Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation. By Rose Stremlau (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xiii plus 320 pp. $24.95)

Abstract

The federal government's allotment of Indian reservations into privately owned tracts of land at the turn of the twentieth century dispossessed native communities of most of their holdings and embedded arcane complexities in law and administration that have endured to the present day. While scholars recognize allotment's significance in the history of nearly every tribe in the United States, few have undertaken study of the allotment process and its consequences. Stremlau's close analysis of allotment's impact on Chewey, a community in the Cherokee Nation that now falls within Adair County, Oklahoma, is thus a valuable addition to the historiography. Stremlau's effort to situate this legislative disaster within the history of the family also makes her book noteworthy, since the family in native history has received even less scholarly attention than allotment. The first half of Stremlau's book provides a general overview of Cherokee history in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book contains most of the new material that Stremlau has diligently gathered from the vast bureaucratic storehouse of records listing Cherokees, individually and in various family groupings. These lists include several important censuses that the Cherokee Nation conducted before the 1898 Curtis Act called for its dissolution. The federal government also generated lists in the form of the regular decennial U.S. census, special rolls of Cherokees produced during the 1830s removal period and at the turn of the twentieth century when the descendants of those removed in 1838–1839 received some compensation, and lists of Cherokees compiled by the Dawes Commission during the long and complicated implementation of land allotment: the Dawes Rolls and its accompanying applications, petitions, maps, correspondence, hearings, probate records, and Indian account case files. Using the methods of a genealogist to reconstruct Cherokee kin connections and residence patterns, Stremlau had no choice but to restrict her study to a small segment of the Cherokee population. The book's many photographs add greatly to bringing to life the individuals affected by allotment policies.