The Capital

This chapter describes the expansion of removal commemoration in the post-World War Two decades, focusing particular attention on Georgia's reconstruction of New Echota, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. While the project began as a local effort to promote heritage tourism, state officials applied a loftier theme to the commemoration, describing the site as an apology for Georgia's part in removal. The chapter examines the New Echota project in the context of the South's civil rights-era politics and as an example of American Cold War culture. It argues that the commemoration of the Trail of Tears offered white southerners a politically safe way to contemplate their region's history of racial oppression. The New Echota project included very little Cherokee participation, a feature that suggests the organizers assumed modern Cherokees were mostly irrelevant to their work in Georgia. The New Echota project required Cherokees to act as witnesses to commemorative acts conducted by non-Indians. It did not require them to participate as authors of those commemorations.

Introduction

This book began with tourism. In the summer of 1994, a friend and I drove from Bloomington, Indiana, where I attended graduate school, to Florida for a short vacation. As we sped along Interstate 75 through northern Georgia, I spotted a brown roadside sign announcing that, at the next exit, we would find New Echota, a state historic site interpreting the history of the Cherokee Nation. For a brief time in the early nineteenth century, New Echota was the Cherokee capital, the seat of the national government created by tribal leaders in the 1820s. The Cherokee National Council met at New Echota in the years prior to removal, and it was the site of the Cherokee Supreme Court. During a time when the United States and the state of Georgia pressured Cherokees to emigrate to the West, the new capital represented the Cherokees’ determination to remain in their homeland. It was also the place where, in late 1835, a small group of tribal leaders signed the treaty under which the United States forced the Cherokee Nation to remove. I had recently become interested in the history of Cherokee sovereignty and nationhood, and I concluded that I should prob ably know about this heritage attraction. We pulled off the highway and followed the signs to the site....

The Drama

In 1950, the outdoor drama Unto These Hills debuted in Cherokee, North Carolina. The play, which became one of the most popular tourism attractions in southern Appalachia, depicted Cherokee history from the time of European contact through the mid-nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the Cherokee struggle against removal. This chapter examines Unto These Hills as an example of Cold War American culture, while placing the drama in the context of the termination policy, the federal government's campaign to remove the trust status of Indian lands and withdraw special federal services to Native American communities. While the memory of removal broadcast in Unto These Hills echoed some of the language of the termination campaign, it ultimately helped the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians avoid termination.

Removal and the Cherokee Nation

This chapter provides an overview of removal-era Cherokee history. It recounts the rise of the Indian removal policy and the state of Georgia's campaign to compel the Cherokee Nation to negotiate a removal treaty. It describes Cherokee resistance to removal and the experience of the "Trail of Tears." It also offers a brief narrative of Cherokee Nation history after removal, while explaining the emergence of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina. The chapter ends by describing several ways in which Cherokees and non-Indians employed the memory of removal in writings from the late nineteenth century. These writings established themes later broadcast by twentieth century commemorations.

Epilogue

In 2012, small white signs began appearing next to monuments and roadside markers related to Cherokee history in western North Carolina and southeastern Tennessee. In red letters, printed in both the Cherokee syllabary and English, they stated simply, “we are still here.” I first noticed one of the signs on my commute to work. It showed up one day next to a North Carolina roadside marker indicating the boundary of Cherokee territory established by a land cession in 1802. The state marker was a typical colonial monument. It commemorated the transfer of territory from an indigenous people to the new settler nation, invoking Cherokees in order to account for their erasure. The new sign, however, deftly reworked the old, reminding passersby that this place is still Cherokee ground and that the Cherokee people remain present....

The National Trail

In the early 1980s, the National Park Service began exploring the idea of creating a national trail dedicated to Cherokee removal. The planning and designation of this national trail became a catalyst for a variety of public history projects across the South. While the Park Service, itself, devoted scant resources to the initiative, the national trail became a framework in which local groups of commemorators pursued dozens of public history ideas. This final chapter describes the creation of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, paying particular attention to the ways in which the federal project influenced public memory in local communities. The national trail idea led local commemorators to emphasize their communities' Cherokee history, even when that Cherokee history was quite negligible. This chapter examines the expansion of removal commemoration since the 1980s as an expression of a contemporary American obsession with issues of history and memory. It also places the national trail in the context of recent "history wars," public debates over the interpretation of the American past.

The Remembered Community

This chapter examines the roles played by public history and historical memory in the reconstruction of the Cherokee Nation in twentieth-century Oklahoma. The United States dismantled the Cherokee political system at the turn of the twentieth century, when it forced Cherokees to accept the allotment policy. By the middle twentieth century, however, Cherokees began to reestablish a tribal administration, creating new institutions to represent and provide services to Cherokee communities. The memory of the nineteenth-century Cherokee Nation contributed to these developments in several ways. Tribal leaders invoked their people's nineteenth-century achievements to promote political cooperation in the present. They also used the memory of the Indian republic to bolster their own legitimacy as tribal representatives, offering themselves as heirs to the leaders of the old Nation. They depicted their work as an effort to restore the Cherokees' nineteenth-century greatness, applying tribal history to the task of building a modern Cherokee Nation.

The Centennial

In 1938 civic and business leaders in Chattanooga organized an elaborate festival to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga and the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of their city. While planning the festival, they added a third anniversary, the centennial of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The festival became the period's single largest commemoration of Indian removal. This chapter explores the Chattanooga event as a particularly vivid example of the emergence of the Cherokee removal story within southern public memory in the interwar period. It traces the evolution of the removal centennial from a minor addendum to an elaborate program, arguing that the event helped to establish Cherokee history as a prominent element of this non-Indian city's public identity. It also describes Cherokee participation in the festival. Cherokees played several important roles in the centennial, but those roles were defined and closely scripted by local organizers. The chapter also explores relationships between the removal memory and more traditional commemorative themes, like the honoring of the Civil War dead and the celebration of community progress.

The Tourists

In the 1920s and 30s, tourism in southern Appalachia created a new public awareness of the region's Cherokee history. With the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP), the Cherokee community in Western North Carolina became a significant tourist destination, and this development encouraged promoters to work the Cherokees more thoroughly into their conceptions of the region's past. Tourist literature and performances began to highlight certain Cherokee historical episodes, among them the story of removal. This chapter traces the Cherokee community's growing involvement in the regional tourism economy during the interwar period, while examining mountain tourism's representations of Cherokee history. It describes the roles played by Cherokee history in promotions for the GSMNP, before closely analysing two particular commemorations: a campaign in Knoxville, Tennessee, to erect a monument to Cherokee removal and a pageant mounted by the Eastern Band of Cherokees to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the tribe's removal treaty.