When the Jeep Cherokee was introduced in 1974, it was the era of Red Power politics - the takeovers of Alcatraz, Wounded Knee, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, when Little Big Man was a popular film and Cher had a number-one hit with "Half-breed." It seems almost a given that a sporty, outdoorsy vehicle - the proto-suv - would have to have an Indian name. But why Cherokee? Why not Lakota or Sioux, since most popular representations of Native peoples since the late nineteenth century generally have been modeled on the Plains tribes? Why not Dakota or Comanche or Navajo? These all came later in the vehicular nomenclature, only after Cherokee was taken. This seems odd when one thinks that the Cherokees are almost universally described in the scholarship as the most "acculturated" of the Indian nations; after all, they have been counted one of the "five civilized tribes" since at least the late nineteenth century. On the face of it, they would seem the wrong candidates for the job of representing the stereotypical Indian, yet they seem always available and in the most peculiar and even intimate ways. It's a well established joke in Native discourse that white people habitually claim Cherokee princesses for grandmothers....
While the Cherokees are persistently available as a type of ur-Indian, their history remains obscured in an especially resilient sentimentality, perhaps more so than for other Indian nations. That sentiment is particularly available in the terms closely associated with the Cherokees in popular discourse and in scholarship; the Cherokees continue to be associated primarily with "removal" on the "Trial of Tears," terms that themselves could bear some investigation. My interest here is in the terms used to describe this history and what they might signify....
The emerging middle class of U.S. citizens in the early nineteenth century learned to feel badly for Indians, as their confrontation with a superior civilization would inevitably destroy them. According to this line of thinking, it wasn't that actual white people were wreaking such havoc in Native societies but rather that the havoc wrought was inevitable when inferior met superior. "Trail of Tears" sounds positively misty and romantic in these circumstances; the tears shed are those of white people at the sad disappearance of the doomed Indians. As John Marshall's comments in Cherokee Nation exemplify, sympathy for Indians has been the U.S. intellectual's pose ever since the early nineteenth century, helping to explain away as inevitable something that was not inevitable at all....
Writing Indian Nations
Maureen Konkle