Cherokee Sister

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, which  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. In Cherokee Sister Theresa Strouth Gaul collects all of Brown’s writings, consisting of letters and a diary, some appearing in print for the first time, as well as Brown’s biography and a drama and poems about her. This edition of Brown’s collected works and related materials firmly establishes her place in early nineteenth-century culture and her influence on American perceptions of Native Americans.

"Cherokee Sister perfectly captures what a scholastic collection of archival papers should be."—Joshua M. Rice, Great Plains Quarterly, "Cherokee Sister is an essential intervention into, and addition to, the canon of nineteenth-century American Indian writers. The introductory essay is exemplary, serving not only as a recalibration of Brown's importance but also as a field- defining treatise on how we should approach nineteenth- century Native writing in general."—Bethany Schneider, Legacy, "Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 offers to Americanists and Native Americanists alike a versatile collection of perhaps the earliest published Native American woman author in the United States. . . . Cherokee Sister's ability to speak to so many interconnected contexts and issues will service a range of college classrooms toward a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of agency and adaptation in nineteenth-century Native American literatures."—Michael P. Taylor, Early American Literature

Theresa Strouth Gaul is a 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.