Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838–1907. By Carolyn Ross Johnston. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. xvi, 227 pp. Cloth, $48.00, isbn 0-8173-1332-X. Paper, $29.95, isbn 0-8173-5056-X.)

Abstract

Where Theda Perdue's Cherokee Women (1998) explored the impact of contact and colonization on Cherokee women up to the eve of removal, Carolyn Ross Johnston's Cherokee Women in Crisis begins with removal and tracks women's lives into the early twentieth century. Johnston grounds her study in the gender conventions that, for centuries, had defined Cherokee women as guardians of children and of the earth. But when, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, many Cherokee women began to abandon Selu (the corn mother) for the cult of domesticity, the rights and responsibilities that had always defined them became points of contention rather than consensus. Three crises—removal to Indian Territory, the struggles of the Civil War, and the disastrous federal allotment policies of the 1890s and 1900s—challenged Cherokee women. Removal, for example, sundered some women's customary ties to the land and threatened their ability to live as cultivators while others saw in the tragedy a chance to complete the “civilization” of their nation. But when families arrived in Indian Territory, many women were able to help organize new settlements and thereby recreate their long-standing relationship with the earth. The Civil War posed different kinds of challenges. Most women tried to hold their families together in spite of the hardships of the war, but others found opportunities to reassert their customary roles as heads of households in the absence of their husbands, while still others engaged in espionage or took up arms. No matter what their experiences, however, all suffered. The war widowed one-third of adult women and orphaned one-quarter of all children. Cherokee women's greatest challenge came in 1898 with the passage of the Curtis Act that mandated the allotment of Cherokee land. While the act threatened to rob the nation of its land base, it also recognized men as the heads of Cherokee households. Women who had previously waged their struggles alone turned to groups such as the Four Mothers Society and the Keetoowah Society to argue collectively for the restoration of their customary rights and responsibilities. Others took advantage of courses offered at the Cherokee Female Seminary to become nurses and teachers.