Won’t You Be My (Allotment) Neighbor? Mapping Cherokee Homelands in Diaspora

Abstract

Contributing to work collected in Allotment Stories (2021), this article highlights the continuities of Cherokee relations that the US federal Indian policy of allotment has left fragmented and attenuated. The article brings the author's personal journal entries and critical reflections on encounters with allotment lands into collective conversation with other family, community, and oral history narratives that "re-member" allotment's legacy of fragmentation, separation, and division. By bringing together these diverse engagements with allotment, the article traces an enduring Cherokee relationality that has developed in multiple places and that remains grounded in Cherokee values and relations to Cherokee mountains, waterways, and cemetery places.&nbsp