BRINGING THE NATIVE SOUTH INTO FOCUS

by Miriam Brown Spiers

For the next three months, Kennesaw State University’s Zuckerman Museum of Art will display Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibit, They Teach Love — a multimedia exhibition that delves into Gibson’s exploration of radical transformation, both in objects and people. The museum’s curators are understandably thrilled to feature the work of an artist who recently represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. But in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, the Native American and Indigenous Studies program is excited for another reason: Gibson’s exhibit shines a rare spotlight on the contemporary Native South.

The very idea of the Native South is complicated and contested. Many Native Americans who might fit into this category are not technically from the South but grew up in Oklahoma or even further west — like Gibson, who was born in Colorado and now lives in New York. This paradox is just one facet of the United States’ colonial legacy: in 1830, the Indian Removal Act authorized the president to grant lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. As the National Museum of the American Indian describes it, the law “imagined a country free of American Indians.” In the wake of Removal, five major tribal nations in the South — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw — were forced to abandon their homes and relocate to present-day Oklahoma. The most well-known result of Removal, especially in Georgia, was the death of approximately 4,000 Cherokee citizens in what we now call the Trail of Tears. (Today, despite the fact that the United States recognizes 574 tribal nations, there are none in the state of Georgia.) Every Southern tribe has similar stories of coercion and land loss.

Of course, some people resisted. Today’s Eastern Band Cherokee in North Carolina are the descendants of the Cherokee people who hid in the mountains rather than leave at gunpoint; the Mississippi Choctaw are likewise descended from those who refused to go. But the Indian Removal Act was only one of the many official American actions — such as the Navajo Long Walk of 1864, the Indian Boarding School movement beginning in 1879, and the Termination and Relocation policies of the 1950s, to name just a few — that forced Indigenous people from their homes and scattered them across the country. Yet most people don’t think of Native Americans as diasporic because, as Gibson puts it, “They were born in the United States and they're still in the United States so where's the Diaspora?”

This is all to say that the history of removal complicates the idea of the Native South. As Gina Caison argues in her book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies, “Native people work within, around, and against colonialism to fight for and maintain sovereign land claim in their home spaces. However, Native people do not have to be physically in these locations in order to engage these issues… we might consider that the narrative does not have to be about home to write home within an Indigenous tradition.” In other words, even if they’ve never lived in the Southeastern US, Indigenous people who are citizens of tribal nations from the Southeast should be considered part of the Native South. When Gibson says he has to “rethink [my] relationship… to my home communities,” we might see that he, too, is “writing home.”

The idea of the “Native South” as not just an archaeological site but its own contemporary designation is relatively new. Gibson explains that he emerged as an artist from “a time that was still so focused and continues to be focused on representation in spaces that were inter-tribal, overt tribal representation was not happening.” The recent cultural turn toward both tribal and regional specificity is therefore especially important in the South, where the story of Indigenous people so often ends with the Trail of Tears.

When I teach Introduction to Native American Studies, students often tell me they signed up for the class because they like learning about history. Those students are surprised to learn that only a quarter of the class focuses on Native American history. For the rest of the semester, we read 21st-century Indigenous literature, explore digital museum exhibits, learn how to apply Indigenous research methods, watch Native-language films, and discuss issues that affect contemporary Indigenous communities, from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests to the Department of the Interior’s three-year investigation into the legacy of American Indian boarding schools. In the wake of removal, the leaders of these movements — the academics, the activists, and the artists — often work far from Georgia, in places like Oklahoma, Chicago, or the Dakotas. But this fall, with They Teach Love on display at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, the Native South will be present and quite literally visible to the community at large.

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