She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, and shared the following:
Page 99 of Land, Language, and Women introduces readers to the three major themes of the book (Cherokee girls' and women's educational worlds, the role of Cherokee language in educational settings, and the power of land to shape and inform community). Readers learn about Cherokee girls' access to Cherokee language education and enrollment numbers at Dwight Mission, a school opened in Arkansas Territory that served Cherokees who had removed to the west before forced removal. Dwight Mission later moved to Indian Territory from Arkansas after the United States and Western Cherokees negotiated the Treaty of 1828. Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee written language and whose daughter figures prominently in the book, assisted in these negotiations. Page 99 also describes how Cherokee people re-established and (re)organized their families and agricultural endeavors in the west during what I have been referring to for over a decade as the Long Removal Era. This longer period of study forces us to consider what led some Cherokee families to remove west before the event we refer to as the Trail of Tears and it corrects an incomplete understanding of the Removal Era to better reflect Cherokee peoples' actual family histories of removal, my own included.Learn more about Land, Language, and Women at the University of North Carolina Press website.
Page 99 does discuss the three key themes of the book, but my disappointment with the test as it applies to my book is that it does not introduce readers to any named Cherokee women. I have encountered so many unnamed "Indian women" in the archival record and in published histories; my goal in writing this book was to offer a methodological approach and a corrective to what I see as a continued erasure of wide swathes of everyday Cherokee women in histories written about Cherokee people. Each chapter of the book (and within original artwork in the book created by Cherokee artist Roy Boney, Jr. ) foregrounds a Cherokee girl's educational world in order to launch a much larger conversation about systems of Cherokee education over 400 years that continually relied on Cherokee women to function. This page doesn't introduce readers to a single girl. In part, I judge books on Cherokee history based on whether I meet Cherokee people I have never met before or get to know someone I have met before, but in a far more intimate and nuanced way. Reading this page, I fail my own test even though I haven't completely failed the Page 99 Test.
Land, Language, and Women extends my exploration of the subjects covered in my first book (social welfare, education, public health policies, and the development and implementation of institutions). It also reflects my continued desire to explore questions related to hybridity and the durability of Indigenous-centered models of social welfare and pedagogy. To accomplish this, I drew upon a far more rich and creative set of primary records. I read mollusk collections, archaeological site reports, Cherokee writing in caves, textbooks used in mission and Oklahoma public schools, oral narratives, the oral histories of friends/teachers, artists' experiences, the experiences and records gathered by my family, and records from my own childhood archive to draw out more nuanced and complicated understandings of Indigenous history, Cherokee history, social welfare policies, educational history, regional histories, and women's history.
--Marshal Zeringue
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