Author: Rose StremlauPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Sustaining the Cherokee Family
Sustaining the Cherokee Family
Author: Rose StremlauPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807834998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
Sustaining the Cherokee Family
Sustaining the Cherokee Family
Author: Rose StremlauPublisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807869109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the federal government sought to forcibly assimilate Native Americans into American society through systematized land allotment. In Sustaining the Cherokee Family, Rose Stremlau illuminates the impact of this policy on the Cherokee Nation, particularly within individual families and communities in modern-day northeastern Oklahoma. Emphasizing Cherokee agency, Stremlau reveals that Cherokee families' organization, cultural values, and social and economic practices allowed them to adapt to private land ownership by incorporating elements of the new system into existing domestic and community-based economies. Drawing on evidence from a range of sources, including Cherokee and United States censuses, federal and tribal records, local newspapers, maps, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral histories, Stremlau demonstrates that Cherokee management of land perpetuated the values and behaviors associated with their sense of kinship, therefore uniting extended families. And, although the loss of access to land and communal resources slowly impoverished the region, it reinforced the Cherokees' interdependence. Stremlau argues that the persistence of extended family bonds allowed indigenous communities to retain a collective focus and resist aspects of federal assimilation policy during a period of great social upheaval.
Sovereign Entrepreneurs
Author: Courtney LewisPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Book Description
By 2009, reverberations of economic crisis spread from the United States around the globe. As corporations across the United States folded, however, small businesses on the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) continued to thrive. In this rich ethnographic study, Courtney Lewis reveals the critical roles small businesses such as these play for Indigenous nations. The EBCI has an especially long history of incorporated, citizen-owned businesses located on their lands. When many people think of Indigenous-owned businesses, they stop with prominent casino gaming operations or natural-resource intensive enterprises. But on the Qualla Boundary today, Indigenous entrepreneurship and economic independence extends to art galleries, restaurants, a bookstore, a funeral parlor, and more. Lewis's fieldwork followed these businesses through the Great Recession and against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding EBCI-owned casino. Lewis's keen observations reveal how Eastern Band small business owners have contributed to an economic sovereignty that empowers and sustains their nation both culturally and politically.
A Nation of Descendants
Author: Francesca MorganPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469664798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
From family trees written in early American bibles to birther conspiracy theories, genealogy has always mattered in the United States, whether for taking stock of kin when organizing a family reunion or drawing on membership—by blood or other means—to claim rights to land, inheritances, and more. And since the advent of DNA kits that purportedly trace genealogical relations through genetics, millions of people have used them to learn about their medical histories, biological parentage, and ethnic background. A Nation of Descendants traces Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries. Francesca Morgan examines how specific groups throughout history grappled with finding and recording their forebears, focusing on Anglo-American white, Mormon, African American, Jewish, and Native American people. Morgan also describes how individuals and researchers use genealogy for personal and scholarly purposes, and she explores how local businesspeople, companies like Ancestry.com, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots series powered the commercialization and commodification of genealogy.
Serving the Nation
Author: Julie L. ReedPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 080615540X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
Well before the creation of the United States, the Cherokee people administered their own social policy—a form of what today might be called social welfare—based on matrilineal descent, egalitarian relations, kinship obligations, and communal landholding. The ethic of gadugi, or work coordinated for the social good, was at the heart of this system. Serving the Nation explores the role of such traditions in shaping the alternative social welfare system of the Cherokee Nation, as well as their influence on the U.S. government’s social policies. Faced with removal and civil war in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation asserted its right to build institutions administered by Cherokee people, both as an affirmation of their national sovereignty and as a community imperative. The Cherokee Nation protected and defended key features of its traditional social service policy, extended social welfare protections to those deemed Cherokee according to citizenship laws, and modified its policies over time to continue fulfilling its people's expectations. Julie L. Reed examines these policies alongside public health concerns, medical practices, and legislation defining care and education for orphans, the mentally ill, the differently abled, the incarcerated, the sick, and the poor. Changing federal and state policies and practices exacerbated divisions based on class, language, and education, and challenged the ability of Cherokees individually and collectively to meet the social welfare needs of their kin and communities. The Cherokee response led to more centralized national government solutions for upholding social welfare and justice, as well as to the continuation of older cultural norms. Offering insights gleaned from reconsidered and overlooked historical sources, this book enhances our understanding of the history and workings of social welfare policy and services, not only in the Cherokee Nation but also in the United States. Serving the Nation is published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Stoking the Fire
Author: Kirby BrownPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806161833
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
The years between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and the 1971 reemergence of the Cherokee Nation are often seen as an intellectual, political, and literary “dark age” in Cherokee history. In Stoking the Fire, Kirby Brown brings to light a rich array of writing that counters this view. A critical reading of the work of several twentieth-century Cherokee writers, this book reveals the complicated ways their writings reimagined, enacted, and bore witness to Cherokee nationhood in the absence of a functioning Cherokee state. Historian Rachel Caroline Eaton (1869–1938), novelist John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), educator Ruth Muskrat Bronson (1897–1982), and playwright Rollie Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) are among the writers Brown considers within the Cherokee national and transnational contexts that informed their lives and work. Facing the devastating effects on Cherokee communities of allotment and assimilation policies that ultimately dissolved the Cherokee government, these writers turned to tribal histories and biographies, novels and plays, and editorials and public addresses as alternative sites for resistance, critique, and the ongoing cultivation of Cherokee nationhood. Stoking the Fire shows how these writers—through fiction, drama, historiography, or Cherokee diplomacy—inscribed a Cherokee national presence in the twentieth century within popular and academic discourses that have often understood the “Indian nation” as a contradiction in terms. Avoiding the pitfalls of both assimilationist resignation and accommodationist ambivalence, Stoking the Fire recovers this period as a rich archive of Cherokee national memory. More broadly, the book expands how we think today about Indigenous nationhood and identity, our relationships with writers and texts from previous eras, and the paradigms that shape the fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies.
The Cherokee Diaspora
Author: Gregory D. SmithersPublisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300169604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838-39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.
Blood Will Tell
Author: Katherine EllinghausPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149623037X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235
Book Description
A study of the role blood quantum played in the assimilation period between 1887 and 1934 in the United States.
The Native South
Author: Tim Alan GarrisonPublisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496201442
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302
Book Description
In The Native South, Tim Alan Garrison and Greg O’Brien assemble contributions from leading ethnohistorians of the American South in a state-of-the-field volume of Native American history from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Spanning such subjects as Seminole–African American kinship systems, Cherokee notions of guilt and innocence in evolving tribal jurisprudence, Indian captives and American empire, and second-wave feminist activism among Cherokee women in the 1970s, The Native South offers a dynamic examination of ethnohistorical methodology and evolving research subjects in southern Native American history. Theda Perdue and Michael Green, pioneers in the modern historiography of the Native South who developed it into a major field of scholarly inquiry today, speak in interviews with the editors about how that field evolved in the late twentieth century after the foundational work of James Mooney, John Swanton, Angie Debo, and Charles Hudson. For scholars, graduate students, and undergraduates in this field of American history, this collection offers original essays by Mikaëla Adams, James Taylor Carson, Tim Alan Garrison, Izumi Ishii, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Rowena McClinton, David A. Nichols, Greg O’Brien, Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, Julie L. Reed, Christina Snyder, and Rose Stremlau.
Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls
Author: Jerry ThompsonPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806165723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446
Book Description
Growing up, Jerry Thompson knew only that his grandfather was a gritty, “mixed-blood” Cherokee cowboy named Joe Lynch Davis. That was all anyone cared to say about the man. But after Thompson’s mother died, the award-winning historian discovered a shoebox full of letters that held the key to a long-lost family history of passion, violence, and despair. Wrecked Lives and Lost Souls, the result of Thompson’s sleuthing into his family’s past, uncovers the lawless life and times of a man at the center of systematic cattle rustling, feuding, gun battles, a bloody range war, bank robberies, and train heists in early 1900s Indian Territory and Oklahoma. Through painstaking detective work into archival sources, newspaper accounts, and court proceedings, and via numerous interviews, Thompson pieces together not only the story of his grandfather—and a long-forgotten gang of outlaws to rival the infamous Younger brothers—but also the dark path of a Cherokee diaspora from Georgia to Indian Territory. Davis, born in 1891, grew up on a family ranch on the Canadian River, outside the small community of Porum in the Cherokee Nation. The range was being fenced, and for the Davis family and others, cattle rustling was part of a way of life—a habit that ultimately spilled over into violence and murder. The story “goes way back to the wild & wooly cattle days of the west,” an aunt wrote to Thompson’s mother, “when there was cattle rustling, bank robberies & feuding.” One of these feuds—that Joe Davis was “raised right into”—was the decade-long Porum Range War, which culminated in the murder of Davis’s uncle in 1907. In fleshing out the details of the range war and his grandfather’s life, Thompson brings to light the brutality and far-reaching consequences of an obscure chapter in the history of the American West.