Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs

At the end of the American Revolution, a delegation of Cherokee leaders trekked to Virginia in hopes of ending conflict with the former colonies. While there, one of the Cherokee headmen asked a rhetorical question of the American commissioners: “Look back and recollect what a numerous . . . people we were.” He continued to ask how “we have been continually . . . decreasing, and are now become weak. What are the causes?” For most Americans, both then and now, the answer would likely be disease, specifically smallpox. According to the Cherokee, however, it was not disease but “War, and [the] succeeding invasions of our Country” that had triggered their decline (215). This exchange cuts to the very heart of this book, in which Paul Kelton argues that Euro-American colonialism, rather than inadvertent contact and interaction, was responsible for the spread of deadly disease throughout native North America. In particular, Kelton wages war on the “virgin soil” thesis—enshrined in the historiography by Alfred Crosby (1976) and in popular culture by Jared Diamond (1999) and Charles Mann (2006, 2011)—which Kelton claims has “place[d] great weight on a historical accident” and the “inability of Natives to deal effectively with the epidemiological crises that ensued,” culminating in the decimation of indigenous North American populations (7). By using the case of the Cherokee, though, Kelton demonstrates how Native experiences in trading, slaving, and warring with Euro-Americans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as subsequent invasions of Cherokee territories during the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, proved far more destructive than smallpox and were the “chief determinant[s] in the transition of the Americas from indigenous to European control.” In short, Kelton suggests that the “virgin soil” thesis has “hidden colonialism’s violence under a cloak of biological determinism,” when in reality it was human agency rather than germs that shaped the colonial project in North America (9, 20).Of the many new insights that Kelton contributes, none is more important than the Cherokee response to smallpox, which undermines the narrative of Native peoples as passive victims who failed to cope with the epidemiological catastrophe or as those who even amplified the lethality of smallpox through “counterproductive actions” like failing to separate the sick from the healthy (59). Instead, Kelton describes a vibrant medical and cosmological framework deployed by the Cherokees to confront new diseases, led by medical and spiritual practitioners who communed, navigated, and invoked the powers of the three Cherokee worlds to uncover clues about the origins of smallpox and to stop its transmission. Such remedies included the “going-to-water” rite, which attempted to purge the sickness from a person’s body by accessing the power of an element that was associated with the lower world (87–88). Religious specialists also invented new methods for battling smallpox, such as a smallpox ceremony, in which infected individuals were segregated from the healthy, while the community danced to restore balance between the three worlds and healing practitioners distributed medicine to all involved. Similar instances of quarantine occurred on a daily basis, as the Cherokee expelled sick individuals from the community to nearby fields, where they were cared for while the larger population was protected. More often than not, these medical specialists advised Cherokee leaders to steer hunters, warriors, and diplomats away from disease-ridden villages and European towns, all of which reveals how Native peoples “responded actively and creatively to the biological consequences of colonialism” (101). Ultimately, then, Kelton’s work is a much-needed antidote to prevailing “narratives of disease . . . that obscure how colonialism—in all its manifold yet connected aspects—has negatively impacted indigenous health and well-being” (173)

Archaeology · Cherokee · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Historiography · Indigenous · Misrepresentation · Political science · Smallpox · Spanish Civil War · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Medicine

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