After her death, the missionaries at Brainerd commissioned Rufus Anderson to compile a biographical article for Catharine to be included in their magazine, the "Missionary Herald". However, so much material was uncovered that the American Board had a book length work published called "Memoir of Catharine Brown, A Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation". While the work exalted the efforts of missionaries to spread the virtues of Christianity to the American Indian, it also suggested that the same work had erased almost all of Catharine’s Cherokee identity. In the following years, Catharine’s writings were used in political debates about removing the Cherokees and other tribes to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. 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.