Search results for ""Author James W. Parins""

Many Anglo-Americans in the nineteenth century regarded Indian tribes as little more than illiterate bands of savages in need of "civilizing." Few were willing to recognize that one of the major Southeastern tribes targeted for removal west of the Mississippi already had an advanced civilization with its own system of writing and rich literary tradition. In Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820–1906, James W. Parins traces the rise of bilingual literacy and intellectual life in the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century—a time of intense social and political turmoil for the tribe. By the 1820s, Cherokees had perfected a system for writing their language—the syllabary created by Sequoyah—and in a short time taught it to virtually all their citizens. Recognizing the need to master the language of the dominant society, the Cherokee Nation also developed a superior public school system that taught students in English. The result was a literate population, most of whom could read the Cherokee Phoenix, the tribal newspaper founded in 1828 and published in both Cherokee and English. English literacy allowed Cherokee leaders to deal with the white power structure on their own terms: Cherokees wrote legal briefs, challenged members of Congress and the executive branch, and bargained for their tribe as white interests sought to take their land and end their autonomy. In addition, many Cherokee poets, fiction writers, essayists, and journalists published extensively after 1850, paving the way for the rich literary tradition that the nation preserves and fosters today. Literary and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820–1906 takes a fascinating look at how literacy served to unite Cherokees during a critical moment in their national history, and advances our understanding of how literacy has functioned as a tool of sovereignty among Native peoples, both historically and today.

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John Rollin Ridge is the first full-length biography of a Cherokee whose best revenge was in writing well. A cross between Lord Byron, the romantic poet who made things happen, and Joaquin Murieta, the legendary bandit he would immortalize, John Rollin Ridge was a controversial, celebrated, and self-cast exile. Ridge was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827, a tumultuous and violent time when the state of Georgia was trying to impose its sovereignty on the Cherokee Nation and whites were pressing against its borders. James W. Parins places Ridge in the circle of his family and recreates the circumstances surrounding the assassination of his father (before his eyes) and his grandfather and uncle by rival Cherokees, led by John Ross. Eventful chapters portray the boy’s flight with his mother and her family to Arkansas, his classical education there, his killing of a Ross loyalist and subsequent exile in California during the gold rush, his talent as a romantic poet and author, and his career as a journalist. To the end of his life, Ridge advocated the Cherokees’ assimilation into white society.

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