Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation

CHAPTER FIVE. Dividing

127 6' chapter five Dividing Rosanna Mounce was flustered. The Dawes commissioners were asking questions about her former lovers and ex-husbands, and they expected her to answer them in this public place, the enrollment office. It was the fall of 1902. Having sent her current husband, Joe, to speak on her behalf as was customary and appropriate from her perspective, she had been waiting outside in the family’s wagon. Joe had represented her once before. In 1900, he had enrolled Rosanna, her son from a previous relationship, and their sons. But his testimony was no longer acceptable to commissioners because they no longer believed with certainty that he was her rightful husband and, therefore, entitled to represent her. A man she had lived with over a decade earlier was claiming an allotment through her, and so commissioners wanted Rosanna to answer directly to them and clarify with whom she had ever had sexual intercourse , lived, and conceived surviving children. And so commissioners called her down from her wagon and put her under oath. During her interrogation, Mounce was surrounded by strangers and outsiders, probably all of whom were men. A stenographer clicked away as she spoke, and her responses became part of the public record. This likely was the first time this common Cherokee farmer and mother in her mid-forties had testified to anything, let alone spoke openly about topics so private . Her answers were short and staccato. Perhaps she was uncomfortable . She might have been angry. She and Joe had married according to Cherokee law and had shared a home for a dozen years. They had three sons together. Who had more right than she to decide to whom she was 128 dividing married? In 1902, the five white men who made up the Dawes Commission thought that they did.1 As strange and disconcerting as this experience was for Mounce, it was a normal one for the Dawes Commission. Allotment policy was a tool of American hegemony over indigenous people, but such abstract and complicated processes were experienced very personally by those being allotted. Mounce’s final enrollment card looks like any other in the Dawes roll. It provides no hint that there was any conflict over which man would be listed next to Rosanna as her husband. The transcript of this interview also is part of the records compiled by the Dawes Commission, however, and it and many other similar exchanges demonstrate just how thoroughly land privatization was interconnected with the regulation of Indian sexuality and reproduction, especially that of women. The purpose of the Dawes roll influenced its final format. It was the means through which federal officials began keeping extensive data on Cherokee domestic life for the purpose of methodically enforcing assimilationist policies. Told from the vantage point of Cherokee people, then, the story of the making of the Dawes roll, this most intimate form of colonialism, is about resistance against the loss of autonomy and privacy over family matters. It also is a story about the bureaucratic reinvention of Cherokee family life and about making Cherokee people appear to be something on paper that they were not, in their daily reality, and then working to make the reality match the records on file. Although Cherokees advocated for their families’ interests, the Dawes Commission never shared the power to draw final conclusions, and, ultimately , the Dawes roll misrepresented Cherokee families in fundamental ways. When categorizing Cherokees on the Dawes roll, commissioners denied the flexibility and autonomy that characterized bonds between Cherokee spouses, and they diminished the importance of kin. To a people who conceptualized prosperity as a reflection of their interconnectedness with one another, such a reduction was pauperizing. In other words, a precursor to privatizing tribal land was robbing Indians of their extended families. Documenting Sexuality Commissioners did not understand all of the information that they gathered . In particular, Cherokees’ conceptions of normal and appropriate sexual relations contrasted with the expectations and values of Dawes dividing 129 commissioners, who had to investigate and document the intimate histories of enrollees in the creation of the roll. Although at times their interest appeared to be prurient, the commissioners’ concern also reflected the logistical necessities of allotment policy. The goal of allotment was to assimilate Indians and, more so over time, their property into the mainstream of American society, including its civil legal system through which material...