Catharine Brown

Catharine Brown (1800 – July 18, 1823) was a Cherokee woman and missionary teacher at Brainerd Mission School. She was the mission's first Cherokee convert to Christianity and the first Native American woman to see many of her writings extensively published in her lifetime.

Early life Catharine Brown was born around 1800 to John Brown, in Cherokee known as Yau-nu-gung-yah-ski, and Sarah Webber Brown, in Cherokee Tsa-luh, about south east of the Tennessee River at a place known to the Cherokee as Tsu-sau-ya-sah; at that time, it was part of Cherokee Indian territory, but now forms part of the Wills-valley in the State of Alabama between the Raccoon and Lookout mountains. Her parents were prosperous, her father being one of the "headmen" for the Creek-Path Cherokee community, but had no understanding of the English language despite being considered among the most intellectual class of Cherokee within their nation.

Brainerd Mission School

In the autumn of 1816, Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury, a missionary, appeared before the general Council of the Cherokees and requested permission to build schools for them. The request was well received and Kingsbury established the first Board among the Cherokees before moving on to the Choctaw Nation. The Board convened and selected the place for the first school known as Chick-a-mau-gah. The school was later named Brainerd, in memory of David Brainerd, a renowned missionary to the American Indians at that time. The following spring, Moody Hall and Loring S. Williams arrived at the school, with their wives, as assistant missionaries and soon after the school was opened. The news spread throughout the Cherokee Nation quickly and reached Catharine living about 100 miles away. Catharine was seventeen at the time and had learned to speak English while living at the home of a Cherokee friend. She asked her parents to send her to the missionary school and they granted her request. On July 9, 1817, Catharine became a student at Brainerd Mission School.

Considered both beautiful and docile, Catharine made rapid progress. In the first three months she learnt to read and write in English. This had exceeded the progress of anyone known at the time in this or any other country. Catharine became passionate about all that she learned and then around January 1818 she converted to Christianity and was baptized by the missionaries of the Board.

Women of the mission Brainerd Mission, from a sketch by Thomas E. Paine, 1821. The Brainerd Mission, located on Chickamauga Creek near present-day Chattanooga. It was created in 1816 by the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions For Catharine, the community of women at the mission was most likely a comfort to her as shown in her letters while she was away from them in later years. In some ways, it resembled communities of Cherokee women in the society where she grew up. Cherokee women lived very separate lives from the men. They grew their crops together and performed their rituals apart from men. They had their children alone or with the help of other women. They even followed the Cherokee principle of secluding themselves from men during their menstrual period. They controlled everything surrounding the household while men spent very little time around. For the women at Brainerd, life was very much like that of the typical middle-class white women of the Northeast at that time. They were expected to be pious, chaste and submissive. They often sought each other's company to reassure and affirm those values. The women distanced themselves from Cherokee women who did not necessarily share their views and developed very close ties to one another. Along with the female students, they accomplished all the tasks of running the mission together. In addition to this they cared for each other, attended births and shared in responsibilities of child-care. Catharine lamented and mourned the loss of this sense of sisterhood while she was away from Brainerd. She was once viewed by literary critics as a victim of early Christian missionaries who, by conversion, became a tragedy because of the loss of her identity. However, as time passed she began to be viewed as a woman representing the lasting revitalization, survival, adaptability and leadership of the Cherokee culture as a whole. Later collections of her letters and diary cemented Catharine's place in early nineteenth-century culture and have had an enduring effect on American perceptions of Native Americans.

Letters and works