Me and Hank: Travelling Cherokee Modernity with My Grandad

Abstract

Recent scholarship in Indigenous literary and cultural studies and in modernist studies over the past three decades has radically expanded how we think about Indigenous lives, literatures, and experiences from the late nineteenth through the latter twentieth century. While important for expanding our sense of the breadth and depth of Indigenous public spheres, much work remains to understand the everyday lives and experiences of Native folks "on the ground," as it were—​folks like my Grandpa Hank.    Informed by Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe’s framework of tribalography and by what Indigenous historians have variously theorized as “writing from home,” this essay puts Cherokee public and private spheres into conversation as a way to contextualize my grandad’s life, to better understand the histories and circumstances he inherited, and to draw upon the paths by which he and his relatives were able to carve out for themselves and their families a post-allotment, post-Oklahoma, yet distinctly Cherokee modernity.