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At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, two women of Cherokee descent gave voice to dynamic, innovative, and in their minds modern articulations of what it meant to be Cherokee in the United States. Wahnenauhi, better known to Euroamericans as Lucy Lowrey Hoyt Keys, was one of these women. At the end of the nineteenth century the Smithsonian Institution reportedly paid her ten dollars for her "manuscript," written in the Cherokee syllabary and first published in 1889. Narcissa Owen, Wahnenauhi's contemporary, also wrote a Cherokee history of sorts, publishing her memoir in 1907.1 Analyzed together, Wahnenauhi and Owen's writings highlight how educated Cherokee women understood the historical dimensions of place, movement, and identity at the turn of the century.
Wahnenauhi and Owen rarely receive more than passing mention in Cherokee historiography. The confinement of their writings to the footnotes of history obscures how both women used their considerable literary skills to critique the cultural forces of settler colonialism, forces that helped to rationalize the exile of the vast majority of Cherokees during the 1830s.2 Wahnenauhi and Owen's writings were published during the allotment era (ca. i88os-i932), a period of American history defined by the federal government's efforts to parcel Native American landholdings to individual allottees, to dismantle tribal sovereignty, and to assimilate indigenous people into white society.3 Set against this historical backdrop, Wahnenauhi and Owen were part of a generation of indigenous writers, performers, and activists who pushed against government efforts to eliminate Native Americans from the United States.
Wahnenauhi and Owen joined writers and activists like Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala-Sa, and fellow Cherokee authors and celebrities Ruth Margaret Muskrat; Anne Ross, a descendant of principal chief John Ross, and a performer who styled herself "Princess Galilolle"; and Rachel Caroline Eaton, a historian and the first Native American woman to receive a PhD from an American university. In their own ways, all these women engaged in a conversation with Euroamerican settler colonial culture and its political economy.4 Thus Wahnenauhi and Owen were not, as white Americans routinely imagined Native Americans during this period, human relics of a bygone era passively existing outside historical time and destined for extinction. Instead, Wahnenauhi and Owen used their considerable literary talents to underscore how Native women felt...