Colonialism and the Cherokee
Contact, Missionaries, Trail of Tears, Civil War and Allotment
FIRST EUROPEAN CONTACT TO THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR
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The first documented contact between European and Cherokee peoples is thought to be around "the year 1540, at which date we find them already established, where they were always afterward known, in the mountains of Carolina and Georgia. [However,] The earliest Spanish adventurers failed to penetrate so far into the interior, and the first entry into their country was made by De Soto, advancing up the Savannah on his fruitless quest for gold, in May of that year," (Mooney 1900, 23). It was not until "1654 that the English first came into contact with the Cherokee", and at this time, they had already laid claim to the "Virginia colony, which had only recently concluded a long and exterminating war with the Powhatan" (30). By 1670, "The first permanent English settlement in South Carolina was established" (31) and trading between the Cherokee and the English began around this time as well. There appears to be record of the first treaty between Europeans and the Cherokee around this time too:
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Among the manuscript archives of South Carolina there was said to be, some fifty years ago, a treaty or agreement made with the government of that colony by the Cherokee in 1684, and signed with the hieroglyphics of eight chiefs of the lower towns, viz, Corani, the Raven (Kâ′lanû); Sinnawa, the Hawk (Tlă′nuwă); Nellawgitehi, Gorhaleke, and Owasta, all of Toxawa; and Canacaught, the great Conjuror, Gohoma, and Caunasaita, of Keowa. If still in existence, this is probably the oldest Cherokee treaty on record.
What seems to be the next mention of the Cherokee in the South Carolina records occurs in 1691, when we find an inquiry ordered in regard to a report that some of the colonists “have, without any proclamation of war, fallen upon and murdered” several of that tribe. (Mooney 1900, 31)
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By 1700, guns had been introduced to the Cherokee​ people, and they had begun to use them for warfare, fighting their first war alongside the English in "the war with the Tuscarora in 1711–1713" (32). The Tuscarora and the Cherokee were longtime enemies, and so it was likely strategically advantageous for the Cherokee to partner with another force in this ongoing conflict. However, camaraderie between the English and Cherokee was not longstanding at this time:
Having wiped out old scores with the Tuscarora, the late allies of the English proceeded to discuss their own grievances, which, as we have seen, were sufficiently galling. The result was a combination against the whites, embracing all the tribes from Cape Fear to the Chattahoochee, including the Cherokee, who thus for the first time raised their hand against the English. The war opened with a terrible massacre by the Yamassee in April, 1715, followed by assaults along the whole frontier, until for a time it was seriously feared that the colony of South Carolina would be wiped out of existence. (Mooney 1900, 33)
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However, soon enough, fearing that they would suffer the same fate as smaller tribes had done at the hands of the British, the Cherokee sought peace. For the Westerners, it was clear that peace was necessary to continue their lucrative trading with the Cherokee, and so:
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In 1721, in order still more to systematize Indian affairs, Governor Nicholson of South Carolina invited the chiefs of the Cherokee to a conference, at which thirty-seven towns were represented. A treaty was made by which trading methods were regulated, a boundary line between their territory and the English settlements was agreed upon, and an agent was appointed to superintend their affairs. At the governor’s suggestion, one chief, called Wrosetasatow, was formally commissioned as supreme head of the Nation, with authority to punish all offenses, including murder, and to represent all Cherokee claims to the colonial government. Thus were the Cherokee reduced from their former condition of a free people, ranging where their pleasure led, to that of dependent vassals with bounds fixed by a colonial governor. The negotiations were accompanied by a cession of land, the first in the history of the tribe. (Mooney 1900, 34)
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Despite the encroaching control of Westerners, about one hundred years after guns had been introduced to the Cherokee, and about 120 years after their first contact with Europeans:
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[The Cherokee people] seem to have quickly recovered from the repeated ravages of war, and there was a general air of prosperity throughout the nation. The native arts of pottery and basket-making were still the principal employment of the women, and the warriors hunted with such success that a party of traders brought down thirty wagon loads of skins on one trip. In dress and house-building the Indian style was practically unchanged. (Mooney 1900, 82)
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The Cherokee would go on to fight on the side of the British in the revolutionary war, and during this time, it can be said that not much by way of gender norms had changed for the Cherokee:
Above: An example of a Cherokee war woman, Nancy Ward, who fought alongside Cherokee and British men during the revolutionary war. (Tucker 1969)
EARLY AMERICA: MISSIONARIES AND WESTERN SCHOOLS
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"The U.S. government and missionaries sought to justify "reform" in the name of liberating Cherokee women from drudgery, but the practical effect was to undermine women's sources of power and destabilize gender and class relations. In this effort to transform gender roles within the Cherokee Nation, the federal government subsidized mission schools such as Brainerd in Tennessee, which was established in I8I7."
(Johnston 2010, 40)
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According to Johnston (Ibid), "More missionaries and missionary funds came to the Cherokees in the early nineteenth century than to any other tribe." These missionaries led a direct effort to "inculate patriarchal family organization and Christian morality" into the structures of Cherokee life. However Johnston (2010), a female Cherokee scholar herself, also argues that while "concepts of modesty and shame about the body were strongly introduced into the culture during this time", it is hard to determine how much gender roles really changed for Cherokee women during the early days of Western missionary insurgence. What does seem clear is that those missionaries "who encouraged Cherokees to accept the new religion while retaining many of their old beliefs and who supported the people politically were the most successful in winning converts," (41).
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"In 1825, approximately one quarter of the Cherokee population had some white ancestry. White fathers tended to disregard matrilineal and clan customs. Moreover, the Cherokee slave owners, many of whom had already intermarried, tended to adopt more patriarchal values." (Johnston 2010, 45)
Missionary schools consciously created curriculum and gendered ideas that dismissed the traditional Cherokee values of gender equality. Here, the women did not farm (rather this was a "male" activity), and instead were given tasks in which they served men without control of commodities, including such "women's work" as cooking, sewing, fine needlework and devotions (49). Clearly, this era for the Cherokee can be thought of as a time of forced indoctrination into Western gender roles. Despite this, Johnston (2010) paints a picture of continued resistance throughout the early days of encroaching Western missionaries. During one instance in which a missionary "tried to convince a Cherokee mother to send her child to the mission school, pursuing her into her chimney corner only to be told by the woman that she would as soon see her child in hell as in the mission classroom," (47). The Cherokee, perhaps due to their matrilineal and matriarchal roots, the Cherokee were comparatively slow to adapt to patriarchy:
...historically, agrarian capitalism has shifted control of household, land, and means of production to men; has stimulated public policies that disempower women; and has fostered the "cult of domesticity" in order to justify the inequitable treatment of wives. She makes a convincing case for the ways in which Cherokee women effectively resisted the economic, cultural, and political changes that would have undermined their matrilineal powers and rights. Thus, Cherokee cultural transformation was not as pervasive as historians have previously assumed. (Johnston 2010, 50)
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THE TRAIL OF TEARS
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For many Americans, the "Trail Where We Cried" (the direct Tsalagi translation of "The Trail of Tears") is what they associate most strongly with the Cherokee people. However, it is unlikely that many have stopped to consider the role gender played in the removal of the Cherokee from their homelands, nor how removal may have "destabilized Cherokee gender roles, but at the same time, [...] reinforced the values of family and tradition because detachments usually consisted of extended families and people who were from the same locations," as does Johnston (2010, 57). She states:
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Cherokee women's power traditionally originated in their roles as mothers (bearers of life) and as cultivators of the earth (sustainers of life). Because removal and the forced cession of lands were direct attacks on Cherokee women's power, they protested the loss by appealing to their people through their authority as mothers.2 Our view of Cherokee removal radically changes when we take gender into account. How did women's experiences of removal differ from men's? What role did Cherokee women play in the crisis? By focusing on gender as an independent variable, we discover that most Cherokee women opposed removal, even as their lack of acculturation served to justify U.S. governmental action. The loss of their formal power via the 1827 constitution meant that they could not oppose removal as forcefully as they could have previously. Removal legitimized male political power and excluded women from public participation in politics. All the public players in the controversy were men. Moreover, the land that was being ceded was that which was most closely associated with women: the agricultural fields and villages. Women in the Nation did not respond to the removal crisis in a unified manner. (Johnston 2010, 56)
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Prior to removal:
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Intended to impress the u.s. government-and especially Georgians-that the Cherokees were civilized and democratic, the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 politically disenfranchised women but preserved their property rights. Although these political changes were pragmatic, strategic moves, they also stemmed from the economic shift from horticulture and hunting to more intensive agriculture and from adoption of patriarchal values by influential elite Cherokees who drafted the legislation. (Johnston 2010, 147)
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The removal "forced into the open the debate over what it meant to be a woman," for the first time and in some regards, the Trail of Tears was harder for women, "because they were more vulnerable to rape and because many of them were pregnant" (Johnston 2010, 57). They carried their "children, alive and sometimes dead and [...] were more susceptible to disease and death" (Ibid.). This time was not easy for men either, who were psychologically damaged by their inability to protect their families and community from removal. Despite these things, once the Cherokee were in "Indian Territory", the role of Cherokee women was in many ways reinforced:
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"Moreover, Cherokee women's traditional skills became even more essential both on the journey and when they arrived in Indian Territory: they needed to fall back on their traditional skills for survival. Much of the burden of removal fell on women, and this underscored their centrality in Cherokee culture. Men's powerlessness may have even reinforced Cherokee women's power." (Johnston 2010, 57)
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Above: Timeline and explanation of the Trail of Tears, or the "Trail Where We Cried". (Smithsonian Channel 2016)
THE CIVIL WAR​
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Once the Cherokee arrived in the West, although about a quarter of their tribe had been lost to the Trail of Tears, they ​were reestablishing when the United States civil war became imminent. Amongst the Cherokee, they were fractured in their support of the North and South, but many fought with the South, due to the status of their most wealthy and "civilized", or acculturated, citizens as slaveholders. Already:
Gender roles within the Cherokee Nation had changed during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the communal land ownership and matrilineal clan systems were being challenged by an aggressive federal policy to convert Cherokee men from hunters to farmers and to convert Cherokee women from farmers to housewives. We have seen how the adoption of the Cherokee Constitution of 1827 diminished women's political power. At the same time, elite Cherokees came to associate patriarchal gender roles with being civilized, and "any challenge to the precepts of the cult of true womanhood could be interpreted as a reversion to savagery." (Johnston 2010, 82)
The civil war furthered the divide between female Cherokees (that is, between the "elite", or "civilized", and the traditionalists), but also in many ways strengthened the role and power of Cherokee women. Notably, in white accounts from (and since) that time, the changing gender roles of the Cherokee, and indeed the voice of their Women in general, was (and is) seldom discussed. Referring back to Cherokee literature, we can see that:
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The crisis of the Civil War empowered women in the Cherokee Nation, because they had to assume new responsibilities and greater burdens as a result of wartime disruptions. They experienced a new crisis of gender. Cherokee women suffered from refugee status and violence in the form of rape, raids, and robberies. The war also led to a crisis of identity for the elite Cherokee women because they were no longer able to live up to the expectations of "true womanhood" as espoused by white America. However, all Cherokee women did not respond to the war in the same way. The Civil War intensified class, political, and racial divisions within the Nation and prevented the emergence of a consensus on gender. At the same time, the Civil War reinforced older Cherokee gender roles for the traditional and nonslaveholding women by emphasizing the role of men as warriors and elevating the role of women as providers and cultivators of the earth. (Johnston 2010, 81-82)
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While, "It is likely that, after the trauma of removal, many Cherokees became more committed than ever to proving that they were civilized," (Johnston 2010, 82), it can also be said that during the Civil War era, for Cherokee who were not "civilized", "hostility erupted against elite Cherokee women" (85). Most Cherokee women did not agree to the war at all, and therefore did not participate in taking sides, and many were stood fiercely in the way of either United States side if it threatened their families (86-87).
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"Even in extreme danger, Cherokee women demonstrated heroism. One young woman confronted the troops when they threatened to hang her sister. She told them that they had better not put a rope around her sister's neck, but that they could hang her instead." Johnston 2010, 87
After the Civil War, the United States government punished the Western Cherokee Nation because many of its members had fought on the side of the South. Further, seminaries, schools and attempts at acculturation multiplied in the new "Indian Country" during the period of Restoration. While, during this time, "Court records [...] reveal the persistence of Cherokee values regarding both communal and women's ownership of property as they faced the further encroachment of white people in their territory and families," (Johnston 2010, 114), and Cherokee women employed a plethora of different strategies to maintain power and equality in such, there was also a marked increase in domestic violence against Cherokee women, and other signs of patriarchal incursion.
ALOTTMENT
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When it was first established "Indian Territory" comprised of a land for "Indians", and was separate from the United States. In 1907, this changed when "Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory were jointly admitted to the Union as the state of Oklahoma," (Johnston 2010, 127).
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Ironically, the seal of the Oklahoma Territory portrayed a frontiersman holding the hands of an Indian, an industrial scene and a hunting scene in their respective backgrounds. The figure of justice and her balanced scales appeared between them. Despite the imagery of joint ownership of statehood, according to a census in 1907, Indians numbered only 101,228 persons in the Five Civilized Tribes out of the state's population of 1,414,177 residents. (Johnston 2010, 127)
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At least one of my own not-so-distant relatives was included in the Dawes Rolls act that officially "counted" these Indigenous peoples (and, really, discounted many more of them). Already, gender relations and norms within the Cherokee culture had been challenged, and this was made more certain if we are to consider that much of the work that Cherokee women did had been negated to "art", such as the task of basket making. By this time, European style-homes and furniture were more common in Cherokee households, and basket making was falling to the wayside in many Cherokee homes.
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The allotment act of 1904, created the most striking departure in gender relations that the Cherokee people had yet experienced. The Act forced patriarchal values on the Cherokee, and diminished their sense of communal land. By forcing land ownership by Cherokee men, and women were deeply affected.
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"The policy of viewing Indian men as heads of households was a conscious effort to encourage patriarchal family structures, undermining women's power." (Johnston 2010, 129)
Although the Cherokee resisted allotment in many ways, the process still negotiated a power over their gender roles. In fact, some of the wealthier and "elite" Cherokee women supported the act, as they believed that the additional infrastructure may help to dispose of alcoholism and domestic violence (Johnston 2010, 129). Even in the face of additional controversy, however, most women resisted the change, as it deeply striped them of power. So too did the Cherokee government officially resist the change in many ways including "by stalling and refusing to negotiate with the Dawes Commission, by refusing to enroll in the program, and by revitalizing their traditional ceremonies" but, "Nevertheless, through the Dawes Act, the U.S. government relieved the Indians of almost two-thirds of their land between 1887 and 1930, even requiring the tribes to pay for surveying and allotting," (130). When enrollment and allotment had commenced, the Cherokee people of Oklahoma numbered only about 12,000 people, about half of which were intermarried, the tribe having seen a large increase in intermarriages after the Civil War. Many Cherokees were impoverished and a direct shift in how they considered themselves and their relation to land, gender equality and ownership had been severely altered, but not completely lost (143-144).
Above: Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee) and Alan Cook (Muskogee Creek) discuss how allotment affected their tribes. (Ahwahneechee 2007)
Above: A preview of the Cherokee production Until These Hills, which details Cherokee history from European contact to removal. (Crow 2017)