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

CHAPTER SIX. Transforming

149 6' chapter six Transforming In early November 1902, Birch Anderson claimed allotments for himself, his wife, Lizzie, and their infant daughter, Willie Mae. Birch’s selections exemplify how familial relationships shaped the ways that Cherokees picked the land that they would own as individuals. Rather than combining the allotments of his family into a large, contiguous tract of land, Birch dispersed them across his community. He chose an allotment near his maternal kin, the Mitchells, for himself, and he picked land for Lizzie closer to her family, the Browns. He selected a homestead for his daughter that included a house and cultivated field belonging to his maternal uncle, John Mitchell. Anderson, in other words, used allotment to further connect his small, growing nuclear family into his and his wife’s network of extended relations. Notably, he did not establish a contiguous base for a large farm that included room for future development and growth, a decision that would have geographically isolated the Andersons from their relatives.1 Three years later, in the summer of 1905, the Dawes Commission created such a consolidated farm for Anderson’s maternal cousins, Rachel, Sissa, and Dora Mitchell. The mother of the young women, Nannie, had been married to Reese Mitchell. Reese was John’s brother and Birch’s maternal uncle. After Reese passed away, Nannie married Steve Dog, with whom she had had another daughter, Tinna. All of Nannie’s daughters lived with her and Steve. John Mitchell remained their closest neighbor . Unlike Anderson and Mitchell, however, Nannie, Steve, and her daughters did not file for allotments. They were Nighthawks. Unable to 150 transforming force these families to participate in allotment, the Dawes Commission assigned land to them. Clerks divided improvements owned by Steve and Nannie Dog between them and their daughter Tinna. Steve received the property upon which was built their house, and all three received adjoining land that included their fields. Clerks then divided another nearby farm that they identified as “belonging to the Mitchell girls” among them and Sissa’s baby. They had inherited this farm, probably from their maternal grandmother but perhaps from their father. Clerks gave Sissa the house, and they divided the fields among her, the baby, and Rachel. Dora received unimproved land on the public domain next to her sisters ’ allotments. An unrelated neighbor, Hattie Holland Lewis, received a small portion of their field in her allotment. The extended family of Steve and Nannie Dog thus received approximately a thousand acres of land, mostly contiguous, but as late as 1908, they refused to claim their allotment certificates. They just went on living on Steve and Nannie’s farm.2 Allotment proved incredibly complicated. The process defied bureaucratic efficiency, frustrated those demanding its speedy implementation, and prompted countless federal court cases. It did, however, effectively separate Cherokees from their land in the long term. For all of these reasons, historical scholarship has emphasized chaos and corruption in association with the policy. In And Still the Waters Run, Angie Debo characterized federal officials as profiting from the discord and disorder that they created and perpetuated. She demonstrates how this contentious environment enabled the swindling of Indian people as overworked officials enforced cumbersome, complicated policies with an eye toward efficiency, expediency, and their own gain rather than Indian welfare.3 In contrast, in his detailed study of the Dawes Commission, federal archivist Kent Carter characterizes the commissioners and their staff as generally wellintentioned but completely overwhelmed. With neither adequate personnel nor authority, they struggled to enforce policies repeatedly altered by court rulings and congressional legislation, to compile rolls without the assistance of Indian leaders and while facing the resistance of tribal members, and to thwart those, particularly non-Indian grafters, who sought to exploit allotment for personal gain.4 Historian H. Craig Miner nicknamed the sprawling bureaucracy that allotted the Five Tribes a “corps of clerks,” yet he, too, emphasizes that even this small army of secretaries could not accurately implement the policy or effectively protect Indian resources.5 transforming 151 Although justified, this emphasis on the pandemonium associated with non-Indians obscures the orderly ways in which Cherokees responded. Scholars know very little about the rationale that guided Cherokees’ selection of allotments. Where they have focused attention on specific responses to the division of communal land among other tribes, historians have demonstrated that Indian families approached the policy thoughtfully and...