admit the fact that we love sex, we're very sexual people, and that doesn't mean
that we're crass about it. I think Cherokees would not have been crass, and I think that

even very sexual Cherokees today have personal modesty, but it doesn't necessarily

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transfer always over to sexual prudery. But, it's depending on the context. It's depending
on who's around, and I think that's okay. I think that's fair. I mean, walking around
flashing your dick at everybody is not a nice thing to do. Not everyboay wants to see that.
So, I think part of it is also just a basic consideration for one another.

QWO-LI
One of the things that I think is so hilarious about the attempt to ban same-sex marriage
in the CNO, and this argument that there's not historical evidence of it—that's what
they're trying to say—is that what we do have really clear evidence of is not something
they would like.

DANIEL
No. (Laughing). No. And fi'ankly, a lot of. . .there is a lot of evidence. A lot of families
have this evidence, as they have Gay and Lesbian and Queer kids, parents, cousins, aunts,
uncles, friends, and so on. And they don't necessarily talk about it a lot, but we've all
heard stories of very public admissions from high-level people in the community. But
these acknowledgments haven't gotten written down. . .there's power in the words. And
there are very important traditionalists who have been very vocal about it, some of whom
are Queer. So, yeah, we have the evidence. But we also have a lot of evidence of—like
you said—of things folks aren't thrilled about, like, oh, burning people alive at the stake
in the 17008, torturing them to death. I mean, I think having a bunch of Queer folks
running around in the Nation is a much nicer thing than burning people alive at the stake.
I understand that there was a social role for that, whatever, but it doesn't necessarily fit

my ethical protocols today. Kiss him, mustn't kill him. I think that's okay.

245

QWO-LI
Are there any things that you—through research or stories or your own feelings or
whatever or that you think. . .I don't know how to phrase the question, but what do you
think is our place historically?

DANIEL
I've asked a couple of elders this, both of whom said they don't think we had a special
place necessarily, or a culturally defined place, but they both said that was because it just
didn't matter, that it wasn't so different as to require a distinctive role. Which surprised
me. . .that wasn't the answer I was expecting. And I wonder about that, I think it's a real
possibility that as long as you were still contributing to the community, whether you lived
as a man or a woman or whatever, who you had sex with didn't matter. Are you having
kids? Are you adding to the safety and security of the town? Are you fulfilling your
obligations to your family? That mattered. On the whole, not everybody had to have
children. Are you contributing to the welfare of the community? I think that's what
mattered. That could very well have been it.

I think because of the really strong gender dichotomies, and there certainly were
anomalous figures that could pass between that, it would be odd to have a defined role.
But I think we also have to ask, "What are we talking about?" Is it people who are gender
variant? Is it people who are having sex with people of the same gender? Is it people who
are living in a different gendered experience? In that way, it may very well have been that
somebody who was born identifiably male and lives as a woman might have a social role
of caring for orphans, or being a healer or something. We certainly know that some of the

War Women were gender variant, at least in their transgressing or crossing over

246

particular kinds of gendered expectations about the sphere of women. They were not in
any way pathologized, they were very much honored. I don't see a similar role for men.
You have War Women, and warrior men, but I don't see Peace Men. Beloved Men, yes,
but that was kind of a different category. So I really don't know, that was really
something I've wondered about. And I do wonder if maybe it's not just that. . .people had
sex. That didn't define their identity. What gender role they took, not what sexual role,
but what gender role they took, that was the defining feature of their identities. And that
makes sense to me. That makes sense within what we know about early Cherokee culture.
But, the absence of evidence doesn't mean that it's not there; it's not the evidence of
absence. I tend to be kind of evidence-oriented on that, I'd like to see more evidence of
something. The few things I've seen that the men who crossed were not kicked out, by
any means, but they were made fun of in a couple of the accounts I've seen. Men who
weren't masculine enough. But then you have somebody like Little Carpenter who could
very well have been Queer. People didn't make fun of him. But people didn't always trust
him or his motives, either. So, I think maybe a man who was shifting a little bit. . .and that
could have very well not just on the part of men but on the part of women. "What is this
man doing coming into our sphere of authority?" But I kind of have to hedge on that one,
because I just don't know.

QWO-LI
What do you imagine and what do you want for Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit folks?

What do you want in the future?

247

DANIEL
I want us to have a place on the grounds, with our partners, where we don't have to worry
or feel like our partners aren't gonna be welcomed. I'm not a Baptist, but I don't imagine
that one's partner would be welcome in the Baptist Church. There are some grounds
where we're welcome, though not many. I want us to be healthy and happy and to not be
seen as compromising our Cherokeeness by living honestly and loving honestly. I want
that love and living to be seen as contributing to Cherokee nationhood, not drawing away

from it.

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APPENDIX F

INTERVIEW WITH CHAD AND COREY TABER

Tulsa Two-Spirit Gathering, April 19, 2008.
QWO-LI
Okay, well, usually I start off just by asking people what words they use to talk about
themselves, as far as Two-Spirit or Gay or both of those things, and kind of why, and in
what contexts, or other words, you know?
CHAD
It depends probably I guess to whom I'm speaking. Usually I identify as Gay, but also
because mainly where I live, it's very urban, there's not many opportunities for me to use
the term T wo-Spirit and be understood. So usually I just used the term Gay and I identify
as Gay and Native American. (To Corey). How do you identify?
COREY
You know, I think that people that are not Native American have no idea what the word
Two—Spirit means in almost every instance, and so I think it's kind of...it's a useless term
in some scenarios...
CHAD
Sometimes. . .
COREY
...Unfortunately. And I don't mean to take away from it, like to say it's not worth having
around, but just that in certain situations it's not applicable as. . .it's lost in translation,

almost, you could say.

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CHAD

Sometimes I use that as an opportunity to tell people a little bit about our history.

COREY
To educate.

CHAD

Mmhmm. Especially in my day-to-day life because I come in contact with a lot of people.
I work as a stylist, and so I see a lot of people on a daily basis, and a lot of them. . . just
because of the nature of the work, I develop a pretty close relationship with most of my
clients, and so and a lot of them will ask me. And also, when I return from ceremony like
Green Corn Ceremony where I have scratches on my body and people see that. Or my
tattoos they see on my wrists and wonder what that's from or what it symbolizes. And so
that kind of gives me an opportunity to explain a little bit more about myself and maybe
even identify with the term Two-Spirit.

QWO-LI
And you grew up in Oklahoma?

COREY
Yeah, we were born and raised in Tulsa. Our parents were also born and raised in Tulsa.
And our grandparents come fi'om a few different places. Our dad's mom is Cherokee and
Creek and she comes from down by Muskogee, and his dad was white and also came
from that same area. Our mom's mom is Cherokee and Wazashe, she's a mixed-race
individual, and she comes from Arkansas, Western Arkansas, and her dad was white and
came from Tulsa, so we've got family from a few different places, but all within maybe a

two-hour drive from Tulsa. Regionally I guess you could say it's all about the same.

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QWO-LI
Part of what I'm hoping with this project is that it can be a way for Cherokee Two-Spirit
folks who maybe are scattered around to be able to find stories that they can, you know,
identify with, they can hear and know that they are part of a community. So, I guess I'm
kind of wondering how you see yourselves as far as, or in relationship to, Cherokee
tradition and Cherokee community. And I know that that's complex, and we were talking
about some of the politics inside—and that stuff is fine too.

COREY
Well, I guess you could say that it would start with our dad's mom. And the reason for
that is because our parents had us when they were pretty young, and so they worked, you
know? And we spent all of our time with these old ladies. And it was kind of by default
and kind of by tradition. That's pretty standard. That's an old tradition. It's how it used to
be. The whole rest of the family would take care of these kids, that would be the elders,
and other community members. And that's just a natural way for us to live. Our family is
not extremely traditional, like most Cherokee families, especially those living in cities by
relocation or choice or force or whatever. And so, while we did not grow up speaking
Cherokee as a first language, or did not necessarily grow up spending every weekend at
the stomp dance, we grew up with a lot of traditional understandings and traditional
knowledge and lifeways that I think maybe other people don't, especially when they're
not close to their elders like that. And so most of our waking hours until we were seven
or eight was spent with her and her sister and at her mother's house, around all of these
old Indian ladies. And so that's how we came to identify as Cherokee people. That was

our primary identification, we grew up knowing we were Cherokee. We didn't grow up

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being told, "Well, you're Cherokee and you're white," or "You're white, but you've got a
little Cherokee in you. " It was, "You're a Cherokee person. And that's who you are." And
I think that maybe in most traditional communities that's how people still identify: they
are because they are. You're not just "part Cherokee." You either are or you're not. And I
think that that's a pretty common perspective here in Oklahoma.

QWO-LI
So you're both really involved with organizing Two-Spirit community and this gathering.
Could you talk a bit about why you are doing the work that you do, and what you're
hoping could happen and. . .why you do this work?

COREY
I think it comes from, at the very root, a sense of feeling different. A sense of feeling
ostracized. The discomfort that comes from being different. It's like John [Co-cké] said, if
you're different there's a power that comes with that. And I think that power that he was
referring to is the power to make the difference the similarity. What I mean by that is just
that we're not alone, there are many of us, and we're scattered but this is our chance to
build that community back and take back what has been lost, and revitalize a part of our
culture that maybe other people aren't already focused on.

CHAD

Like Corey said, we both grew up knowing that we were Cherokee and identifying as
that, but we both grew up in communities that weren't—especially after age seven or
eight when we moved from the Tulsa area to the Oklahoma City area, which is more

urban and demographically more Caucasian.

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COREY
And non-Cherokee anyway.

CHAD
And non-Cherokee in general, yeah, definitely non-Cherokee. I think that's probably
where a lot of that sense of "I'm different" started to come from.

COREY
Yeah, because up until that point we weren’t different we were surrounded by other
Cherokees.

CHAD
Right.

COREY
Mixed-race people, whatever, but still Cherokees.

CHAD
And when you're faced with that feeling I think that a lot of times it's—like John said—
that's where the similarities come into play and you start to seek out other people that are
like you. And you have commonalities and your life experiences, stuff like that. And a lot
of times, the unfortunate think is those commonalities are points of pain. And discomfort
and rejection and they can come from something simple as rejection or torment or being
harassed or...

COREY

Abuse of all sorts.

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CHAD
...Abusive. . .yeah. Just any kind of negative feelings, and so I think that both of us kind
of evolved in a similar way out of those experiences.

COREY
It's all about turning something bad into turning something good.

CHAD
Right, right. And it's not necessarily. . .I think that for both of us—and you can tell me
whether you agree or not but I really think for both of us—it's really not a personal thing,
it's more of like something you're looking forward, looking ahead, you know? Not that
we seek something we have a business pursuing is, at least for us, but maybe to align
people of a similar experience or a similar identity so that they don't have to have the
same experience that we had, the same negative experiences that we had.

COREY
I think it's both. I think that even in some instances, for example in traditional
communities that have limited exposure to Gay people or Two-Spirited people, you can
still get ostracized by your own people. And that's unfortunate and we have experienced
that. To a lesser degree than in society in general, but it's still there due to varying
degrees of assimilation into non-Indian culture by our own people. And so, even in those
traditional communities there are times and places where you'll still be exposed to that
sort of dis-harmony, that distrust, or that exclusivity as if there's no reason for you to be
there because you're Gay, or there's no reason for you to be there because you're mixed.
That invalidation. I think that those personal experiences provide you with the desire to

make those changes. And so I can definitely say in my case the personal experiences

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were so frustrating that I wanted to subvert it somehow. And so I do that just by being
here and exemplifying the ideas that I was taught to exemplify as best as I can.
CHAD
Not only that, but I think as we get older I definitely I feel more and more of a sense of
duty to younger generations. Not only to make a their path easier, but to...
COREY
To make a path at all.
CHAD
To make a path at all, but also trying to regain and reconstruct and reassemble what we
have lost, because that's their right as much as it is ours. At this point going forward it's
only going to become more difficult. So at this point where we're at, when we each feel
that sense of duty and when we feel that sense of obligation to our future generations, I
think part of our responsibility is to do those things so that they're not lost forever.
COREY
I think it has to come from, though, a personal place. I think it has to begin that way...
CHAD
I think so too.
COREY
...in order for it to have that depth of meaning and that depth of importance and that
permanent sensibility, you know?
CHAD
You were asking us why we do the work that we do. It's not just for our specific

communities. I think that a lot of the good that comes from gatherings like this is that all

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of our communities are brought together and we all share——whether we identify as
Cherokee or not—we all share a common goal and we share common hopes, common
desires for all of us. And so I think that that's another thing, is just bringing communities
together. And. . .

COREY
Fixing some of those old hurts, those old wounds, and those old rifts that still exist,
for whatever reason, especially in smaller communities people tend to perpetuate. It just
happens, you know? And sometimes it happens for no reason at all. People are just doing
it and they don't even know why. It's 'cause they didn't stop to think, or because So-and-
So told them that's how it is. I've seen that happen so many times in so many different
ways that it’s frustrating, and. . .I don't know, for whatever reason I feel compelled to take
it upon myself to be like, "No! That's enough. It stops here." And I think it starts as a
personal journey and I think it ends with as sense of obligation, or continues with that. It
becomes bigger than yourself. And certainly you have tofeel it deeply to begin there.

QWO-LI
What do you think, or what have you been told, is our traditional place within Cherokee
community and tradition?

COREY
I haven't experienced a great difference between Cherokee and Creek communities, and
what I've learned from my experiences with all of those people is that there wasn't
necessarily a place of reverence for Two-Spirited people—necessarily. And there could
have been, you know, I mean all of our people teach different things, but it was told to us

that that's not how you're characterized. What's important is how you help out your

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family and how you take care of your people, whether it be your community, your family,
your tribe——whatever circumstance. How you treat the people around you and what you

do to give back. That essentially defines you as a person, and not who you choose for a

partner.
CHAD
But blood-quantum, too, or...
COREY
Or racial existence, any of it.
CHAD

Exactly. We don't identify just because you're a certain percentage of Cherokee blood, or
whatever. Traditionally we're told that you were Cherokee based on your participation in
the community and what you do for the community.

COREY
And also, I've heard our medicine people say that everybody deserves a place at the fire.
There's room for everybody at the fire. And the fire is how we pray and how we
commune. And we don't waste people. And that's not a good enough reason to throw
somebody away. So that's kind of been my experience. It's more of a non-issue than a
point of reverence. Just a non-issue altogether.

QWO-LI
What do you think is our work right now, and what do you think it will be in the future?

Why are we here?

257

COREY
I think that we're here primarily to. . .for one thing, to honor those who came before us.
To show them that their words and their lives not for naught. That we remember them
and we honor them. And I think that anytime you honor yourself you are honoring the
Old Ones. And if you're being true to yourself by following whatever path your heart
leads you to follow, as long as it's a good path. I'm saying this in reference to the topic.
But, as long as you're following that path and you're doing it in a legitimate and genuine
type of way, then it's a means by which to honor people. And it's a means by which to
honor the Creator. The Creator put us here to honor the Creator, and also to honor our
own selves and to enrich ourselves somehow. And I feel like you can't do that if you're
stifling yourself.

CHAD

But I also think we're all here...I mean, that's a very broad prospective, but I think in a
more narrow prospective, I think you are here, and you are here, and I'm here—the three
of us, and the ninety of us that are here—however many—are here specifically for a
reason. Because I've never experienced, in all of the gatherings and different things that
I've been to, so many powerful people in one place. And I've never witnessed things like
I've witnessed here, and in ceremony—I don't know if I can really talk about it on
recording and stuff like that—but just to witness some of the things that I've seen. The
power like the ceremony that we had this morning, the amount of healing that I
witnessed, and not just with my eyes but just felt. And so, our work is many different
things to different people. You can ask me what our work is, and I'll tell you something,

and Corey will tell you something, and you can go ask somebody else over there and

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they'll tell you something else. And, it just depends. And so, we can give you answers to
that and that's wonderful, but, I think that our work is a lot of different things. But I think
that the basis of our work, fundamentally, is restoring what was lost. And that's a very
general statement, but it means a lot of different things. Restoring what was lost as Two-
Spirited people, restoring what was lost as Cherokee Two-Spirited people, meaning
traditions and ceremonies...

COREY
Healing the part of the Cherokee circle that's been gone because these people have
ignored us and cast us out.

CHAD
Not just that but, healing and restoring what is lost in the world. And I think our work is
going to transition from regaining what we've lost in a smaller prospective to restoring
what was lost as a whole.

COREY
It's a part of a bigger healing that has to occur.

CHAD

And I think the world is even trending more toward that, toward healing. Because people
evolve. Life evolves. All life forms evolve. The world keeps spinning, but it can't
continue on the way that it is right now forever. And if we do want life to continue—
which I think is the general goal of all people, to preserve life—if we want it to continue
and we want it to continue in a positive manner, then we must evolve. And sometimes

evolving doesn't mean just going forward, but it means looking back. Because some of

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the problems that we are facing right now as—not only as a Cherokee nation but as a
United States nation and as a world in general...

COREY
They're old problems.

CHAD
They're old problems, but some are new. And some of the new problems we're facing are
because of some of the old problems in the past. That's part of our work, and like I say,
here we have a concentrated amount of really powerful people, and we're kind of like
satellites. And our work is to go out into our communities—whether it be Cherokee and
Two-Spirited or whether it be neither—and try to heal the people, in whatever that
means.

During the ceremony today I was blessed with a really big honor as being a circle
keeper, and that's not to say that I'm a holy medicine person, but I carry medicine. That's
a duty, a job, an obligation to the people. And, as far as my understanding, all of that is
about is healing. Healing people like in the ceremony we did today, and healing people
on a personal level, whether they come to you as a Cherokee person, or even as a non-
Native person.

COREY
Healing means a lot of different things, but I think that's the best term.

CHAD
Yeah, I think that pretty much sums up our work here, today, tomorrow, and in the future:
healing. And maybe someday we'll come to a point where we are healed, when we can

just exist in beauty. Part of me thinks that.

260

QWO-LI
One of the questions that people ask me a lot, and maybe they ask you all too, is if there
are words in Cherokee. I've heard a few, but are there any words that you've heard or that
you want to talk about?

COREY
You know, not really any that I've experienced, especially. . .I would say that a lot of the
words that you'll hear, they probably have some sort of negative connotation. Because I
haven't ever experienced or haven't ever been informed of any position of reverence, we
don't have a pretty word for it—you know what I mean?———like some tribes do. There just
wasn't that. Not that I know of anyway. And a lot of the younger people now—well,
younger people anyway are the ones who cause a lot of the issues or go out of their way
to make people feel uncomfortable and that sort of thing, or harass all of the Two-Spirited
people, that sort of thing. It's usually the younger people that do that. The older people
have a quieter way. And so, younger people nowadays, a lot of them don't speak our
language. And so for that reason they don't even know the words to use other than
English words. So I've never really had any experiences or anything like that with being
called negative or even positive words in the Cherokee language reference that GLBT
status or anything like that.

CHAD

Same for me.

261

QWO-LI
Knowing that part of what these stories are is to give stories in the future, and our future
generations, what kinds of things do you want to say to them? Or what things to you want
people to know?

COREY
I want them to know that regardless what they hear from outsiders of any kind, that we
tried. (Laughs). We tried and tried as best as we could to preserve what's left and regain
what was lost for them. Because, it's theirs. It's their legacy. And we want them to have
that, because we find solace in that. And we find ourselves in that. And they won't find
themselves in something else. T hat's where they will find who they are.

CHAD

That's the most important thing for us. That you're not gonna find yourself inside of
something else.

COREY
Because if you are Cherokee, you already are that. There's not something you do that's
gonna make you that. You can't become more Cherokee. You're born as much Cherokee
as you're ever gonna be. No matter what you do, you're not gonna change. Either you are
or you're not, like we said earlier. And if you are, then that's not just something to be
taken lightly, you know? If you are then you should respect that, and you should do what
we're doing. (Laughs). You know, you should do whatever you can do—whatever that
may be to preserve whatever's left and regain whatever is lost for those that come behind

you. Because it's important to us, and it was important to those that came before us. And

262

for that reason we're here. And for that reason people will follow. And that's continuity
right there.

CHAD
And I think the best advice that I could probably give someone in the future would be to
listen...

COREY
Just take the time...

CHAD
Just stop and listen to the spirits, because they'll tell you. And that sounds so esoteric, but
it's really true. And it's hard for me sometimes because I'm so hyperactive and my energy
is so unfocused sometimes, in so many directions, that it's hard for me to quiet my mind
and just listen, or watch, signs and be aware of what is going on around me. On every
level, not just what I can see with my eyes or what I can hear with my ears, but what is
going on around me that I can sense. And developing that ability to sense not just to
recognize it but to follow it. That's the best advice I could probably ever give. The spirits,
they're not gonna lead you wrong. And they see more than we could ever see. And
sometimes it's really hard, especially being someone that was raised by Indian people, but
after a certain age when you're socialized in a school setting and stuff like that, you're
kind of—I hate to use that term, "whitewashed," but...

COREY

It's true.

263

CHAD
You kind of are. I just hate that term. You're kind of socialized to believe a certain way or
whatever. And it's not even just in whitewashing, but it's...
COREY-
You internalize a lot of the ignorance and prejudice that you're exposed to.
CHAD
Well, it's a lot of Americanization, even. It's Americanization. It's very culturally

American to be a consumer and to be a capitalist and to just be so out of touch with all...

COREY
It's a Western ideology.

CHAD
Yeah.

COREY

You can call it anything in the world, but that's what it is.

CHAD
I think that what's so amazing and what's so fortunate for us is that we can sit in this
setting and be surrounded by trees. [Unintelligible section of recording due to wind]. You
don't see this in Manhattan unless you sitting in Central Park. We're surrounded by all
this nature and all this beauty. I mean, obviously, I just got distracted by a butterfly. But,
we're surrounded by all this beauty, and so it's easier for us in this setting to try to be
more in touch with that. But I think that that's so important, because as life evolves and
stuff and nature's shrinking and you notice the effect on the climate. And we've got to

listen.

264

QWO-LI

Do you have any other things that you wanted to talk about?

COREY
Do you?

QWO-LI
I like talking about all of this.

COREY

I don't know. I don't know how you can tell somebody to do this and actually expect them
to, because it has to be something that you can feel. But the most important thing is to
connect with your culture. And if you're not in a Cherokee community, it's hard as hell.
And if you don't have a connection to a Cherokee community, it's sometimes harder.
'Cause if the Cherokee people, quote unquote, don't know you or your family, it's hard to
connect to a culture without a community. And so, when that's the case it's very
frustrating and, I think the thing is—if you really care about it—you can't lose sight of
that. And you have to persist, and you have to keep going and keep trying. And I think
that even if you do live in a Cherokee community, and even if you do get exposed to
traditional ways and non-traditional ways and Christian ways, or whatever. I think that if
you have it within yourself anyway that you want to reconnect and you want to me more
culturally appropriate—that's what I call it—if you want to be more culturally connected
to your culture, your people, whatever, it's an effort. And it's a painful process sometimes.

And it's not easy and it can be very frustrating. But I think it can be very rewarding.

265

CHAD
We keep talking about connecting, and it's kind of hard for me to identify as someone
that's a leader, because I'm like more of a reluctant leader. I don't really view myself as
someone that's a leader among any of the social classifications that I identify with: as a
Gay person, as a male, a someone of my age—you know, twenty-seven. Even in my
social group I really don't identify myself as a leader. I'm more of a reluctant leader. Even
being a circle keeper, I don't think that that's a leadership position. And so, without that
connection, all the things I'm doing I feel compelled to do. I feel compelled by the Spirit
or by our Creator, and it just comes to you that way. So, that's why I think we keep
talking about that connection, because everybody's job is different. We all have a
different purpose, in the future...

COREY
But there's something there. There's something for everybody.

CHAD
Absolutely. We all have our own purpose.

COREY
I think a lot of people, especially those who are not connected to the community, seek a
purpose and get discouraged because it's not easy to uncover...

CHAD
And that's why I say listen.

COREY

...If you're not connected.

266

CHAD
And that's why I say listen. Because eventually—eventually—the path will come...
COREY
The path with present itself.
CHAD
Yeah, will present itself. Absolutely. It will be shown to you.
COREY
If you're doin' right. Aaayyeee. . .(Laughs).
CHAD
But the thing is, you know, you say that but I have to say, I consider myself a reluctant
person in some ways, because I consider myself to be so flawed. You know, I'm not

perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But that doesn't matter, because...

COREY
'Cause it's not about you.

CHAD
Exactly. It's not me, it's about...

COREY

You taking on what you can do to give back.
CHAD
And it's about what the Creator or what the Spirit sees in me that I can do for the people.

COREY

That you may not ask for yourself.

267

CHAD
It's about the people. It's about the people, above all. It's about them, that we're talking to.

COREY
Yeah, we're doing this for them, we're not doing this for us.

CHAD
None of this is for us. That's why I say "reluctant." Not because I don't want to do it, just
because I would have never sought that out specifically on my own. But it found me.

COREY
But you know, those type of credentials can be imaginary. They can be so imagined
sometimes. And so that's a whole 'nother problem within our culture, you know?
Everybody tries to out Indian each other or out Cherokee each other: "You're not
qualified to do this," or "You're not qualified to do that."

CHAD
My turquoise is bigger than your turquoise. Mine's greener than yours...

COREY AND CHAD
Aaayyeee...

COREY
But I think if you're speaking from the heart, and if you're a genuine person speaking
from the heart, and you're doing it without some sort of ulterior motive, then I think that's
appropriate.

CHAD
I think that above all, I think all of us are here to walk our own path. And if you're

walking in a good way, and in a right way, then it'll find you. Your path will find you.

268

COREY
It will reveal itself more easily.

CHAD
It will reveal itself whether you like it or not.

COREY
That's true, that's true. Well, you know along with all of those things, I think that a huge
misconception among non-Indian people or non-traditional people is that there's glamour
to be found in some of the hard work that is done. And there's not. There's satisfaction to
be found.

CHAD

It's more fulfillment.

COREY
It's fulfillment. Well, yeah. I feel satisfied whenever I do something well, or whenever I
do something and it's appreciated by those who it was intended for. I get satisfaction from
that. Fulfillment, you call it whatever. But, I mean, there's no glamour in it. There's no
glamour in being a medicine person. There's no glamour in being the leader of a Two-
Spirit organization. It's not glamour, and it's not about that, that's not how Indian people
operate. That's a totally inaccurate perspective. It's about the people, and it's about
making sure your people aren't hurtin'. And whenever people are disparaging you, or
disparaging your friends, or disparaging your lifeways, you're hurting. You're wounded
by that. You're abused. If they're doing it intentionally, and intentionally informing you
that you are wrong or bad or sick or confused, then that's damage that they're doing to

ou and our eo 1e and whoever ou ma come in contact with, 'cause ou ma take it
Y Y P P Y Y Y Y

269

in and give it back out. So, I think that it's very important for us just to be here, just to
show by example that we don't think that we're ill and we don't think that we're bad and
we know from a cultural perspective that it's okay for us to be here, and it's okay for us to
switch dance, and it's okay for us as men to shake shells if we feel compelled to do that.
And it's okay for us to be at whatever ceremony we're invited to. Not just show up
somewhere, but you know, if there's a legitimate reason for you to be there, then that's
okay. You shouldn't not go because you're Gay or Two-Spirited. You should be there,
because you belong there. And that sense of belonging is hard for a lot of people to find,
and like I said, even harder if you're not connected to a traditional community. But it's
there, it's there.

CHAD
I think that sense of belonging is what instinctively we all begin seeking.

COREY
I think getting that, I think achieving that, and finding thate—even if it's just here, at
gatherings like this—is the jumping off point for you to go out and give back. You have
to get before you can give, 'cause you can't give if you don't have. You can make some
shit up, but that's not gonna do anybody any good. That's gonna do far more damage than
anything else. But if you have that love and that community that's been given to you, and
that you've been brought into and accepted by, if you have that sense about you, then you
can give that back. And that's the whole purpose for attaining it in the first place: to
make sure that everybody has that. And you have to get it before you can give it. And I

think that's why people start out looking for it.

270

QWO-LI
Is there anything else you want to say?

COREY
(Speaking to future generations). We love you. We love all of those of you that come
after us.

CHAD

There's much love for you here.

COREY
We're bustin' our asses tryin' to make y'all happy. Aaayyeee. .. (Laughter). No, I mean
that from the bottom of my heart. I say it jokingly, but I mean every bit of it. We want
this kind of thing to be here long after we're gone. And we're not gonna be up there tellin'
y'all y'all are wrong...

CHAD

No, but we will be watching. We'll be watching.

COREY
But that's the thing though, you have to have that kind of foresight. You have to be able
to look that far in the future and know. Because if you can see that far into the past, you
can see that far into the future. If you look at how our people used to live, you know what
was important to them. You can tell. And I mean, that's what we try to keep going. That
feeling, that good feeling, you know? In the age of flat-screen TVs and four-year-olds
with cell phones, it's hard to keep it real. You know? It is so hard. But, things like this—
places like this—are very convenient and very easy places for you to get a little glimpse

of that. You know, and a little taste of that. Just to remind you of who you come from.

271

Because once we leave. like Chad said, we're satellites and we go out into the world and
we share all of this with white people, green people, and everybody else. And it's not
meant to be divisive. Two-Spirit people and our Two-Spirit movement is not an act of
divisiveness. It's an act of faith, and it's an act of love and hope and continuity and
preservation. Of nothing but, you know?

CHAD
And going forward I think, like I said earlier, evolution is inevitable. We must evolve if
we want to preserve life. And so, bringing our way of life and—not just our way of life
speaking of tradition, but our way of life as far as perspective and the way that we love
and the way that we care for one another—bringing that to other people and other
cultures is necessary for our survival.

COREY
We want love to be our legacy. I can't wait...

CHAD
And beauty, because we're so pretty.

COREY
I can't wait until a hundred years from now, whenever they're looking at our pictures...

CHAD
I can't wait until an anthropologist finds this recording and they're like, "Ah, I wish I
could see their faces 'cause they're so cute." (Laughter).

COREY

What you're hearing right now is our grandmas. This is our grandmas talking.

272

CHAD
This is Mary and Betty. No, I'm just kidding. (Laughter).

COREY
It is, it is. We didn't make this shit up. This was taught to us. And this comes from two
generations behind us and two generations behind that. And so that's what's so special
about it, is that somebody our age can here sit and tell you things that people who have
been dead for a hundred and fifty years can tell you.

CHAD
It sounds the same.

COREY
It's the same message. I just can't wait till they see my pictures, when we're all dressed
up, and I think that's gonna be great, 'casue they'll see all these drag pictures and they'll
be like, "0H! That must have been a traditional Chickasaw dress!" No, gurl. We did drag
back then. Aaayyeee

CHAD

That's tranny fierce.

COREY
No, but I just think it'll be great. My one hope for future generations is that our message
is received in the feeling and sentiment with which it was intended. I fear that things will
be lost in translation. And I just hope that there's little bits and pieces and bigger bits and
bigger pieces that we have for them to work from and operate from in order to build a life

that holds true to our values, regardless of what it looks like. Because that's what really

273

makes us who we are, is our values. The way we walk through this world. And I think
that if we can do something to make other people—or to encourage other people—
or inspire them to do that same thing and live that same way then we've done what we

were here to do.

CHAD
Aho! (Drum beat).
COREY
What else?! No more questions?
QWO-LI
If you want we can keep talkin'.
COREY

I don't know what to say, really, but if you have more questions then that might give us a
jumping off point.

QWO-LI
Well, I don't know if I have anymore specific questions.

COREY
Well you know what, I wanna say this too: We have a lot of Gay relatives. There's a lot, a
lot, a lot of Gay Cherokees and a lot of Gay Creeks. And there always have been and
there always will be. And anybody on the tribal council that tells you different is full of
fuckin shit. (Laughter). And I want you to believe that. I want you to know that from us.

CHAD

Not just our tribes. Not just our tribes though, they're everywhere. We're everywhere.

274

COREY
Just in case you didn't hear it anywhere else, you heard it here. I mean that from the
bottom of my heart, because that's what our medicine people have taught us. You guys
aren't something new, you aren't some kind of spectacle we never seen. They treat us as
if it's a non-issue, like I said, they treat us like it's nothing out of the ordinary. Because it

isn't to us. And I wanna make sure that that gets in there. Aaayyeee. ..

QWO-LI
Well, wa'do so much. I appreciate it.

COREY
Howa!

CHAD

Howa!

COREY
We're happy to participate.

275

APPENDIX G
ARCHIVAL NOTES FROM THE MUSEUM OF THE CHEROKEE INDIAN

ARCHIVES, JOHN HOWARD PAYNE MANUSCRIPTS

Museum of the Cherokee Indian: Cherokee, Qualla, North Carolina
John Howard Payne. Vol. II & 111
VOL. II The Life of George Gist

VOL. III Indian Antiquities

VOL. III
[9. 49]

Among the Cherokees there used to be a custom of cementing perpetual
friendship between individuals. Supposed two young men conceived a particular
fondness for each other, and desired to enter into the strongest bonds of perpetual
friendship, they went to that feast or fast of purification when the Yowa was sung.
Taking an opportunity sometime during that feast, when the people were seated in the
council house, they arose, walked toward the fire, and then turned and commenced
dancing around the fire, what is called the A to hu na, or friendship dance, each having on
his best clothes. While dancing, in the presence of all the people, who looking, they
exchanged one garment after another till each had given the other his entire dress, even to
legings, mocasins etc. and thus each of them publicly received the other as himself, &
became thus pledged to regard and treat him as himself while he lived. Sometimes two

women, and sometimes a man and a woman contracted this friendship. Thus when a

276

young man and woman fell in love with each other but were hindered fiom marrying,
either by relation or by being of the same clan, they bound themselves in perpetual
friendship. While dancing round the fire as above stated, the man threw his blanket over
the woman, and the woman as soon as convenient threw hers to the man. Then man also,
having prepared a cane sieve, & hung it

[P- 50]
by a string over his shoulder, gave her that. He also presented her with a pestle to pound
corn with. The mortar he had for her at home.

Friends among the Cherokees, must share with each other whatever they might
have. They must also, if request always reveal whatever secret they might know. To
hide anything from a friend was betraying a want of confidence inconsistent with the ties
of that friendship by which they were bound. But friends must never reveal secrets thus
made known to them.

T. Smith (A ska lo tigi ski)
Raven & Zachariah.

John Howard Payne Manuscript. John Howard Payne.
Vol. IV Book 2
[p. 207, pp. 321-334 in original]

V,

A to hu na (or)63

 

63 Note via B0: A dv hv na (gathering wood dance), in Speck & Broom.

277

Feast of Expiation

The fifth great national feast, or fast, was called A to hu na. The signification of
this word, is no easily ascertained. It implies that connexion the Indians enter into on
certain occasions. Thus, when two young men conceived a peculiar64 fondness for each
other, they entered into a state of perpetual brotherhood, if I may so call this relation,
which cannot be expressed by any word in our language. They put on their best clothing,
and met by mutual agreement, at a time & place appointed. Without much conversation,
one took off a certain garment and gave to his friend. In this he was immediately
imitated by the other. Another garment was then exchanged, and another, until there was
an entire inter change of clothing. Thus each one gave himself to the other and was
clothed by the other, & were of course one. This relation embraced all that is implied in
peace, reconciliation, friendship, and brotherhood, and much more than either or all of
these terms. When two were thus giving themselves to each other, and entering into that
clossst connection, it was said of them A no to no ka, and the relation thus formed was
termed A to hu na. So the feast under consideration was termed A to hu na. And may we
not suppose that this word, whatever its precise meaning may be is, designed to express
an idea some thing similar to expiation, reconciliation or atonement? When the two
parties concerned, viz. God and his people, become reconciled, and mutually through the
infinite, condescension of God, give themselves to each other, and become one (in

Christ).

 

64 Transcription error? In the earlier excerpt (p. 276) while describing this ceremony, Payne uses the word

particular. Payne's manuscript will need to be revisited to verify if my transcription is correct here.

278

The nature and design of this feast may also be inferred from the name give the
great priest of all time, or while
[p. 208]
officiating, viz. U na wi san 11 hi, i.e. one who renews heart and body, or cleanses from
mental and bodily defilements. And while attending to the ceremonies of this feast, it
was said of him Te ko tlu hi si ha. Nut 8 a wi (pinelong?)

[. . ..]

We may also learn something respecting the nature and intention of this feast
from the time & manner of its celebration.

The great new moon feast, as we have already seen was commenced at evening
about the time that moon made its first appearance, and continued through the next day
and night, so that the people dispersed on the morning of the second day of the moon.
Soon after the people had retired from that feast, the seven prime counselors, (i.e. the
seven counselors of the great priest above mentioned) convened an assembly at the
council house. Probably, however, not till the next day after the people had retired. At
that convention they appointed the great A to hu na, to commence in seven nights from
that time; and dispatched their messenger through all the towns and to give notice of this
appointment, and to direct all the people to convene on the evening of the sixth day.

They gave orders to the hunters to commence the business the next morning.

279

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