The Cherokee Diaspora

Writers interested in Cherokees often spill ink on Indian removal, rightfully emphasizing the defining event for the burgeoning United States and for the native nations impacted by it. Gregory D. Smithers's chronology, which covers 1756 to 1945, underscores his interest in understanding removal within a longer period and the context of settler colonial disruption that informed “migration [and] resettlement” (pp. 7, 23). This and his emphasis on new and old homelands enables him to weave the stories of groups of Cherokees, which scholars normally treat as separate topics: North Carolina Cherokees, Texas Cherokees and “old settlers” who relocated west before forced removal, those Cherokees forcibly removed, and smaller groups who left for more personal reasons. The Cherokee Diaspora builds on the ideas of “mobility” and “diaspora” introduced by Rose Stremlau in Sustaining the Cherokee Family (2011). Smithers homes in on the ways migration challenged Cherokee memory and identity in his two-part book. Part 1, “Origins,” which is largely a synthesis of the literature, covers the years leading up to and immediately following forced removal. He draws attention to fissures created by separations and reunions as a means to understand the “new perspectives on what it meant to be Cherokee” in the postremoval era (pp. 95, 144). In part 2, “Diaspora,” Smithers opens with the Civil War as another catalyst for diaspora. He then discusses identity and memory and focuses on the underutilized applications produced by an 1870s- and 1880s-era Cherokee citizenship commission tasked with evaluating the applications of North Carolina Cherokees, formerly enslaved people, and countless others who claimed a distant Cherokee ancestor. This section adds to scholarly discussions of race among southeastern Indians and in Indian Territory. In the book's final chapter, “Diasporic Horizons,” covering 1887 to 1934, Smithers takes on the consequences of the allotment era, which broke up Cherokee communal landholdings in the West. He highlights the experiences and choices of people living in diaspora, including large numbers of Cherokees in California and, in more isolated instances, places such as Hawaii and Australia

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