Presented by Dr. Theresa Gaul, “Writing for Her People: Epistolary Activism in the Cherokee Life and Letters of Catherine Brown tells the story of Catherine Brown. Catharine Brown (1800? – 1823) was a young Cherokee woman whose voice had an unusual reach to Anglo-American audiences in the early nineteenth century. A student in the early missionary schools established in the Cherokee Nation, her letters frequently appeared in US newspapers, and after her death a memoir based on her letters and diary became very popular, going through dozens of editions. This lecture examines her letters as the venue for her activism on behalf of Cherokee people as they faced increasing encroachment on their homeland and the threat of removal. As arguably the earliest Indigenous woman author of published, self-written texts in the United States, Brown attempted to write into existence a cross-racial and transnational network of supporters for the Cherokees. Writing as a Cherokee woman in the feminized genre of letters to Northern white women she called her “sisters,” Brown effectively enacted a gendered and politicized strategy through her writings that complemented the more overtly political writings of Cherokee men of her generation, though it has received less attention. 

Theresa Strouth Gaul is director of the Core Curriculum and professor of English at Texas Christian University. An award-winning researcher, teacher, academic leader and diversity and inclusion advocate, her scholarship focuses on US women’s writing, early Indigenous writers, and letters as a literary form. Cherokee Sister: The Collected Writings of Catharine Brown, 1818-1823 (2014) and To Marry an Indian:  The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1825-1839 (2005) established her reputation as a foremost practitioner of archival methodologies of literary manuscript recovery. She has served as co-editor of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, editor of the book series Legacies of American Women Writers and volume editor for A Companion to American Literature, Vol A, Beginnings to 1820 (2020). 

At her university, Professor Gaul has directed Women and Gender Studies, chaired the English department, and co-founded TCU’s Native American and Indigenous Peoples Initiatives. She is co-editor of a forthcoming book, Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873-2023, centering Indigenous perspectives of the history of her university’s relations with Native peoples. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century multicultural literary history of Texas.