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The name is shortened and comes out of Tsalagi which in Cherokee, means Cherokee. Tsalagi is Cherokee in the Cherokee language. And so, the shortened version is Tsala. And Tsala is based on Tsali, who was a real man that died for refusing to leave and was killed by the U.S. government. And so Tsala became a way for me to bring in the historical elements of the book, the events leading up to The Trail of Tears. I wanted him to be based on that, because he and his son got killed. And he as a spirit begins to narrate what he sees, to bring that historical element of people getting sick and dying, the child getting shot by a soldier, just all this horrible violence from the U.S. government, and today, 200 years later, we’re still seeing people get shot, and that became a way for me to talk about this story, the history of what led to The Trail. I hope that it raises less discussion about Native stereotypes or what people call Native literature, and more discussion about the importance of human life and the way that we’ve been treated.
Editor’s note: For context, “In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee people called this journey the \"Trail of Tears,\" because of its devastating effects. The migrants faced hunger, disease, and exhaustion on the forced march. Over 4,000 out of 15,000 of the Cherokees died.”
In a year where the national conversation has focused on police brutality and systemic racism, many Native Americans, who have supported and participated in the Black Lives Matter movement, still feel that no one is talking about the trauma happening to their own people. According to a 2015 report by the Lakota People’s Law Project, Native Americans “suffer the most adverse effects of a criminal justice system which consistently reifies itself as structurally unjust.” The report goes on to say that Native American men are imprisoned at four times the rate of White men, and Native American women at six times the rate of White women, and that they are “routinely ignored in the public discourse on such topics.”
I hope that it raises conversations and gets them thinking about violence against Natives and the history of removal and displacement. And I hope that it raises empathy, because I don’t know if you’re like this, but for me, the more fiction I read, I become more and more empathetic. Good art makes me more empathic and understand the human condition better. And I think that’s what art is supposed to do, help us understand suffering and sadness and feeling lost and displaced, and all the things that we all go through in life.
Listen to the full interview here:
\"The Removed\" by Brandon Hobson is available everywhere now. Get started reading with an excerpt of the book below.
Read along with us and join the conversation all month long on our Instagram account -- GMA Book Club and #GMABookClub
*****
MY BELOVED SON: time among the dead is mysterious. Time among the dead does not exist the way humans experience it during life. Time may be felt: U-di-tle-gi, u-hyv-dla!
Look to the sky, and there we are, soaring like hawks, circling in the air. We are the birds appearing like a string of red berries against the clouds. We are all around, the deities to cover every expansive body of land. We are bathed in rainwater, flying together. We are a sparkle of blue light inside rocks, the swift rising of smoke and dust, forming the hazy outlines of bodies.
We are speakers of the dead, the drifters and messengers, the old and the young, lurking in the shadows of tall trees at night, passing through the walls of abandoned buildings and houses, concrete structures, stone walls and bridges. We are the ones watching from underwater, rising up like mist, spreading like a rainstorm, over fields and gardens and courtyards, flying over towers and rooftops and through the arched doorways of old buildings with spider cracks in their walls. We reveal ourselves to those who will look. It has been said we are illusions, nightmares and dreams, the disturbing and tense apparitions of the mind. We are always restless, carrying the dreams of children and the elderly, the tired and sick, the poor, the wounded. The removed.
IN 1838, the firing squad killed you before they killed me. Your mother adorned us in gold and jewelry and buried us. You must know that adornment is as important in death as in life, so they made it known that we were beautiful, even absent of our spirits. An elder had once taught me not to be afraid of death because there is no death—there is only a change of worlds.
I refused to migrate west on the Trail, and that is why we died. I refused because it was not fair treatment, and I was willing to sacrifice my life for you, our family, and our people.Yes, I know an old man has a mouth full of thunder. So does an old spirit.
Before you were born, I helped Dragging Canoe and his son take the fleshy side of enemy scalps and paint them red and tie them to poles for the scalp dances. We imitated theEuropeans who invaded us by dancing a foolish, awkward stomp to show their clumsiness. More importantly, the dance healed us by weakening the other races who were responsiblefor harm or sickness. It was also used to heal the sick for our own people.
At one of these dances I met a man named Dasi’giya’gi whose war medicine was an uktena’s shedded skin and burned turtle shell, which he used to smear on his face and body for protection from enemies. He had never been wounded because of wearing this war medicine, as strong as yellowroot. He warned me of the seventh hell we were living in, and soon I had dreams of the blood and destruction. Dragging Canoe told me, “You will be a visionary with prophetic gifts. You must learn to understand this.”
*****
From THE REMOVED, by Brandon Hobson. Copyright 2021 by Brandon Hobson. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins.
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