Sustaining the Cherokee Family

The allotment policy carried out in Indian Territory from 1887 to 1934 divested tribes of their common landholdings despite treaty guarantees. While Angie Debo's And Still the Waters Run (1940) is the definitive text exposing the resulting “orgy of exploitation,” Rose Stremlau's Sustaining the Cherokee Family, a community study of three-dozen families in Chewey, Oklahoma, points out “that is not the whole story, at least not for Cherokees” (p. 5). Stremlau argues that allotment was not simply a policy aimed at dividing communal lands into individually owned tracts, but it was a “profoundly gendered” program that targeted the most intimate aspects of Indian peoples' lives—their families (p. 18). Yet, despite this, Cherokee households remained “egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized” (p. 22). Instead of stripping Cherokee people of the most basic features of their society—kinship, hospitality, reciprocity, and communalism—allotment led Cherokee people, both those who participated and those who resisted, to draw upon traditional Cherokee values and respond in a calculated and informed manner

Allotment · Archaeology · Cherokee · Economics · Genealogy · Indigenous · Kinship · Political science · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law