New Voice at New Echota: The Ethics of Presentation in C19 Cherokee History

This paper addresses the questions presented by my recent work with the Georgia State Parks Service to record digital audio tour material for the New Echota Historic Site. Working in collaboration with Cherokee citizens,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper addresses the questions presented by my recent work with the Georgia State Parks Service to record digital audio tour material for the New Echota Historic Site. Working in collaboration with Cherokee citizens, speakers, and scholars (not mutually exclusive or inclusive categories), students in my course composed, recorded, and produced a series of audio clips that visitors hear when they tour the nineteenth-century Cherokee capital.

However, this re-voicing of New Echota in present-day Cherokee voices is not without a number of ethical considerations, many of which mirror the town’s fraught history. New Echota represents a space of division even as it stands as a site of innovative Native literacy and print practices in the creation of the Cherokee Phoenix. To give new voice to New Echota is to ask Cherokee collaborators to return to a site of national achievement and trauma. During the course of the project all participants had to consider whether New Echota — as the site of treason — should be re-voiced at all. Does it call back to the moment of intra-tribal conflict around the adoption of western governmental and literacy practices? Does it ask Cherokee participants to be complicit in oral histories maintained and controlled by the state of Georgia? What new literacy legacies does such a project call forth, from the syllabary to the politically symbolic? I explore these questions as I reflect on the creation of a digital oral history of New Echota that, like the town itself, calls up the distance between intentions and implications.