Cherokee Historical Fiction and Indigenous Science Fiction in Riding the Trail of Tears. (13th November 2020) - Jackson, Joshua
Abstract: Turning to Indigenous genre theory, this article interprets Blake M. Hausman's Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) as a work of both Indigenous science fiction and Cherokee historical fiction. By defying the temporal constraints of science fiction and historical fiction, as conventionally defined, the novel imagines Cherokee people effectively resisting Removal via digital, Cherokee-made technology and reclaiming Cherokee historical lands. To understand how historical and tribal specificity combine in the novel's imagination of these possibilities, the authors apply Cherokee literary history and definitions of Cherokee Beloved Path and Chickamauga consciousness to explain how the novel's science fictional framework and historical narrative enable characters to resist settler-colonial technologies of dominance and survive the novel's seemingly infinite loop of Removal. To describe how the novel uses Native-made technologies to connect elements of Cherokee historical fiction to elements of Indigenous science fiction, we combine Allison Adelle Hedge Coke's use of the term throughways with Grace L. Dillon's definition of the genre Native slipstream. The article concludes that discussions of genre, and specifically historical fiction, should pay careful attention to the way that multiple cultural contexts inform definitions of history, time, and space.