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Daniel Heath Justice. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 296 pp. Paper, $20.00.
Thomas King. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 184 pp. Cloth, $24.95.
Our Fire Survives the Storm is Daniel Heath Justice's contribution to an emerging edifice of Native literary criticism that builds upon the ground most recently cleared by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack-that triumvirate of contemporary Indigenous scholarship whose works call for Indigenous writers to forge a productive critical engagement with their own intellectual traditions. Borrowing most strongly from Womack's aesthetic of identifying and paying homage to a tribally centered literature, Justice presents a "Cherokee literary history" that, as the subtitle suggests, grounds itself exclusively in the perspectives, culture, and textual productions of the Cherokee. While one might argue that there is no shortage of works that focus on Cherokee history or literature, few prior to Justice have considered "Cherokee literature" as a discrete entity worthy of its own study. This alone makes it a worthwhile project.
In this book Justice covers a period from the pretextualized era of Cherokee narrative to the more contemporary works of authors such as Thomas King, Robert J. Conley, and Diane Glancy. It is not, however, a preliterate-postliterate binary that is important here. Like Womack in his book Red on Red, Justice is not so much concerned with the ruptures of forced assimilation as with the continuance of Cherokee tradition and community that delineates itself in the overall literature. He begins by establishing a critical paradigm rooted in Cherokee epistemologies and that is perhaps best represented in the histories of Nanye'hi and Tsiyu Gansini, who embody, respectively, what Justice identifies as "the Beloved Path" and "Chickamauga consciousness." Both figures were active leaders in their communities, and both resisted the forces of violent colonial appropriation that were tightening around them in the mid-eighteenth century. But while the one-time woman warrior Nanye'hi ultimately opted for peaceful resistance, or the Beloved Path, Tsiyu Gansini's Chickamauga consciousness led to armed confrontation. Both, in their own manner, are seen as helping to clear a path for the slender generation of relative peace that ensued, Tsiyu Gansini by forcing the colonists into making...