Intergenerational Testimonials and the Politics of Black Cherokee Belonging

Abstract

Abstract This article extends Tiya Miles’s study on the Black Cherokee Shoe Boots family by reading the legal documents they submitted to the Cherokee Nation—citizenship applications and land deeds as intergenerational testimonials. These documents, the article argues, constitute intergenerational testimonials because they record how the Shoe Boots family produced their own archive, their own print record across time and for future generations, as one strategy to build a livable world within and on Cherokee lands. As intergenerational testimonials, they transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging. The article argues that the collaborative political labor of submitting claims captures the plurality of expression in the documents. What appears as an individual claim, the article contends, is instead linked to a network of familial ties. Put another way, the article reads the use of “I” in a family member’s citizenship application, for example, as constituting a collective utterance that embeds the desires of family members, whether living, lost, or dead.