Review of \u3ci\u3eSustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation\u3c/i\u3e by Rose Stremlau

Cherokee families, Rose Stremlau states in her elegantly written book, were and remain egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized. These characteristics, she argues, have provided stability through difficult times, as Cherokee families faced colonization, displacement and removal, the Civil War, and ultimately the allotment policy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries {although it is important to note that she also carries her analysis beyond the allotment era, into the mid-to-late twentieth century}. Using U.S. and Cherokee census data, Dawes Commission records, Guion Miller Commission applications, probate records, articles from the national Cherokee Advocate, and oral histories in the Doris Duke Collection, the Indian Pioneer Papers, and in the collections of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Stremlau examines a sample of about 200 people in and around the community of Chewey {located in what was once called the Goingsnake District and is known now as Adair County, Oklahoma}. To this rich documentary record she employs ethnohistorical methods and uses intimacy as an analytical concept, skillfully and compassionately humanizing the bureaucracy of allotment by writing about each person as unique and fully human

Review of \u3ci\u3eSustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation\u3c/i\u3e by Rose Stremlau

Cherokee families, Rose Stremlau states in her elegantly written book, were and remain egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized. These characteristics, she argues, have provided stability through difficult times, as Cherokee families faced colonization, displacement and removal, the Civil War, and ultimately the allotment policy of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries {although it is important to note that she also carries her analysis beyond the allotment era, into the mid-to-late twentieth century}. Using U.S. and Cherokee census data, Dawes Commission records, Guion Miller Commission applications, probate records, articles from the national Cherokee Advocate, and oral histories in the Doris Duke Collection, the Indian Pioneer Papers, and in the collections of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Stremlau examines a sample of about 200 people in and around the community of Chewey {located in what was once called the Goingsnake District and is known now as Adair County, Oklahoma}. To this rich documentary record she employs ethnohistorical methods and uses intimacy as an analytical concept, skillfully and compassionately humanizing the bureaucracy of allotment by writing about each person as unique and fully human

Cherokee Civil Warrior: Chief John Ross and the Struggle for Tribal Sovereignty

In Cherokee Civil Warrior, W. Dale Weeks offers several arguments about Cherokee history and United States Indian policy in the Civil War Era while seeking to reframe how scholars understand Chief John Ross’s wartime leadership

Population Knowledge and the Practice of Guardianship

In the United States of America, as in other regions of the New World, the colonists imagined that the native peoples were "dying out." Recent critical studies of this popular and robust narrative neglect to account for its demise. This paper describes the emergence, by the 1870s, of a critique of the "Dying Indian" story that rested on a growing store of population knowledge generated by the United States government. This paper narrates the increasing demographic capacity of colonial authority, starting with Jedediah Morse in the 1820s and noting the use of population data by the Cherokee and by Lewis Cass in the debate about Indian removal in the 1830s. This paper then links the work of Henry Schoolcraft in the 1840s and 1850s to the rise of a reservation system and President Grant's "Peace Policy" in the 1860s, arguing that "statistics" enabled humanitarian policy intellectuals to argue "unsentimentally" for a "civilizing" program. The surveillance capacity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) enabled the critique of the "Dying Indian" thesis made by Francis Walker, Selden Clark, and Garrick Mallery in the 1870s which, in turn, contributed to the political success of Senator Dawes's "allotment" policy in the 1880s. This paper concludes by placing the work of these early critics of the "Dying Indian" story in the context of two histories: of U.S. colonial sovereignty and of the discipline of historical demography