SOURCE: "The Cherokee Night of R. Lynn Riggs," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Autumn, 1988, pp. 45-59.

Braunlich is an American biographer and critic whose works include Haunted By Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs (1988). In the following essay, she provides a detailed analysis of The Cherokee Night.

"An absorbed race has its curiously irreconcilable inheritance. It seems to me the best grade of absorbed Indian might be an intellectual Hamlet, buffeted, harrassed, victimized, split, baffled—with somewhere in him great fire and some granite. And a residual lump of stranger things than the white race may fathom" (Letter to [Barrett H.] Clark, 10 March 1929). This statement by part-Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs recognized, early on, the failure of the assimilation policy for Native Americans. The theme of the play he was writing, The Cherokee Night, might also be stated thus: the combination of American Indian and...