Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action
FAIN: FEL-281830-22
Ellen Cushman
Northeastern University (Boston, MA 02115-5005)
Research and writing leading to a history of the everyday life and philosophy of Cherokee people using a corpus of newly translated Cherokee-language materials.
Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action will be the first monograph to treat the everyday writings of Cherokee people as evidence of a lived philosophy of individuals’ persistence and a people’s resilience. 25 fully translated Cherokee documents tell the stories of church deacons mustering teams of diggers to bury the dead; of townspeople who modeled self-sufficiency and generosity; of elders convince men to continue in Cherokee ways; of Cherokee men teaching each other to read and write in Sequoyah’s syllabary; and of community leaders drafting governance documents for what would eventually become the federally recognized United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. These documents demonstrate the skill of Cherokee families, work teams, church congregations, and communities to collectively organize themselves to maintain Cherokee lifeways — an abiding social compact to work together toward a greater good, particularly in times of great social uncertainty.
Associated Products
Cherokee Stories: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action (Article)
Title: Cherokee Stories: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action
Author: Ellen Cushman
Author: Claire McGrath
Abstract: What does literary and cultural studies mean by story? The word, though ubiquitous, ping pongs between truth and knowledge, fact and fiction, written genre and oral aesthetic. Regardless of their material presence (literacy or literary artifacts) or impermanence (utterance), stories provide the rhetorical means for establishing social collectives, carrying knowledge across space and time, and creating and enduring change. Stories represent Indigenous people simultaneously within the text and larger contexts of their utterances; therefore, these pieces must be understood as plural and shifting. With Alcolff, we locate “the ontology of meaning” for stories in a broader cultural space and time. Stories are the foundation for Indigenous lifeways since time immemorial — as nourishing as land, as necessary as air, as warming as fire, and as sustaining as water. Stories bring together the aesthetic details of life and living within the larger scale of collective work— gathering, persisting, creating knowledge, and documenting history.
What cultural, linguistic, and historical legacies of thought remain hidden in the Willie Jumper stories? Each story penned presents an artifact of everyday life: a remembrance of a person, a community, or event. Each story details the common practices of Cherokees coming together as communities to create and endure change. When taken together, the Willie Jumper stories take literary form in their richly detailed use of Cherokee to convey broad historical and cultural significance for those who read them. In doing so, each story carries forward the epistemic practice of archiving knowledge that sustains Cherokee lifeways. Coded as they were in the Cherokee syllabary, though, the deeper meanings of Willie Jumper’s stories have largely remained hidden.
Year: 2025
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: New Literary History
Publisher: New Literary History. University of Virginia
Crossing Epistemic Borders in Archival Spaces to Support Indigenous Language Persistence (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Crossing Epistemic Borders in Archival Spaces to Support Indigenous Language Persistence
Author: Ellen Cushman
Abstract: Settler and colonial border crossings are revealed in texts written by, for, and about indigenous peoples. Transculturation, border crossing, settlement, and resettlement have long shaped the language and cultural experiences of indigenous peoples in the Americas as collected and displayed in archival spaces. One impetus for this roundtable is to foster discussion about utilizing archival materials with indigenous communities to inform and advance Indigenous language curriculum and teaching. Discussants reveal the methods and methodologies of epistemic border crossing that unfold when working with archival texts written by and for indigenous peoples. Discussants will briefly describe their work in language persistence in settler colonial archival spaces. They will consider how researchers interested in decolonial methodologies might engage in epistemic border-crossing spaces within archives and with indigenous communities. Finally, roundtable discussants will showcase how Indigenous communities, scholars, and Elders can be engaged in language persistence, cultural reclamation, and survivance (Vizenor).
Date: 06/12/2024
Conference Name: Multi-Ethnic Society of Europe and the Americas
Unsettling Digital Archives: Centering Community Languages, Practices, and Histories. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Unsettling Digital Archives: Centering Community Languages, Practices, and Histories.
Author: Ellen Cushman
Abstract: Building off of the work of García, Kirsh, Smith, and Burns Allen’s recent edited collection, Unsettling Archival Research: Engaging Critical, Communal, and Digital Archives, this panel will share several archival projects that showcase community-driven approaches to constituting ourselves “in the face of our entanglements, complicities, and an-other set of choices, options, and responsibilities” (13). While digital archives have been lauded as platforms for expanding equitable access to historical materials, they have also proven to potentially expand and extend colonizing and white supremacist modes of collecting and engaging with the past. In other words, archives are never simply innocuous collections of documents, they are never just archives. But as archives continue to be increasingly developed and leveraged by marginalized communities, they demonstrate the power of archival reckonings and the possibilities of just archives.
This panel brings together four scholars who work in and on digital archival initiatives that are designed to counteract historical erasures, archival neglect, and representational harms enacted upon oppressed communities. Each presenter will briefly overview some of their recent experiences developing community-led workflows and community-informed engagement practices in digital archival contexts. The discussion will center on the speakers’ archival and linked data projects that have deep community partnerships with Indigenous communities and that navigate complex ethical terrain.
Date: 05/23/2024
Conference Name: Rhetoric Society of America
To Write A People: The Cherokee Syllabary and Cherokee Identity Past and Present (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: To Write A People: The Cherokee Syllabary and Cherokee Identity Past and Present
Author: Ellen Cushman
Abstract: Presented by Dr. Ellen Cushman, “To Write A People: The Cherokee Syllabary and Cherokee Identity Past and Present, tells the story of the creation, development, and continued vitality of the Cherokee syllabary from its introduction by Cherokee metalworker and inventor Sequoyah, its print transmission in publications like the Cherokee Phoenix, to its present civic and cultural use among the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes. The presentation traces the creation, dissemination, and evolution of Sequoyah’s syllabary from script to print to digital forms, thus illustrating how it has remained and continues to be a principal part of Cherokee identity. The lecture also highlights the unique character of the Cherokee syllabary through demonstrating its origins in distinctly Cherokee syllables and Cherokee meanings over Euro-American alphabetic writing systems.
Date: 11/09/2023
“Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action.” 2023 B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecturer. Department of Communication. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Cherokee Lifeways: Hidden Literacies of Collective Action.” 2023 B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecturer. Department of Communication.
Author: Ellen Cushman
Abstract: Cherokee people have proven themselves to be prolific writers in the language since the early 1820’s when a Cherokee man named Sequoyah first introduced the 86-character Cherokee syllabary to his people. Today, over two-thousand manuscript pages of Cherokee language documents inked in the Cherokee syllabary can be found in archives around the United States. Written between 1880 and 1960, these documents include church records, remembrances, speeches, letters, and governance documents — the quotidian literacies of Cherokee life. While this documentary evidence offers insight into Cherokee life, knowledge, stories, and governance during times of great uncertainty, we haven’t yet figured out how to read these documents as something important. Coded as they were in the Cherokee syllabary, these documents have remained largely unexamined, untranslated and accessible only through archives or access to personal collections.
With the support of the Henry K. Luce Foundation and a grant from the National Archives, the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) team at Northeastern University published a corpus of 87 documents in a digital edited collection called Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way (CWKW). Drawing on a selection of church records, stories and remembrances, letters, and speeches, my talk supported by an NEH Fellowship will demonstrates the skill of Cherokee families, work teams, church congregations, and communities to collectively organize themselves to maintain Cherokee lifeways — an abiding social compact to work together toward a greater good, particularly in times of great social uncertainty.
Date: 10/26/2023
Conference Name: University of Utah, Department of Communication, Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture
Archiving Otherwise: A Roundtable Discussion on Community-led Digital Archives (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Archiving Otherwise: A Roundtable Discussion on Community-led Digital Archives
Author: Ellen Cushman, KJ Rawson, Leslie Beegle, and Rachel McIntosh
Abstract: While digital archives have been lauded as platforms for expanding equitable access to historical materials, they have also proven to potentially expand and extend settler and white supremacist modes of collecting and engaging with the past. This panel brings together four scholars who work in and on digital archival initiatives that are designed to counteract historical erasures, archival neglect, and representational harms enacted upon oppressed communities. Each of the four discussants will briefly share some of their recent experiences developing community-led workflows and community-informed engagement practices in digital archival contexts. In particular, the discussion will center on the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence and the Digital Transgender Archive as two projects that have deep community partnerships and that navigate complex ethical terrain.
Date: 10/03/2023
Conference Name: Feminisms and Rhetoric