After participating in the symposium Indians as Southerners, Southerners as Indians at Florida State University in fall 2014, I invited several other historians contributing to the anthology of the same name to strategize about how to integrate the literature about American Indians into the master narrative of Southern history. We shared our ideas in a roundtable at the annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. These are my comments.
I was invited to participate in this collection after finishing my first book in which I sought to explain how the members of one community in the Cherokee Nation responded to allotment. I had analyzed experiences of the policy from the bottom up focusing on the most basic unit of Cherokee society, extended families. I selected a few dozen families as a case study and scoured the paper trail created by clerks, lawyers, and government agents looking for the grey areas suggesting where persistence met change in the day-to-day lives of allottees. I spent hours researching in the records created by the Dawes Commission, the federal committee charged to dismantle the Cherokee Nation and distribute its resources. At some point among inhaling copious amounts of dust and squinting to make out the illegible handwriting, I realized that the Dawes Commissioners were – pretty much – a bunch of men obsessed with sex.
Recent Comments