SCHOLARSHIP

raccoon (2021)

“On a July morning in 2015, a raccoon died at the corner of Yonge and Church in Toronto. That evening, Conrad’s passing was marked by a candlelight vigil, his furry body surrounded by framed photographs, flowers, and notes of heartfelt remembrance. One city councillor proposed leaving compost bins open in Conrad’s honour, and NPR would later declare Toronto the ‘raccoon capital of the world.’

This is just one of many stories that Daniel Heath Justice, holder of a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, draws upon in his deep dive into the biological, taxonomical, historical, and cultural significance of Procyon lotor. His latest book, Raccoon, joins over a hundred entries in Reaktion’s Animal series (which also includes Justice’s previous contribution, Badger). This is more than just a thorough primer on the nocturnal mammal whose roots can be traced back in the fossil record some thirty million years; it is a nuanced interrogation of the many behaviours, habitats, and characteristics the little guy shares with us….

….Justice leaves little doubt that we see ourselves in raccoons, flattering ourselves as kin to the ‘seasoned traveller in all worlds’ (cue the dapper Porter Airlines mascot). We hold these wily creatures close to our hearts, even while shaking our fists at their evening cavorting through our Dumpsters. We love them and hate them for their resilience, their ingenuity, their pluck. We mark their passing with candles and letters on the side of busy streets — gestures that even a post-ironic world can’t strip of their significance.”
Literary Review of Canada (July-August 2021)

Why Indigenous literatures matter (2018)

“Indigenous literature scholar and fantasy novelist Justice (Our Fire Survives the Storm) assembles a vital history and defense of First Nations writing. Centered around four key questions—’How do we learn to be human? How do we behave as good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? And how do we learn to live together?’—this book is a cross between an academic reader and a polemic on indigenous literatures, with a focus on voices often left out of the canon, such as those of women and queer/two-spirit individuals. Justice makes strong, well-reasoned arguments that indigenous liberation is essential for indigenous peoples to survive and recover from colonialism, structuring his thesis around issues of racism and cultural appropriation, such as when white authors attempt to tell indigenous stories as if they were their own. He also addresses Western literature’s tendency toward a unified standard of ‘realism’ that dismisses or downplays indigenous fantasy, surrealism, and apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic works as genre works or escapism not worthy of the same merit as similar work by non-indigenous writers. By embracing a wider canon of indigenous authors, Justice explores personhood, queer identities, ancestry, and speculative works (dubbed ‘wonderworks’), and offers erudite, passionate analysis of and paths toward discovering new material.”
Publishers Weekly (9 April 2018)

“Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve no doubt encountered ongoing public conversations about Indigenous writing and storytelling. What is it? Whom should we read? And perhaps the most contentious debate: who gets to tell these stories? Why Indigenous Literatures Matter addresses all these questions and more. Building on an extensive oeuvre of Indigenous literary studies, Daniel Heath Justice, a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation, offers generous and clear points of entry for readers of all backgrounds, incorporating accessible scholarship, personal anecdotes, and close readings of texts.”
Quill and Quire (May 2018)

Badger (2015)

“Few mammals arouse such extreme reactions as the badger–from admiration for its striking beauty to vicious hatred for–well, for no obvious reason. This literary, historical, wide-ranging and stylish study of the species is a very original book, lovely to look at and fascinating to read.”
Scotland Outdoors (July/August 2015)

“I have read many of the books in Reaktion’s series Animal, and though they are uniformly beautiful the quality of the text does vary. However, Badger is one of the best. Author and academic Daniel Heath Justice is deeply read, yet shares his knowledge with a light touch. The focus of the book is on the way that the image of the badger has been used throughout the world in literature, art and advertising (did you know that its association with the mythic underworld has made the animal a symbol of wisdom?). But there is also plenty of interesting natural history about different badger species from Africa, Asia and North America.”
—Hugh Warwick, BBC Wildlife (Spring 2015)

Our Fire Survives the Storm (2006)

“Justice writes well, and I recall someone’s observing once that Sigmund Freud became influential not only for his theories but for the passionate, compelling prose with which he delivered them. Justice’s passages about Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward) and Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe) are good examples of this. In terms of Justices articulating the dichotomy between the Chicamaugua (War Chief) tradition and the Beloved Path (Peace Chief) tradition, the portraits of Tsiyu and Nanye’hi are crucial. The stories of these two important Cherokee historical figures are compelling, and Justice’s prose brings the story to life. Our Fire Survives the Storm is a good book, valuable for both libraries and classrooms.”
Great Plains Quarterly

“This book is a good resource for students, educators, writers and those interested in Cherokee culture.”News From Indian Country

“With Daniel Heath Justice’s approach in hand, college-level students of Native American literature have a fine method of analyzing stories for strengths, purpose, and direction.”
California Bookwatch

“Justice makes an important, striking contribution to the growing body of tribal-centered criticism.”
Choice

“The defense of his pedagogy is both provocative and profound.”
The American Indian Quarterly

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E3W Review of Books, Vol. 6, Spring 2006

Reviewed by Katy Young

Over the last fifteen years, scholars in American Indian studies have moved toward a tribally-specific understanding of indigenous cultural production, encouraging readers and critics to read indigenous texts as the productions of complex historical contexts and active Indian nations. This shift requires critics to abandon the often simplistic and denigrating views of Native peoples that pervaded Euro-American-dominated Native American studies since its inception and to privilege the histories, knowledges, and interpretations of those closest to the production of Native writing—Native authors and critics.

Daniel Heath Justice’s Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History marks the next significant step in this shift, providing an important contribution to Native American studies that will impact a generation of scholars in this rapidly growing field. Justice explicitly places his work in the lineage of scholars who advocate for the privileging of Native voices and contexts in indigenous literary studies, citing Robert Allen Warrior’s notion of “intellectual sovereignty” in Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995) and Jace Weaver’s ethic of “communitism” as detailed in That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (1997) as foundations for Our Fire Survives the Storm. Justice’s work shares with these studies an emphasis on the continuation and survival of Indian peoples in North America and the importance of community-based artistic, scholarly, and activist projects as inherently valuable to the formation of a nation.

Justice views literary analysis as a site of community regeneration and takes seriously his responsibility to the Cherokee community he studies and from which he comes. He recognizes that academic research grounded in a tribally-specific worldview will not only benefit greatly from the richly textured specificity, but will also contribute to the “continuance and growth of Native communities.” Justice’s commitment to Cherokee intellectual sovereignty results in a methodology drawn from Cherokee history, traditions, spirituality, and social customs and centered on readings of the complementary spheres of the “Beloved Path” and the “Chickamauga consciousness” that ordered the Cherokee Nation into peace/white towns and war/red towns up through the early nineteenth century. Beloved Men and Beloved Women, usually the older members of the tribe, were appointed by the tribe to walk the Beloved Path of peace, to attempt to maintain and restore harmony, justice, and equilibrium to the community. In contrast, the Chickamauga consciousness, exemplified most often by younger warriors, was tied to forceful, often violent, resistance, at whatever cost. In tandem, the peace/white and war/red socio-political spheres of influence provided the balance necessary for the continuation of the People.

Underscoring the importance of the relational perspectives of the Beloved and Chickamauga spheres for Cherokee survival, Justice reads the same complementary impulses in Cherokee literature. The central model is the eighteenth century relationship of Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward), the Beloved Woman of Chota, with her cousin Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe), the war-leader of the Chickamaugas. Although Nanye’hi has often been perceived as an ally of the colonizers, Justice reformulates our understanding of her actions by placing them within the historical and political context of the Cherokee Nation two hundred and fifty years ago. Viewed from a Cherokee-centric perspective, Nanye’hi “was not betraying her people, but serving the functions of her office as Beloved Woman.” She was using the strategies available to her in her role as peacekeeper to ensure that her community remained whole. In contrast, Tsiyu Gansini opposed the forces of colonialism with the tools available to him as a war leader from a red town, specifically “armed resistance, whether rhetorical or physical.” He led numerous attacks against non-Native settlers encroaching on Cherokee land and repeatedly refused to capitulate to the treaty demands of the fledgling U.S. govern­ment. In their own ways, Nanye’hi and Tsiyu Gansini exemplify resistance to colonial extermination. Justice argues that this relational model helps to read these authors with a clearer understanding of how they serve the continuation of Cherokee nationhood:

Tsiyu Gansini and Nanye’hi are the cultural forebears of the contemporary discourses of Cherokee nationhood. Together they are the clearest examples of the ancient manifestations of the red and white spheres of Cherokee political consciousness…In returning the missing half of the story, the other half changes as a result of this reinterpretation, and both are understood through their relationship with one another and the People.

Tracing the Beloved and Chickamauga impul­ses in Cherokee authors through history is the central action of Our Fire Survives the Storm: the nineteenth century red texts of John Ross are positioned in relation to the white texts of John Rollin Ridge, the early twentieth century Beloved Path texts of Lynn Riggs with the Beloved Path writings of John Oskison and next to the fierce Chickamauga words of Will Rogers, and the late twentieth century Beloved Path writings of Marilou Awiakta, Thomas King, and Diane Glancy along­side the Chickamauga writings of Wilma Mankiller, Geary Hobson, and Robert J. Conley. In this way, Justice’s work refuses the oversimplified Manichean dualities of European metaphysics, explicating instead how relationships and the interplay of values within a community serve as a foundation to a complex Cherokee nationhood, a nationhood which has changed and evolved over time but still remains a vital presence.

Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History is as much a history of the major events in Cherokee history in the last three hundred years as it is a study of Cherokee authors or a manifesto for the future of American Indian literary studies. But because Justice undertakes this task with the lyricism of a fiction writer (his first novel, Kynship: The Way of Thorn and Thunder, Book One, was published in 2006), the compassion and clarity of an accomplished teacher, and the nuance and rigor of a scholar at the heart of the current conversations in American Indian literary studies, this book is poised to have an immediate and lasting effect on the field.

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Reviewed by Phillip Round (Department of English, University of Iowa)

Published on H-AmIndian (December, 2006)

Reading the Two Paths of Cherokee Literature On the cover of Our Fire Survives the Storm, a phoenix rises from a cluster of flames. It is a fitting tribute to its author’s elaboration of and participation in what is perhaps the longest-running print literature tradition in Indian Country. Since the Cherokee Phoenix was first published in 1828, the bicultural image of the bird that gives birth to itself from its own ashes has served many readers and writers–Cherokee and non-Cherokee alike–as a figure for Cherokee survival through books and print. Unfortunately, the phoenix has also been taken to represent the fundamentally “assimilated” (and therefore “inauthentic”) nature of Cherokee literary production. Whether viewed as classical or Christian symbol, this reading goes, the phoenix is a firmly Euro-western sign, and the Cherokee’s adoption of it for their nation’s newspaper masthead vignette, was an unembarrassed acknowledgement of their wholesale adoption of Anglo-American tastes and values. Daniel Heath Justice, however, strongly disagrees. He explicates this well-worn image anew, tempering it in the sacred fire of the Cherokee origin story–a fire that Cherokee poet Marilou Awiakta likens to “the spirit of the Creator, of the sun, of the people” (p. 203). By explicating the specifically Cherokee contexts for the phoenix’s fire of rebirth, Justice asks his readers to consider how “a historically rooted and culturally informed reading of the Cherokee literary tradition help us to better understand Cherokee social history and vice versa” (p. 7). Justice’s Cherokee-centered analysis derives from two main methodological approaches, each drawn from Cherokee tradition. The first approach is drawn from the Beloved Path, a Cherokee social and political practice epitomized by the life of Nanye’hi (Nancy Ward). Nanye’hi took up arms in 1755 and gained acclaim as a war leader. She later became renowned as a Beloved Woman, and spared the lives of many Euro-Americans. Justice observes that although outsiders (and some Cherokee) have represented Ward’s actions as “betrayal,” most “Cherokees today understand Nanye’hi’s often contradictory approach toward preserving her cultural identity while adapting to the demands of the present” (p. 41). Justice presents Ward’s actions as exemplary of the Beloved Path, a pursuit of balance and compromise that has the survival of the Cherokee Nation and its people as its ultimate goal. The second path is Chickamauga Consciousness, exemplified by the heroic military leadership and cultural resistance of Nanye’hi’s cousin, Tsiyu Gansini (Dragging Canoe). Justice sees Chickamauga Consciousness as a “strategic” term (p. 142), a needed counterbalance in Cherokee society to the white [Beloved] path of accommodation and peace” (p.155). Tsiyu Gansini’s story is necessary, Justice argues, because it helps right the balance between resistance and accommodation that is central to Cherokee culture. Through the combined paths, Justice recovers a methodology that “places the literature in relationship to some of its historical antecedents and its cultural contexts (p. 30),” and that “gives a new vocabulary for exposing the depth and significance of Cherokee literature and intellectualism” (p. 31). Justice’s application of the Beloved Path and Chickamauga Consciousness to Cherokee literary history is divided into three parts–“Deep Roots,” “Geographies of Removal,” and “Regeneration”–as the book moves in a roughly chronological fashion from the 1730s to the 1990s. After a chapter on the Removal, that briefly touches on the way that Chief John Ross employed both Beloved and Chickamauga ways in his battle for Cherokee nationhood, Justice settles into a series of author-centered readings drawn from three periods in Cherokee literature. The first extends from the 1880s through the 1930s and includes discussions of Lynn Riggs, John Milton Oskison, Will Rogers, and Emmet Starr. Each individual lived most of his professional life away from the Cherokee homelands, yet “all saw their Cherokee ancestry as central to their selves” (p. 94). Of the four, Starr emerges as the most interesting given the way Justice reads his exile and post-allotment literary production in terms of the Chickamauga “principle of strategic defeat” (p. 142). Where the reading of Riggs is somewhat derivative of the work of Craig Womack, Justice’s attention to the History of the Cherokee Indians (1921) by Starr is refreshing for the way its exposes Starr’s “unflinching exercise of intellectual sovereignty, embedded fully in Cherokee culture and history and ignoring the conventions of written history of time” (p. 136). This is not an easy task, since Starr was a southern Democrat, a Freemason, and an evangelical Christian who, at first blush, appears to fit perfectly with outsider characterizations of Cherokee literature as assimilative. Justice argues, however, that Starr “advocated a political Chickamauga consciousness rooted in a Cherokee nationhood that encompassed Christianity” (p. 138). “If he was convinced that his people were doomed to erasure,” Justice asks, “why would he continue fruitlessly working on books that were rooted in the concept of Cherokee continuity” (p. 140)? Our Fire Survives the Storm concludes with a series of readings in contemporary Cherokee literature. Among the works Justice examines in some detail are Marilou Awiakta, Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom (1993), Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999), Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (1993), Geary Hobson, The Last of the Ofos (1999), Robert Conley, Mountain Windsong (1992), and Diane Glancy, Pushing the Bear (1996). For Justice, these works “provide a representative sampling of today’s most compelling Cherokee writers” and “most clearly … express the principles of Cherokee nationhood² (p. 151). Although each reading is interesting in its own right (with Wilma Mankiller’s non-fiction autobiography being the most overtly “nationalist” text in the study), Justice’s interpretation of Truth and Bright Water by King is perhaps the most rewarding. Because he seems most comfortable with contemporary literature, Justice is able to stretch here, productively engaging the most troubling categories imposed on Cherokee literature and authors–outland, mixed-blood, assimilated. King’s novel, with its Canadian border setting, shifting temporal perspectives, and largely non-Cherokee characters, allows Justice to ponder “how do we establish bonds of nationhood when they have been damaged or severed for generations (p. 169)? Unlike King’s other works, which have employed the Cherokee syllabary and Cherokee protagonists, Truth and Bright Water “demonstrates the profoundly Cherokee sensibility” of its narrative through other means (p. 169). Justice’s sensitivity to the subtle (and Cherokee) means by which King “Cherokeeizes Native Canadian literature” (p. 170) offers perhaps his greatest interpretive payoff, pointing the way for additional studies that may wish to consider how other Native national literatures work in urban, off-reservation, and even transnational settings. Our Fire Survives the Storm ends with a manifesto–“The Stories that Matter”–that reflects what will perhaps be the book’s most lasting legacy: the clear articulation of a Cherokee-centered literary separatism that re-imagines both phoenix and flame as complementary, constitutive gestures of Cherokee peoplehood and sovereignty.