Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
11 - Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Book contents
- Death and the American South
- Series page
- Death and the American South
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Contributors
- Introduction: Death and the American South
- 1 Mutilated Bodies, Living Specters: Scalpings and Beheadings in the Early South
- 2 The Usable Death: Evangelicals, Anglicans, and the Politics of Dying in the Late-Colonial Lowcountry
- 3 When “History Becomes Fable Instead of Fact”: The Deaths and Resurrections of Virginia’s Leading Revolutionaries
- 4 American Mourning: Catastrophe, Public Grief, and the Making of Civic Identity in the Early National South
- 5 To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery
- 6 Nativists and Strangers: Yellow Fever and Immigrant Mortality in Antebellum Charleston, South Carolina
- 7 “Cumberer of the Earth”: Suffering and Suicide among the Faithful in the Civil War South
- 8 The “Translation” of Lundy Harris: Interpreting Death out of the Confusion of Sexuality, Violence, and Religion in the New South
- 9 “He’s Only Away”: Condolence Literature and the Emergence of a Modern South
- 10 “A Monument to Judge Lynch”: Racial Violence, Symbolic Death, and Black Resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi
- 11 Reframing the Indian Dead: Removal-Era Cherokee Graves and the Changing Landscape of Southern Memory
- Index
Summary
This essay examines the histories of three Cherokee graves, moving from east to west along the Trail of Tears. It treats these marked historical graves as dynamic sites, places where memorials interpret the past in complex and shifting ways. At the grave sites along the Trail of Tears, monuments not only recall Cherokee removal, but speak eloquently of Southerners' ongoing and contentious efforts to interpret the Indian past. Removal graves, meanwhile, illustrate the particular power the dead can confer upon sites of memory. In Hopkinsville and at Moccasin Springs, residents' awareness of Cherokee graves played an essential role in commemoration. The dead encouraged the public identification of these places with Cherokee history by rooting the removal story in the landscape, and they led some members of these communities to consider the moral significance of the Trail of Tears.
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- Death and the American South , pp. 250 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014