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2017
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
RAIDERS OF THE LOST CHEROKEE ARK a review by Kirstin L. Squint Holly Sullivan McClure. Conjuror. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2015.
KIRSTIN L. SQUINT is an Associate Professor of English at High Point University, where she specializes in teaching US multiethnic literature. She has published articles and interviews on American Indian and US Southern literature in Mississippi Quarterly, Studies in American Humor, and MELUS. Read her interview with Monique Truong in NCLR 2015. HOLLY SULLIVAN MCCLURE is an Atlanta, GA, resident but was raised in the Great Smoky Mountains. She is inspired by the Cherokee heritage of her mother and the Scottish heritage of her father. Read more about her on her website.
development of Cherokee lands, including sacred sites. Most of McClure’s characters are complex and likeable, even the elder who is the novel’s antagonist. The author makes sure that the reader understands his ambivalence about his actions, even when he is overtaken by an ancient evil spirit. Conjuror also displays McClure’s knowledge of Western North Carolina geography and Cherokee traditions. The book contains references to a number of locations, individuals, and objects that suggest the author’s consultation of ethnologist James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1902), widely acknowledged as a classic collection of Cherokee traditional stories. Mooney’s stories are still popular, as Tallulah, a character in Oklahoma Cherokee author Blake Hausman’s recent novel Riding the Trail of Tears claims, “Today Cherokees around the world learn about their culture from the Mooney book.”* Hausman notes the influence of Mooney on Cherokee author Robert Conley whose Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1995) depicts the purification ritual of “going to water” similarly to McClure’s portrayal. Despite the compelling Cherokee cultural elements in McClure’s novel, its serious rendering of contemporary Native life is undermined at times by superficiality and a reliance on dominant cultural tropes. For example, in a conversation about the tacky tourist elements of Cherokee, NC, elder Walker Copperhead says, “This crap brings in enough tourism money to finance a lot of good
Holly Sullivan McClure’s novel Conjuror takes its reader on a twisty thrill ride through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina’s Qualla Boundary, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). McClure’s novel braids together ancient Cherokee lore in a contemporary story of murder and betrayal resulting from a struggle for power surrounding sacred tribal artifacts. McClure shows her mastery of the suspense genre by creating believable characters and withholding just enough information at every switchback to keep her readers turning the pages. Though the author notes that she is Cherokee through her mother’s lineage and the novel does contain a significant knowledge of EBCI history and contemporary culture, its overt references to the Indiana Jones movies and glossing over of certain contemporary issues facing American Indians suggest that it is designed to interest fans of the action/adventure genre more so than readers of literary fiction by contemporary Native authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, or LeAnne Howe. The most appealing qualities of the novel are its solid characterization and plotting. John McLeymore is the protagonist, a white man who has married into the Copperhead family, living with them on the Qualla Boundary. Along with his Cherokee family and friends, McLeymore winds up battling a tribal elder who has gone against the will of other elders to use ancient artifacts to save the Cherokee people from what he views as a greater danger than Indian Removal: continued
*
Blake M. Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011) 57.