Sustaining the Cherokee Family

Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation

Rose Stremlau

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807869109
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

CHAPTER ONE
Arriving

The story of the Cherokee people begins with a family undergoing tremendous change. In the version of “Origin of Corn” that ethnologist James Mooney learned while researching among the Eastern Band of Cherokees during the late nineteenth century, the central characters are a couple, Selu and Kana’ti, and their unnamed biological son. Selu means “Corn Mother,” but her significance is transcendent and multifaceted.¹ The first woman and man at once represented the ideal division of labor in Cherokee society, explained the origination of dietary staples, and modeled standards for proper behavior. Selu and Kana’ti knew only harmony and, therefore, abundance until they adopted another son, an outsider, a boy born of pollution, of blood mixed with water, who brought chaos and suffering into the world.² This Wild Boy did not respect boundaries, and the Cherokee world hinged upon the careful balance of many opposing categories. Lacking his adoptive parents’ sagacity, his understanding of how to survive was simplistic and irreverent. He had no interest in the long process through which wisdom was acquired, nor did he care to know the deeper significance of the work humans did to live rightly in the world.³

As a result, Selu and Kana’ti’s household suffered through tragedy of their own making, but they responded as a family, including Wild Boy. He had inadvertently caused the dispersion of the resources, technology, and knowledge essential for Cherokee survival and shaped the natural environment into the one Cherokees recognized and in which they prospered. Instructed by his parents, he at last learned behaviors essential for community well-being, especially making recompense through the assumption of individual responsibility and generously sharing food and labor with the earliest Cherokees. That Wild Boy’s mistakes, the release of game and the spread of agriculture, ultimately produced positive results should not be surprising, considering the emphasis on restoration in the traditional Cherokee worldview. Selu and Kana’ti are not Adam and Eve. The change that took place in their idyllic home was not an irrevocable loss of harmony because, although there was no restoration of what had been, Selu’s children made amends together and in doing so restored prosperity to a world forever transformed but still fundamentally good.⁴

This chapter tells the story of how Selu’s descendants adapted to enormous changes taking place in their southeastern homeland even prior to allotment. Emphasizing the major transitions defining Cherokee history during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I historicize the experiences of the families in this study as they adjusted to non-Indian encroachment, relocated to the Goingsnake District, and rebuilt their households in Indian Territory. The Henderson roll, compiled in 1835, and the Eastern Cherokee applications collected by the Guion Miller Commission between 1906 and 1909 provide the core of this chapter.⁵ Many scholars have ably conceptualized this period, and the causes, outcomes, and nature of the profound political, religious, and economic developments that characterize this era remain a subject of debate. As historian Theda Perdue has argued, however, the overall persistence of traditional gender roles made possible adaptation to and even mastery of new resources and technologies prior to removal.⁶ This consistency suggests the overall stability of Cherokee family life. As the chaos of colonization buffeted them, Cherokee households remained egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized.

The Old Nation

This story begins in the southeastern homeland of the Cherokee clans. Prior to the early nineteenth century, these seven interconnected, extended families that traced their ancestry back to a common maternal ancestor formed the basis of Cherokee sociopolitical organization.⁷ Cherokees recognized matrilineal descent, meaning that anyone born of a Cherokee mother belonged to her clan and was a person with rights and obligations to other “Real Human Beings,” or Ani-yun-wiya, as they called themselves. Because clan affiliation was fixed and did not change, people knew who they were and relied upon maternal relatives to provide care, companionship, and protection throughout their lifetimes. Within clans, individuals related to each other in precise ways informed by gender, age, and type of connection, but this specific and complicated system for positioning oneself in relationship to others should not be confused with hierarchy. Clans provided order rather than rank. Forbidden from marrying members of their own clan, Cherokees were exogamous, and through intermarriage with members of other clans, they further connected themselves to one another. The clans thus permeated the Cherokee world, infusing it with structure and meaning.⁸

As important as kinship was to Cherokees, however, it often was incomprehensible to Europeans and their American descendants. In part, this lack of understanding resulted from outsiders’ belief in female subservience and disdain for the powerful and important place women held in matrilineal societies. Unable to comprehend clan law, early outsiders who observed and wrote about Cherokees anglicized their way of life by focusing on identifiable geographic and political units and their male leaders. Prior to the French and Indian War, approximately sixty Cherokee communities were scattered among four distinct regions: the Lower Towns in South Carolina; the Middle Towns in western North Carolina; the Valley Towns in southwestern North Carolina and northeastern Georgia; and the Upper or Overhill Towns in eastern Tennessee and northwestern North Carolina. Linguistic and, to a lesser extent, cultural and economic differences distinguished them.⁹

Cherokee towns were autonomous settlements in which households related to each other through ties of kinship and patterns of reciprocal interaction for subsistence, spiritual, and political purposes. These ties and patterns—the presence of family throughout their communities and their obligations to one another—united the Cherokees, not allegiance to a particular headman or ideology. Like other Indian towns throughout the Southeast, these communities ranged in size from dozens to many hundreds of residents. They typically were composed of residential structures and fields clustered around a council house complex or, if the landscape dictated it, a trail of sleeping and working quarters that stretched outward from the common buildings. These communities always were located near water, the constant mooring connecting the physical and spiritual landscape. Rivers, lakes, streams, and springs influenced the shape of towns and shaped life within them.¹⁰ Anthropologist Charles Hudson describes these settlements as “small, bounded, and composed of intricate, many stranded relationships.” The hospitality and reciprocity necessitated by Cherokees’ ways of reckoning kinship were such regular occurrences that practitioners understood them as normal and universal. They must have thought the relatively disconnected and unattached Europeans who identified themselves by their different churches and distant kings to be as profoundly strange as those outsiders thought Cherokees.¹¹

Larger Cherokee towns, called mother towns, were surrounded by satellite communities. Within these settlements, households organized themselves into similar patterns. In addition to being a matrilineal people, Cherokees were matrilocal, meaning that women remained with their birth families throughout their lives and, after marriage, a husband relocated to the home of his wife. Extended family households were organized around matrilineages comprising elder women and their descendants through their daughters and granddaughters. Maternal uncles filled a paternal role toward their nieces and nephews, but because they often stayed in the homes of their own wives, male leadership was not essential to the day-to-day operation of Cherokee households. Instead, these homes were the centers of women’s authority, and their households were the primary unit of reproduction, production, and distribution in Cherokee society. Hudson describes these residences as clusters of buildings including rectangular summer shelters; solidly constructed winter houses; cribs and storage buildings for other foodstuffs; covered work spaces; and menstrual houses. These improvements belonged to women, and the relationships connecting their inhabitants existed through women.¹²

Cherokees practiced a gendered division of labor that empowered women and men as autonomous producers of the diverse range of foods needed for survival. Women worked as the gatherers, growers, and processors of foodstuffs. They collected a prodigious amount of wild edibles from forests and fallowed fields grown over with semi-domesticated plants. Historian Tom Hatley suggests that these sources provided as much as half of Cherokees’ non-meat calories during the eighteenth century.¹³ Acorns, hickory nuts, black walnuts, berries, seeds, grasses, greens, tubers, roots, bark, and leaves nourished Cherokees because women were skilled in their collection, storage, and preparation.¹⁴

Women also grew corn, the Cherokees’ staple, and their gender identity was inseparable from that of their primary crop. Women raised food in multiple locations throughout their communities. Planting the majority of their corn in large, communal fields outside their towns, they also grew “intensive gardens,” as Hatley calls them, next to their households. The “three sisters”—the name given to the ecologically sound co-cultivation of corn, beans, and squash—occupied the majority of tilled space, and Cherokee women hedged their bets against crop failure and diversified their menu by growing at least three types of corn: a small, quick-growing variety; a large, yellow one used for hominy; and a large, white, fluffy type used for bread.¹⁵ Men provided meat, using bows and arrows, traps, snares, deadfalls, clubs, and blowguns to hunt white-tailed deer, bear, elk, and smaller fur-bearing animals and fowl as well.¹⁶ Both men and women fished.¹⁷ Although forests provided valuable hunting grounds and opportunities for significant male contributions to familial subsistence, as archaeologist Max White notes, Cherokees relied most on the resources obtainable on river bottomlands, places where women did the majority of their productive work.¹⁸

Cherokees had developed a proficient system for exploiting the resources in their environment, but their towns proved vulnerable to attack by English colonists seeking to control the economic development of the Southeast. Throughout the eighteenth century, these communities were lightning rods for assault, and Cherokees soon concluded that concentrations of population were a liability in the age of empire. When they established permanent diplomatic and trade relationships with European colonists during the 1690s, Cherokees were integrated fully into the intricate networks connecting communities throughout the Indian South. The arrival of Europeans, who brought new people, worldviews, and material culture, accelerated the pace of change in an already sophisticated, complicated world.

Europeans also introduced new microbes, and although Cherokees may have succumbed to earlier epidemics, certainly smallpox decimated their towns during 1738 and 1739. Casualties may have totaled half the population, leaving 8,000 to 12,000 grieving kin. The survivors likely abandoned some towns and consolidated in others. These settlements became targets in wars involving Europeans and their colonial descendants. In 1760 and 1761, within the larger conflict known as the French and Indian War, the British, although nominally allied with some Cherokee leaders, attacked the Lower, Middle, and Upper Towns. According to British trader and historian James Adair, 40 percent of Cherokee towns were burned to the ground during this conflict. In addition, smallpox, and perhaps other diseases, again struck in 1759 and 1760. The Cherokees sided with the British during the American Revolution, and the Patriots responded by engaging in scorched-earth warfare that destroyed approximately 80 percent of their homes and fields, sparing only the Valley Towns. Smallpox also struck the survivors of war in 1783, and a third of the population died that year.¹⁹

The Treaty of Hopewell, signed in 1785, marked the formal end of warfare between the Cherokees and the United States but not the cessation of violence between the Cherokees and the new nation. Sporadic attacks and raids on Cherokee towns continued throughout the end of the century. The Revolutionary War had been the second time in a normal lifespan that Cherokees had experienced such brutality in communities simultaneously ravaged by disease. Their population hovered around 9,000, the lowest on record. After having already ceded much of their land base in colonial-era treaties, Cherokee leaders acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States and gave up what was left of their hunting grounds. This era in Cherokee history is one of loss, shock, grief, and dispersal. Despite its optimistic name, then, the gathering at Hopewell was an ominous moment for Cherokees. Their survival depended on their ability to adapt, and they were poised for dramatic change.²⁰

In the decades between the American Revolution and removal, Cherokees reestablished their households, but they did not do so in towns. The survivors who rebuilt their homes were a different kind of Cherokee from what their ancestors had been. Smaller, less concentrated groupings made sense to those who had lived through epidemics and total warfare, and although not all Cherokees abandoned towns, the majority did.²¹ For this reason, traditional residence patterns changed as most Cherokees dispersed into communities characterized by smatterings of farms strung along waterways and separated by woodlands.²² These were the homes made by the ancestors of allotment-era residents of Chewey, and we first meet these specific families here amid their recovery.

Rivers continued to define and connect settlements. Huckleberry, Nelson Crittenden’s father, lived with four other family members along the Ellijay River, which flows into the Coosawattee. Lewis Bird’s ancestors lived to the southeast along the Etowah River, which, like the waters of the Ellijay, eventually joins the Coosa River. His father, Jeh-si, and nine more of his ancestors lived among three houses.²³ Tellingly, pre-removal census takers commonly noted households like Jeh-si’s whose members resided in multiple, connected farms. In other words, these extended families lived in close proximity to one another, even though they were scattered among several houses interspersed by fields.²⁴ For example, Steve Dog’s ancestors made up a family of eight who lived among three houses located on six acres of cultivated land.²⁵ Will and Dicey Proctor, the maternal grandparents of Fannie Turtle, Betsy Suake, and Nannie Dog, belonged to a family of ten. Among them, they had built two farms that included four houses on twenty-five acres of land.²⁶ Census takers did not note who lived in these houses, and Perdue has suggested that the more dispersed settlement pattern prompted a shift toward nuclear family organization.²⁷ Without knowing the age and gender of family members, it is difficult to know conclusively. The clustering of farms, however, makes clear that Cherokees continued to live and work among their kin. Those who once shared a household within a town remained near one another. Likewise, it is logical to presume that they worked together and shared resources.

Those who intermarried with whites during this era had larger families and tended to live on one farm, but they nonetheless remained close to kin. Although they did not define their methodology, American census takers noted the presumed racial makeup of each Cherokee household prior to removal.²⁸ Eliza Brown grew up in a family of nine descended from an intermarried white father, Jesse Raper, and Cherokee mother, Mary McDaniel, on one farm along the Nottley River, near Murphy in North Carolina. The two neighboring households were those of her father’s kin, Thomas and James Raper, who also had married Cherokee women, at least one of whom was a relative of her mother.²⁹ Mary Ghormley, who became Eliza’s daughter-in-law, was the descendant of Cherokees from Tennessee. Her maternal grandparents were Andrew and Jennie Taylor. Andrew was a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Sustaining the Cherokee Family
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Arriving
• CHAPTER TWO Belonging
• CHAPTER THREE Debating
• CHAPTER FOUR Enrolling
• CHAPTER FIVE Dividing
• CHAPTER SIX Transforming
• CHAPTER SEVEN Adapting
• CHAPTER EIGHT Sustaining
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Appendix: Note on Sources
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index