Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part three. Peace of War: It Can Get Really Personal

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc (as explained in the next essay), then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

We hear about war and its casualties all the time in the news. As I write this, the United States is at “war” (undeclared, solely at the discretion of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth) with Iran, and supports Israel in its strikes against Lebanon. We hear and forget the numbers but it gets personal when I meet and talk with Iranians and Lebanese, some of whom live in France where I do. I hear about their family members who died in American and Israeli bomb strikes. I also remember, years ago, hearing the story of an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian home of a man who was not a terrorist. His daughter was excelling in school and wanted to be a doctor so she could help people. A minute later, her blood was dripping from the ceiling. It gets personal.

Seldom has war been a more personal issue than it was between Nanyehi (later Nancy Ward) and her cousin Tsiyu Gansini, also known as The Canoe. He was such a dedicated warrior that he wore war paint every day and was instantly ready to defend Cherokee interests against those of other tribes and of the whites. He believed the only way to withstand the whites was by war. To accomplish this, all the tribes that had long been at war had to unite together, something he worked hard to achieve. He was the enemy of the Muskogee tribe, until it was clear that their interests were better served by uniting with them against the whites. Rice clearly takes the side of Nancy Ward, but he puts words into The Canoe’s mouth that make his viewpoint seem irresistible. Rice gets inside of his mind. The Canoe’s slogan was, We are not yet conquered.

Nancy Ward, however, realized that the white path of peace and the red path of war were separate but often parallel, sometimes intersecting: sometimes war was necessary to obtain peace. But she compromised when she thought the Cherokee tribe would benefit, even if it meant becoming more and more culturally white herself. She married the white man Bryan Ward (see the next essay), and encouraged their daughter to marry a Virginia government official. Nancy Ward released a white prisoner who promptly ran to warn white outposts of The Canoe’s impending attacks. This caused her cousin’s war plans to fail ignominiously. He had reason to hate her. He considered her the prostitute of the white man—especially since the white prisoner she released may have been her lover. Her slogan was, Our cry is all for peace.

Peace or War? Rice clearly chooses peace, as did Nancy Ward, but sometimes the choice was not clear. Rice speaks through the voice of The Canoe with sympathy.

Rice weaves in some of the brutalities that white armies took against the Cherokees, such as pulling up all of their cornstalks to starve them out of their villages. This was one of the reasons that The Canoe fought until the bitter end, when his entire Chickamauga nation consisted of just a few villages in the mountains of Georgia.

Race as Shorthand, Not as Reality

It has always been impossible to define race. Most humans who have ever lived have had characteristics that were recognizable for their race, although nobody could ever figure out how many races there were. For example, are subsaharan Africans all one race? Bantu people (e.g. Nigeria) look very different from Ethiopians and San (e.g. from Namibia).

But in many societies the dominant people found it extremely important to define race with an exactitude that the concept will not allow. This was particularly true for people of mixed ancestry, as many of us are. This resulted in such absurdities as the one-drop rule in pre-Civil-War America, in which “one drop of black blood” made you black, and if your mother was a slave, you were a slave, even if you were only (like the children of Sally Hemings) one-eighth black. The former Apartheid leaders of South Africa struggled with this concept so much that, in their pitiful final days of rulership, they had to define people from India as honorary whites. No more needs to be added to this, other than that if you have not read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (a slave and a master, who were both one-eighth black, were switched in the nursery), you should.

Still, look around you, and you will find that race is a useful shorthand for identifying people. Even the bluest of liberals cannot avoid it. And, for me, seeing all the different races helps me to rejoice in human diversity, more so than I would if I (perhaps more accurately) saw each person as unique. On the trams of Strasbourg, I enjoyed seeing Muslims and Jews, each in distinctive garb, mixing with saffron-robed Buddhist priests.

But many people want to make each race a category of blame. The most obvious modern example of this is that millions of conservatives consider all Muslims to deserve blame for the terrorist actions of a small number of them. The solution to terrorism, they believe, is to keep all Muslims out of America. By which they mean, all people Arabic ethnicity. (I’m not sure what they would do with red-headed white Muslims from Turkey or the former Yugoslavia.)

But I’m here to tell you, from personal experience, how evil this is. I am of partial Cherokee ancestry. My sixth great grandmother was Nancy Ward, the famous peace activist of the Cherokee Nation prior to the Trail of Tears. Her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini, was the last holdout of Cherokee warriors, whose Chickamauga warriors did not surrender until 1794 on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. Tsiyu Gansini and his warriors committed numerous atrocities, and Nancy Ward could not stop them. Nancy Ward said “My cry is all for peace,” while Tsiyu Gansini said, “We are not yet conquered.” Today we would call the Chickamauga warriors terrorists.

And yet the United States considered all Cherokees to be guilty of the Chickamauga terrorism. In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, and all Cherokees, not just terrorists (of whom none remained by that time) were forced out of their homeland by the United States Army in 1838. Even though the Cherokees by that time had their own written language, newspaper, constitution, Supreme Court, and they lived in white-man houses and had white-man agriculture,

the United States still considered them savages and took their land. It was the category of “Cherokee” that allowed the government to hold all members of the category responsible for the terrorist acts of a few.

When I think about the really nice Muslims I have known, including the couple who struck up a really friendly conversation with us on the tram in Strasbourg, I know none of them approved of Islamist terrorism, any more than my ancestor Nancy Ward approved of the terrorist acts of her cousin, Tsiyu Gansini.

War, Peace, and Human Nature Again

So, what were you all doing this past weekend while the world was waiting to hear whether the U.S. would attack Syria? As for me, I was at the Cherokee National Holiday in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. My family and I got to listen to a very funny Cherokee storyteller, the incomparable Richard Lewis, and take a brief tour of a reconstructed Cherokee village in the style of the eighteenth century, before most of the tribe adopted white American building styles.

And then in the evening we went to the nearby state university to see a performance of a musical based on the life of my 6^th-great-grandmother, a Cherokee woman named Nanyehi, also known as Nancy Ward, who is the most powerful woman in the history of Cherokee tribal government. First she distinguished herself as a war hero. She insisted on accompanying her husband to the Battle of Taliwa in 1755, between the Cherokee and Muskogee tribes. When her husband was killed, she took his rifle and killed the man who had killed her husband, then rallied the Cherokees to a decisive victory. She was given a position of power that allowed her supreme authority to decide the fate of captives and of prisoners of war.

And though a war hero, Nanyehi consistently chose to either release captives or to adopt them into the tribe. This brought her into continual conflict with her cousin, the war leader Dragging Canoe. Throughout this musical, Nanyehi’s path of peace and Dragging Canoe’s path of war came into conflict. It is the same conflict that the world has seen throughout history, and that we see today in our struggle to decide what to do about Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria. It also brings important and evolved components of human nature into sharp contrast.

First let me tell you about the musical Nanyehi, directed by free-lance director Nick Sweet, with music by composer Becky Hobbs (see the website). Both have many credits to their names, but this musical must be the pinnacle of their careers. This is without question the best musical I have ever seen, and this includes Broadway performances of Jersey Boys and Phantom and I think it is even better than 1776. Every aspect of this production, from the quality of the performers (whether as singers or acrobats), most of them local, to the structure and dialogue of each scene, to the beauty of the music, is spectacular. The drama is utterly compelling. I have never cared so deeply and shed as many tears for characters in a play or movie as I did for all the characters in this musical, except for the ones who were evil. Perhaps most importantly, this musical is about a person and a story that is not well known outside of the Cherokee tribe, and not known very well even by most Cherokees. Nick Sweet has outdone his 2002 production, Trail of Tears, and this is no small accomplishment. I believe this musical deserves a permanent place in the hall of fame of American creative productions.

It is difficult to pick out just one thing that is most compelling about this musical, but I think I can do so. The main characters are portrayed as complex human beings. Over and over again, Nanyehi’s path of peace and Dragging Canoe’s path of war come into conflict, and in no case is it clear which one is right. Dragging Canoe is absolutely not portrayed as an evil warrior interfering with Nanyehi’s pursuit of holy peace. They both make decisions that end up causing an immense amount of trouble. Some of Dragging Canoe’s warlike decisions resulted in unnecessary bloodshed, but this is also true of some of Nanyehi’s peaceful decisions. She pardoned a white American prisoner, and in return for this act of mercy the white Americans slaughtered a Cherokee city. Who was right, Dragging Canoe or Nanyehi? To me, the climax point was when Nanyehi surveyed her slaughtered fellow Cherokees, and a white American found her and decided to shoot her also. Dragging Canoe shot him before he could kill Nanyehi. Nanyehi decided to spare the wounded white American. I do not know and I suspect that no one will ever know whether this was the right decision. (I don’t even know whether it really happened, though this musical has inspired me to read as much as I can about Nanyehi, and I may someday find out.) Both the instinct of war and the capacity for peace are part of evolved human nature. They never neutralize each other; they are both always present, always next to one another like strands of color in marble. And so it is to this very day. Should we blast the hell out of Bashar al-Assad? Clearly he and his inner circle deserve annihilation. But will the consequences bring even more suffering?

But this much is clear to me. Peace and prosperity are possible only if both parties consider one another to be humans. Nanyehi pointed out, over and over, that for every enemy warrior you kill, you leave a widow and orphans and bereaved parents. Of course, Dragging Canoe knew this, but he considered it more important to avenge attacks than to forgive them; bereavement of survivors is an unfortunate price to be paid. But what happens when an enemy does not consider you to even be a human? There was a clear example of this in the musical. That example was none other than the government of the United States. It was the American army that slaughtered Cherokee villages and used treachery to do so. Nanyehi died in 1822 and did not live to see the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and to see it brutally carried out on the Cherokee beginning in 1835 in the Trail of Tears (which the Muskogee, Chickasaws, and Choctaws also suffered). According to the character in the musical, this would have broken Nanyehi’s heart and perhaps made her give up her faith in the path of peace, had she known of it. But even in the Trail of Tears, there was some decency mixed with the total evil. President Andrew Jackson, whose life the Cherokees had once saved, even defied the U.S. Supreme Court in order to force the Cherokees out of their land. By order of this commander in chief, Cherokees were put into concentration camps before being put on a forced march. I consider President Jackson to be purely evil and his image on our $20 bill, perhaps the image seen most by the rest of the world, is a national shame. But the general who actually carried out the removal, Gen. Winfield Scott, was as merciful as his orders allowed him to be, and he mourned the suffering of the Cherokees. Jackson did not consider Cherokees to be human. Gen. Scott did.

What better thing can be said about a performance, whether a musical, a movie, or a play, than that it grasps our minds and forces us to face the important, even if insoluble, questions about our own evolved human nature? And the best performance does this without making us depressed. The circumstances around the gradual conquest of the Cherokees are enough to make anyone (not just any Cherokee) depressed, but from this depression we are inspired by spirits of indomitable hope, none better than Nanyehi.