 | Cherokee Sister Subjects: HISTORY / United States / 19th Century.; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies.; LITERARY COLLECTIONS / American / General.; Cherokee Indians; Cherokee women; Catharine Brown (1800?-1823) became Brainerd Mission School's first Cherokee convert to Christianity, a missionary teacher, and the first Native American woman whose own writings saw extensive publication in her lifetime. After her death from tuberculosis at age twenty-three, the missionary organization that had educated and later employed Brown commissioned a posthumous biography, Memoir of Catharine Brown , whichnbsp; enjoyed widespread contemporary popularity and praise. In the following decade, her writings, along with those of other educated Cherokees, became highly politicized and were used in debates about the removal of the Cherokees and other tribes to Indian Territory. Although she was once viewed by literary critics as a docile and dominated victim of missionaries who represented the tragic fate of Indians who abandoned their identities, Brown is now being reconsidered as a figure of enduring Cherokee revitalization, survival, adaptability, and leadership. Theresa Strouth Gaul is anbsp;professor of English at Texas Christian University. She is the editor of To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839 and a coeditor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers . |
