In May 2016, several dozen historians gathered at the annual meeting of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association to discuss the past, present, and future directions of scholarship on Native peoples during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. My comments are below. Thanks to Joe Genetin-Pilawa and Boyd Cothran for organizing these two roundtables.
When I wrote about Cherokee responses to allotment in my first book, my goal was to prioritize the stories of people rather than the policy. I put names and faces before roll numbers, blood quantums, and tallies of acres kept or lost. When I finished, I was so happy. Because I was done — but also because I discerned a pattern – a neat, orderly, beautiful trend towards cultural persistence within Cherokee communities, particularly regarding gendered behavior. It is exactly what you would expect from a Theda Perdue student who is herself a fan of organization. Because this was a community study covering the 1880s through the 1920s, I stayed focused, but over and again, I wanted to zoom out to see the big picture and to step back and write about changes that preceded the allotment era. That curiosity has led me to study one extended Cherokee family over multiple generations, from the end of the American Revolution through WWI. This project is forcing me to extend beyond my comfort zones as a scholar and to think beyond the Old Nation and Indian Territory to California and Hawaii.
I remain concerned with how Southeastern Indigenous people experienced their lives as gendered people within familial systems shaped by the customs of kinship. The farther into this manuscript I get, however, the larger the gap I see between the order of my first book and the chaos I am now trying to put into words. Looking back on what I wrote before about changes to gender roles among Cherokee people during this period, I think my characterization of Cherokee responses were a bit simplistic – or at least didn’t fully acknowledge the motivations and experiences of those Cherokee people who sought to use economic intrusions and the activist state elaborated upon in scholarship on the GAPE for their personal benefit and to profit from the ongoing colonization of Indigenous land and resources in the West (and Pacific) during this period – both that of their own people and other Indigenous peoples. The kind of men and women I dismissed as outliers in the first project are the central characters in this one. Likewise, influenced by the scholarship on historic trauma, I no longer see incidents of internal violence, particularly male aggression committed by Indians against Indians, in isolation. I recognize a slow poisoning whose consequences accumulated and compounded over generations. What patterns I can discern are messy, complicated, tragic, and consistent with the larger literature on family, gender, and sexuality in the GAPE.
Family histories are useful. They are a tool historians use to articulate complex processes as they played out through diverse human experiences of them over time. That’s probably why we are seeing more and more of them written by scholars with feet firmly planted in other fields of social history beyond women’s history, where family history first took shape. For the GAPE, family histories provide fertile ground for studies that complicate the traditional narrative of this period lauding the growing state’s problem-solving abilities. From my perspective in the literature on the Native families in the South, however, it certainly broke more than it fixed. Understanding those processes are important and how historians can support those trying to heal these ruptures.
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