Maybe this was the Great Spirit's lesson. Nothing was mine. I could receive and lose in the same breath. The burden the white man carried was that he didn't know the lesson yet.
This is an extremely revealing quote for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is a demonstration of the way in which Maritole and Knowbowtie were trying to find a way to stay true to their Native American spirituality whilst learning and incorporating the new Christianity into their belief system. Knowbowtie chose to see the Trail of Tears as a lesson from the Great Spirit; that nothing truly belongs to us as humans (in Christianity this is a concept that also appears with the words "The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away") and that at one moment what we have becomes what we do not have; we are still the same people.
Secondly it is revealing in the way it shows the Cherokee reframing what has happened to them and actually seeing their aggressors, the white men who evicted them from their ancestral homes, as the ones carrying a burden, and the ones who were not fortunate enough to have understood the lesson that was being taught. The white settlers still believed that they could take what they wanted, and what they took was theirs to loose. They did not understand the lesson yet, and this enabled Knowbowtie to turn his anger against them into pity for them, instrumental in his being able to move forward to the betterment of the Cherokee nation, rather than carrying this embitterment forwards to its detriment.
No, this white bread is nothing my granny would have touched.
Accustomed to cooking with corn, as her ancestors had done, Maritole is unable to cook anything palatable with the white flour given to them by the white settlers. To Maritole, everything relates back to the ancestors, and the fact that her grandmother would not have used the white flour is reason enough for Maritole not to be using it as well.
However, the comment also relates to the more broad issue of the ways of the Cherokee and the ways of the white settlers. To the Cherokee the corn is of extreme importance and they believe that their nation actually comes from the corn. Corn gives them life, and taking this away and replacing it with white flour is to Maritole a sign that the white settlers are also taking away her heritage and replacing it with their own.
You got my grandmother's cabin. My wife didn't have any fields.
Tanner likes to taunt Knowbowtie about having nothing, and about the fact that he is nothing without Maritole. Because all of the property and land in Cherokee culture is passed down through the women of the family, a man does not have the right to farm unless his wife owns land. Basically, he marries the right to be involved in agriculture. Tanner is reminding Knowbowtie that he lives in Maritole's grandmother's cabin and farms Maritole's ancestral lands, ousting Tanner from the business of agriculture because the woman he has married had no ancestral farmland, or property. Both men resent each other and spend much of their time goading each other, trying to get the upper hand.
