Join us for a 30-minute presentation by author Kirby Brown (Associate Professor, Department of English) about his book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Century Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970, followed by Q&A, a book signing, and light refreshments in the Knight Library Browsing Room.

The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the reorganization of the Cherokee Nation in 1971 are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown (Cherokee Nation) offers critical readings of several twentieth-century Cherokee authors that reveal the complicated ways their work bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state.

Faced with the devastating effects of allotment and assimilation policies on Cherokee communities, Brown demonstrates how historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of a Cherokee national imaginary. Across fiction, historiography, drama, and diplomacy, Cherokee nationhood functions as both a concrete literary claim to presence and a conceptual framework to remember the past, document the present, and (re)imagine explicitly national futures for Cherokee people in a time when the “Indian nation” was thought a contradiction in terms. Brown recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory and a crucial moment in Cherokee and American Indian literary and intellectual production.

The publication of a book is a major achievement for authors and universities, representing significant investments of research, creativity, time, and resources. UO Authors, Book Talks is a pilot series that will celebrate books published by UO faculty authors. The two-part series will occur during the 2019-2020 academic year, with one event featuring one author in fall and winter.

Sponsored by Office of the Provost, UO Libraries, and College of Arts and Sciences.