Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory - Softcover

Denson, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469630834 ISBN 13: 9781469630830

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017

Synopsis

The 1830s forced removal of Cherokees from their southeastern homeland became the most famous event in the Indian history of the American South, an episode taken to exemplify a broader experience of injustice suffered by Native peoples. In this book, Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal through an examination of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions dating from the early twentieth century to the present. White southerners, Denson argues, embraced the Trail of Tears as a story of Indian disappearance. Commemorating Cherokee removal affirmed white possession of southern places, while granting them the moral satisfaction of acknowledging past wrongs. During segregation and the struggle over black civil rights, removal memorials reinforced whites' authority to define the South's past and present. Cherokees, however, proved capable of repossessing the removal memory, using it for their own purposes during a time of crucial transformation in tribal politics and U.S. Indian policy. In considering these representations of removal, Denson brings commemoration of the Indian past into the broader discussion of race and memory in the South.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Denson teaches history at Western Carolina University.

Review

Subtle, powerful, and riveting, Monuments to Absence delves into why and how the historical event of the Cherokee Trail of Tears is remembered in the South. Andrew Denson offers readers a fascinating, stimulating, and wide-ranging treatment of the role of Cherokee removal in southern memory that will set new directional courses in Native American studies and southern history.--Tiya Miles, author of Tales from the Haunted South
An enlightening and powerful study of Cherokee memory and removal, Monuments to Absence tells the complex racial and political story of how we remember the Trail of Tears.--Malinda Lowery, author of Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1469630834
• ISBN 13: 9781469630830
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304