front cover of Our Fire Survives the Storm
Our Fire Survives the Storm
A Cherokee Literary History
Daniel Heath Justice
University of Minnesota Press, 2006
Once the most powerful indigenous nation in the southeastern United States, the Cherokees survive and thrive as a people nearly two centuries after the Trail of Tears and a hundred years after the allotment of Indian Territory. In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. 

Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. 

Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. 

Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.
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front cover of Our Fire Survives the Storm
Our Fire Survives the Storm
A Cherokee Literary History, Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition
Daniel Heath Justice
University of Minnesota Press, 2026

The twentieth-anniversary edition of the path-clearing study of Cherokee writing in English, with an emphatic refocus on voices from the three Cherokee tribal nations


This Citizenship and Sovereignty Edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is a thoroughly updated, nationhood-focused, twentieth-anniversary revision of Daniel Heath Justice’s influential study of Cherokee writing in English. Through politically astute and historically grounded readings of diverse texts by citizens of the Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Justice connects Cherokee literature to Indigenous sovereignty, nationhood, and collective futurity.

 

Guided by a reparative vision that directly contends with the outdated literary legacies of the book’s first edition, this revision confronts the ongoing harms of unsubstantiated and false Cherokee heritage claims on literary studies, replacing readings of primary texts by unverified claimants with those of Cherokee citizen writers. As Justice addresses issues of accountability, he engages with the past two decades of Indigenous scholarship, fully updating terminology, concepts, and scholarly resources. He expands and deepens the intellectual and historical context for Cherokee literary production introduced in the first edition, and he discusses Cherokee writing and community in the mid-twentieth century, the Cherokee Freedmen’s long struggle for justice, and the future of Cherokee nationhood.

 

Highlighting the work of authors who illustrate the transformative collective discourses of what it means to be Cherokee, Justice examines the richness of Cherokee literary expression through motifs of roots, removal, and nationhood in traditional stories, speeches, legal and governance documents, memoirs, short stories, novels, and plays. An invitation to reflective criticism, this new edition of Our Fire Survives the Storm is grounded in the belief that Indigenous nationhood is a necessary ethical response to the violence of the settler imaginary.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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