Our Fire Survives the Storm
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The twentieth-anniversary edition of the path-clearing study of Cherokee writing in English, with an emphatic refocus on voices from the three Cherokee tribal nations
This Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is a thoroughly updated, nationhood-focused, twentieth-anniversary revision of Daniel Heath Justice's influential study of Cherokee writing in English. Through politically astute and historically grounded readings of diverse texts by citizens of the Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Justice connects Cherokee literature to Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and collective futurity.
Guided by a reparative vision that directly contends with the outdated literary legacies of the book's first edition, this revision confronts the ongoing harms of unsubstantiated and false Cherokee heritage claims on literary studies, replacing readings of primary texts by unverified claimants with those of Cherokee citizen writers. As Justice addresses issues of accountability, he engages with the past two decades of Indigenous scholarship, fully updating terminology, concepts, and scholarly resources. He expands and deepens the intellectual and historical context for Cherokee literary production introduced in the first edition, and he discusses Cherokee writing and community in the mid-twentieth century, the Cherokee Freedmen's long struggle for justice, and the future of Cherokee nationhood.
Highlighting the work of authors who illustrate the transformative collective discourses of what it means to be Cherokee, Justice examines the richness of Cherokee literary expression through motifs of roots, removal, and nationhood in traditional stories, speeches, legal and governance documents, memoirs, short stories, novels, and plays. An invitation to reflective criticism, this new edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is grounded in the belief that Indigenous nationhood is a necessary ethical response to the violence of the settler imaginary.
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About this Author
Daniel Heath Justice is a Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation and professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the Department of English Languages and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. He is author of Why Indigenous Literatures Matter and coeditor of Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations under Settler Siege (Minnesota, 2022).
Reviews
"Taking inspiration from the mythic phoenix as a Cherokee model for reparative publishing, Daniel Heath Justice offers us this book as renewal. In this new edition and with the still burning embers of the old, Justice rekindles Our Fire Survives the Storm, a book that has become an Indigenous studies model for community-centered literary studies, to full flame. With clarity of voice and vision, he models the wisdom that comes from reflection, the importance of returning to intellectual roots, and the compassion to look unflinchingly at how Cherokee scholarship is ever-evolving, responsive, awake, and burning. Justice?s full ethical and political voice can be heard on every page affirming the vitality and continuity that Cherokee literary contributions have made to Cherokee nationhood as he calls for future Cherokee sovereignty and community. This book is a revelation in revision and a testament to Justice?s lasting contributions to Cherokee literary studies, nationhood, and sovereignty."?Jodi A. Byrd (Chickasaw), author of Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession
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