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Boyd Cothran, Andrew Denson. Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 240–241, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.240
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In 2012, little white signs with red lettering began appearing throughout western North Carolina next to monuments and roadside markers dedicated to Cherokee history. In both English and the Cherokee syllabary, they proclaimed, “we are still here.” The message was simple. Despite America’s collective memory of the United States’ forced removal in the 1830s of several thousands of Indigenous people from their southeastern homelands to a new territory in the West, many American Indians, including the Cherokee, still called the South home. These signs were part of a project created by the artist Jeff Marley (Eastern Band Cherokee), and they represent a kind of coda to historian Andrew Denson’s remarkable and surprising study of the legacy of the so-called Trail of Tears, the most infamous event in the Indian history of the American South. Monuments to Absence traces the development of memorials, historic sites, and tourist attractions since the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century to tell a surprising tale: rather than rejecting this tragic history, white southerners embraced the Trail of Tears, celebrating the region’s history of Indian removal, and in the process they constructed a public memory of Cherokee removal that, ironically, reinforced white ownership of the South. This public memory, Denson contends, permitted whites to acknowledge historical injustices while still clinging to a redemptive narrative of American innocence. The Trail of Tears was a mistake—one Americans have, perhaps unexpectedly, admitted for generations—but recognition of that mistake has never led to a challenge to the fundamental legitimacy of American nationhood. In Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory, Denson argues that Cherokee removal has been constructed as a historical aberration because to do otherwise would be to admit that the United States rests less upon a set of liberal political values than on a series of colonial conquests and territorial acquisitions.
