Defying Erasure
Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash
It is the propensity of empires, characteristically, to erase minority populations that they find troublesome, disruptive, or inconvenient. Empires work at such erasure because they want to impose a conformist offer of control over their sweep of power. Empires are impatient with minority populations that do not readily conform to that order. In broad strokes, empires practice two strategies through which they seek to accomplish erasure. On the one hand, they can practice genocide, as with US policy toward native tribes. On the other hand, they can insist upon assimilation whereby minority peoples are required to forfeit their own language, culture, and identity, as with the “church schools” in the United States and Canada that forced the children of native tribes into dominant language and culture. Both strategies of genocide and assimilation have catastrophic impacts on minority populations and their cultural identities.
In light of this framing of the reality of erasure, I will comment on the most remarkable book by Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence, Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory (2017). It is a matter of historical record that the US government, led by Andrew Jackson and reinforced by the state government of Georgia, required the forcible removal of Cherokee tribes in the 1820s via the Trail of Tears. (This is also the decade when the “Doctrine of Discovery” of the Catholic Church was read into US law, giving white Europeans the sole right to territory in the New World.) The forcible removal of the Cherokee tribes resulted in the painful transport west of the Cherokee peoples, away from their native territory.
Beyond that, however, Andrew Denson has traced a most remarkable response to that historic removal on the part of dominant culture. Rather than the Cherokee peoples being totally “disappeared” to the West (erased), Denson reports on the astonishing explosion of monuments to the Cherokee that were erected and established over the territory from which they were removed. Specifically, in New Echota, Georgia a “model village” of the Cherokee has been erected on a tribal site. That amazing “model” has been variously replicated through the South, all the way west as far as Arkansas.
Denson reads this remarkable array of monuments to a displaced people in an ironic way. It is a way of celebrating this people who were here, but who are not here now any longer. They are, by the monuments, being remembered so that their land could be cleansed for white settlement. Thus the several monuments are an effective assertion of white supremacy and white entitlement to the land that no longer belongs to the Cherokees. These monuments to the “disappeared tribes” has the effective irony of being a remembrance of native peoples, while at the same time state legislatures were engaged, as compellingly as possible, in the erasure of Black populations. Both the erasure of Black populations and the remembrance of disappeared Cherokees tilt toward white entitlement, privilege, and supremacy. This historic accomplishment of erasure and remembrance is breathtaking in its shameless aggression.
Thus the double irony of remembrance in absence and Indian memory and Black erasure! There is, however, a third irony that Denson offers near the end of his book.
In 2012, small white signs began appearing next to monuments and roadside markers related to Cherokee history in western North Carolina and southeastern Tennessee. In red letters, printed in both the Cherokee syllabary and English, they stated simply, “we are still here…The new sign, however, deftly reworked the old, reminding passersby that this place is still Cherokee ground and that the Cherokee people remain present (Monuments to Absence, 221).
In the face of white usurpation of land through “disappearance,” this ad hoc, unofficial assertion insists that the disappearance and erasure have not been complete or effective. The Cherokee people, however reduced in size and power, are still there! The erasure work of empire has a most difficult time completing the task!
The signs are offered by a Cherokee artist, Jeff Moody, who intends that the signs would
challenge what he termed the “finality” expressed by memorials to Native history created by the dominant society. Historic sites, he observed, suggest that the history of Native peoples has ended (221).
Moody’s term “finality” inescapably brings to mind the violence of the Nazis who sought a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” But as the Nazis discovered, and now Moody affirms, such “finality” does not work. Moody affirms,
History and culture are not static, but grow and develop daily (221).
Thus historical, cultural reality defies administrative closure! Denson concludes that the ad hoc signs,
politely correct long-established narratives of Indian disappearance. (“By the way,” they seemed to remark, “Cherokees did not vanish—this history is not finished” (222).)
While the land has been taken over and occupied through white violence,
Cherokees, however, did not forget. Keepers of traditional knowledge in both the mountains and the West remembered Kituwah and its significance. Tom Belt, who grew up in Oklahoma and who helped lead the effort to acquire the site, recalls learning of Kituwah from his father and grandmother, who never saw the place. In the mid-1990s, the white family that farmed the land for generations offered to sell the property to the Eastern Band, and, with that act, the mother town returned. After some initial discussion of possible commercial uses for the land, the tribal government decided simply to preserve the site. A few years ago, the Tribal Council passed a resolution affirming Kituwah’s standing a sacred place, in effect promising that no new development would occur there (226).
This stubborn, insistent assertion of the Cherokee population is an affirmation that white power does not and cannot give closure to Cherokee existence. The Cherokee affirmation, “we are still here” is a refusal of the imperial power of erasure. Denson ends his book with a statement from Principle Chief Joyce Dugan concerning the sacred Cherokee side of Kituwah in North Carolina:
The Cherokees who went west on the Trail of Tears, she wrote, “entrusted the preservation of these resources to us.” North Carolina Cherokees had the honor and the duty “to protect our homeland until the time they might return. That time is now.” Removal was not the end, and Kituwah’s people do return. As Belt remarked, “We are only separated by a short distance and a little time.” (227).
This unexpected declaration of the Cherokee people, “We are still here,” merits close and sustained attention. This is an affirmation of a minority community that would not be erased. It is an act of defiance against an empire that would erase. And it is a measure of the limit of imperial erasure that the empire itself had thought to be without limit.
As I pondered this bold Cherokee declaration, I recalled that I had read somewhere (in a reference now lost to me) of a Jewish community that was under severe assault by the terrorism of the Nazis. In that community it was the custom of a minion of ten Jewish men to meet in secret as a synagogue practice. It was exceedingly risky to make any noise in their meeting, so the men sat in silence. The silence was only broken, so it was reported, when one of the men whispered, “Wir sind da.” The phrase is Yiddish for, “We are here.” This statement by endangered Jews was a claim closely parallel to that of the later Cherokee assertion. In a like way, this is the affirmation of another community that it would not be erased. It was an act of quiet defiance against an empire that would erase. And it was a measure of the limit of imperial erasure that the empire itself (in this case, the Nazis) had thought to be without limit in its drive for a “final solution.” This whispered utterance is a declaration that there is not and cannot be anything “final” about imperial erasure.
Of course the Jews, long before the time of the Nazis, are the primary embodiment of a minority community that is troublesome, disruptive, and inconvenient for empire, because faithful Jews refuse to meet the expectations of empire. Thus long before the ghettos of World War II Jews have been the perennial subject of erasure. If we push back far enough we may come to the anticipated erasure of Jews in the Book of Jeremiah in the 6th century BCE. In prophetic parlance, however, Nebuchadnezzar in the 6th century is not more than an agent of YHWH who undertakes the erasure (judgment) of the chosen people, Israel. Jeremiah has YHWH speak in a fit of imperial anger that bespeaks the obliteration of all creation and the obligation of Israel as chosen people and Jerusalem as chosen city. The imperial utterance of YHWH proceeds step-by-step to the dismantling of all of creation, so artistically rendered that it is easy enough to see that the poetic lines are a reversal of the processes of creation in Genesis 1:
I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger (Jeremiah 4:23-26).
It is all “before his fierce anger.” The lines suggest that the divine erasure is final and complete.
Except that verses 23-26, so symmetrically voiced, are followed by verse 27:
For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end.
Some critics readily read this as a later scribal addition. Perhaps so. Where is it written that the creator God cannot speak as well in a scribal addition? The verse sounds like an afterthought wherein the imperial God reflects on what has just been uttered, and finds that in its harsh finality it is an overstatement well beyond what the creator God will do, or can do, or wants to do. This verse amounts to something of a retraction by God for what God, in imperial anger, has just resolved. The qualification of verse 27 means that there will not be a “full end” to the chosen people or no complete erasure. We do not know if God could not do it, or will not do it. Either way, God does not do it. It is as though the creator God can hear the chosen people insisting, “Wir sind da.” It is as though God attends to the insistent survival of this endangered minority population—Jewish, Cherokee, or whomever.
The historical reality that corresponds to this poetic retraction is found in the last paragraph in the Book of Jeremiah 52:31-34. (See also II Kings 25:27-30.) From that narrative report we learn that even though displaced, disgraced, and rendered helpless, the Jews are still there. They are still there through King Jehoiachin who is still, in exile, recognized as king:
In the thirty-seventh year of the exile of King Jehoiachin of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the twenty-fifth day of the month, King Evilmerodach of Babylon, in the year he began to reign, showed favor to King Jehoiachin of Judah and brought him out of prison (v. 31).
Jehoiachin contains in his royal body the hope and possibility of restoration to the better days that Jeremiah anticipates. The Judean king, at the table of the Babylonian king is an uncompromising assertion, “Wir sind da.”
In a very different idiom, the prophet Ezekiel scores the same point against any final erasure of Israel. In three long recitals of Ezekiel 16, 20, and 23 the prophet imagines the undoing of shameless Israel. These recitals, however, are not permitted as the final word. In Ezekiel 16, after the long diatribe, 16:59-63 voices a reversal. The God who rants against fickle Israel now speaks in a different mode of covenantal embrace:
Yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant…I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord (vv. 60, 62).
The point is reiterated in Ezekiel 20. After the long speech of judgment, this same God makes a promise of restoration:
For on my holy mountain, the mountain height of Israel, says the Lord God, there all the house of Israel, all of them, shall serve me in the land; there I will accept them, and there I will require your contributions and the choices of your gifts, with all your sacred things…You shall know that I am the Lord, when I bring you into the land of Israel, the country that I swore to give to your ancestors…You shall know that I am the Lord, when I deal with you for my name’s sake, not according to your evil ways, corrupt deeds, O house of Israel, says the Lord God (20:40, 42, 44).
There is, even in these verses, a note of continuing severity. That severity, however, is overruled by a resolve for restoration.
The utterance of these lines of restoration in Ezekiel 16:59-63 and 20:33-44 are not easy to adjudicate. Are they simply “feel good” additions to soften the rhetoric? Or are they, as I think, to be taken as revelatory disclosures of the God who finally will not and cannot erase? The ground of hope in Ezekiel, unlike that of Jeremiah, is not divine compassion, but rather divine holiness wherein God will rehabilitate Israel for the sake of God’s own reputation. In the end, even Ezekiel, with his harsh rhetoric, cannot arrive at erasure. He cannot because of historical reality; thus the book of Ezekiel bases its timeline on the chronology of King Jehoiachin, the same king who appears as a sign of royal continuation in the book of Jeremiah. But YHWH in Ezekiel cannot arrive at erasure, finally, because the imperial creator of heaven and earth is not given to erasure. Thus it is a truth inscribed in the very heart of God that history does not end in a “final solution,” not for the Jews and not for the Cherokees. It ends in the hope and prospect of return and restoration. It was so for 6th century Jews. And it is so for 21st century Cherokees. And for every such vulnerable minority population that lives with courage and in resistance. The God of fidelity is attentive to the affirmation, “Wir sind da” when it is uttered outside the barbarism of empire. In response to such “Wir sind da,” God is attentively engaged!
This remarkable reality that serves to defy the calculations of Realpolitik is a matter of immense import for the church. This foil to imperial erasure is an insistence that the “arc of history” is not determined by the force of empire. It is determined by the resolve of fidelity that acts in solidarity with the vulnerable who are repeatedly the targets of erasure. This resolve of fidelity, it is promised and it is hoped, can and will and does run beyond the force of imperial erasure.
From all of this the church is summoned to its work of resistance and witnessing against imperial erasure. It turns out that imperial erasure is a gesture of idolatry, because it imagines that the dominant culture, tempted to erasure, can be ultimate in its imposition of its violent will. Because it trusts in the God of the gospel, the church resists any such idolatrous claim of ultimacy. It is the work of the church to embrace those minority populations that are subject to erasure, to provide protection, to valorize their presence in history as active agents of their own future, and to remember and cherish the names of those who have been subject to such erasure. Now, in this present season of global fascist reaction, there are many populations threatened by erasure. Thus voter repression is an act of erasure, gerrymandering election districts is an act of erasure. Violence committed in gay bars is an act of erasure. Laws that deny women control of their own bodies is an act of erasure. The church is to stand with and for those populations in both resistance and affirmation.
In Christian confession, the ultimate moment of imperial erasure is on Good Friday. By sundown on that Friday, the emperor, the governor, and the Jewish king, Herod, all thought they had effectively erased and eliminated the threat of the alternative governance that Jesus embodied. We confess, to the contrary, that the one they tried to execute and erase has been restored to life and to governance. Thus the Easter declaration of the Risen Christ is,
Ich bin da!
I am here!
We Christians confess that his re-emergence in power validates the claim that God’s creation is on its way to newness. The ground for such a confidence in God’s future is in our confession:
Er ist da!
He is here!
Or as we translate,
Christ is risen!
The erasure by empire has reached its limit on that Friday. This is the ground for refusal and resistance to such erasure, affirming with the Cherokee insistence,
We are still here….History is not finished (Monuments to Absence, 221-222).
Walter Brueggemann
December 27, 2022
