Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
By Tiya Miles
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About this ebook
Meticulously crafted from historical and literary sources, Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family. Doll emerges as an especially poignant character, whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her—her purchase, her marriage, the loss of her children—but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow. A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations, the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities, ironies, and tensions among African Americans, Native Americans, and whites in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Updated with a new preface and an appendix of key primary sources, this remains an essential book for students of Native American history, African American history, and the history of race and ethnicity in the United States.
Tiya Miles
Tiya Miles is Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story and The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts. Among other notable prizes and fellowships, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2011.
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Ties That Bind - Tiya Miles
THE GEORGE GUND FOUNDATION IMPRINT IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
The George Gund Foundation has endowed this imprint to advance understanding of the history, culture, and current issues of African Americans.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the African American Studies Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates, which is supported by a major gift from the George Gund Foundation.
Ties That Bind
AMERICAN CROSSROADS
Edited by Earl Lewis, George Lipsitz, George Sánchez, Dana Takagi, Laura Briggs, and Nikhil Pal Singh
Ties That Bind
THE STORY OF AN AFRO-CHEROKEE FAMILY IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM
Second Edition
Tiya Miles
UC LogoUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miles, Tiya, 1970– author.
Ties that bind: the story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom / Tiya Miles. — Second edition.
p. cm. — (American crossroads; 14)
Originally published: 2005.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-28563-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-520-96102-9 (ebook: alk. paper)
1. Cherokee Indians—History—19th century. 2. Cherokee Indians—Mixed descent. 3. Cherokee Indians—Kinship. 4. Indian slaves—Georgia—History—19th century. 5. African Americans—Georgia. 6. African Americans—Kinship—Georgia. 7. Blacks—Georgia—Relations with Indians. I. Title. II. Title: Story of an Afro-Cherokee family in slavery and freedom. III. Series: American crossroads; 14.
E99.C5M553 2015
975.004’97557—dc232015002838
Manufactured in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
For my dear grandmother, Alice Banks,
and
in memory of my grandfather, Ardell Banks
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SHOEBOOTS FAMILY TREE
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
PART ONE
BONE OF MY BONE: SLAVERY, RACE, AND NATION—EAST
1. Captivity
2. Slavery
3. Motherhood
4. Property
5. Christianity
6. Nationhood
7. Gold Rush
PART TWO
OF BLOOD AND BONE: FREEDOM, KINSHIP, AND CITIZENSHIP—WEST
8. Removal
9. Capture
10. Freedom
Epilogue: Citizenship
Coda: The Shoeboots Family Today
APPENDIX 1. RESEARCH METHODS AND CHALLENGES
APPENDIX 2. DEFINITION AND USE OF TERMS
APPENDIX 3. CHEROKEE NAMES AND MISTAKEN IDENTITIES
APPENDIX 4. PRIMARY SOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
MAPS
1. Location of the Cherokees relative to other major southern tribes, 1780s–1830s
2. The Cherokee Nation, 1817–1823
3. Locations of the Five Tribes before and after removal
4. Important places in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory
PLATES
1. The Etowah River, North Georgia, 1998
2. A model Cherokee house of the early 1800s, New Echota, Georgia
3. Chief Vann House, Spring Place, Georgia, 2003
4. Cherokee statesman John Ridge, 1837
5. Cherokee Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot
6. Arkansas swamp along the removal route
7. View of the Arkansas River, Webbers Falls, Cherokee Nation, 1900
8. Slave house near Talala, Indian Territory, 1900
9. A Cherokee family in front of a cabin, 1890
10. Formal portrait of a Cherokee family, Indian Territory
11. Cherokee Treaty Party Member and Confederate General Stand Watie
12. Murrell House, Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory
13. Tahlequah, Cherokee capital, 1902
14. Haskell Shoeboot, descendant, circa 1986
FIGURES
1. Account of Nancy’s capture, Testimony of Two Cherokee Chiefs Relating to Nancy, a Cherokee Woman,
October 28, 1808
2. Bill of sale for Nancy from William Kennedy to John Fulton, April 2, 1778
3. Letter from five Cherokee chiefs to protect Cherokee lands, March 27, 1802
4. Tuscarora Shoe Boots’s deed of gift for personal property, April 24, 1835
5. Articles 1 through 3 of the Cherokee Nation Constitution, 1827, in English and Cherokee
6. Shoe Boots’s petition to the Chiefs in Council to free his children, October 29, 1824
7. Cherokee County plat and land grant issued to Stephen Carter
8. Example of a land lottery ticket from 1832
9. Mapping of Cherokee County Section 1, District 10
10. Article in the Cherokee Advocate of October 7, 1847, on the kidnapping of Shoe Boots and Doll’s grandchildren
11. Estate inventory of Major and Susannah Ridge
12. Warrant for the land that Doll received on account of Shoe Boots’s military service
13. Patent for the land sale from Dolly Shoeboots to David B. Cumming, November 1, 1860
SHOEBOOTS FAMILY TREE
The spelling of Cherokee names is variable in the records, and names are often difficult to read. The names given here are taken from the legal statement of William Shoeboots, made in 1888. William did not give a Cherokee name for himself. Adapted from a tree by Joy Greenwood.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
In September 2005, two months before Ties That Bind was released, Diné historian Jennifer Denetdale invited me to give the keynote address at a conference on Native American and African American relations hosted by the University of New Mexico. The title of the conference was Crossing Breath,
a lovely evocation of spirit and interconnection. However, as I knew from researching Ties That Bind and from my own experience as a member of an Afro-Native family, the conference planners’ focus on black-red interchange was in many ways aspirational. The reality of black and Native relationships, particularly within nations that had once owned black slaves, was rough, tumultuous, and in many ways characterized by conflict. The timing of Professor Denetdale’s invitation and my awareness of tensions between black people, Native people, and self-identified Black Indians over issues of personal identity, cultural identification, indigenous authenticity, and political belonging led me to think about a different case of troubled waters and what is necessary to bridge the breach after a devastating storm.
The University of New Mexico conference took place just months after the natural and political disaster of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf coast in the summer of 2005 and is now brilliantly captured in the National Book Award–winning novel Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward.¹ I was among the millions of people who saw that horror scene unfold at a distance on my television screen, as the poorest, brownest people in the city of New Orleans and countless coastal parishes succumbed to the ravages of nature. I watched with mounting disbelief as the storm surged, as squalid floodwaters swallowed homes and public buildings, stranding people, taking lives. Women, men, and children directed to designated safe zones found themselves corralled without the basic necessities of life: food, water, or the governmental safeguards that are supposed to support all of this country’s citizenry. The tragedy of thousands felled by nature and failed by civic leaders elicited the empathy of many others. It brought those of us who still had our family members near, who still had homes and dry land to stand on, to a point of epiphany: we are, all of us, human beings and therefore deserve compassion, good lives, and the respect of others.
The breach that characterized Hurricane Katrina was both natural and human-made. While the storm overwhelmed the structural defenses of settlements and cities, a slow and inadequate government response made matters worse. If people felt betrayed by nature in August 2005, they also felt abandoned by their political leaders who failed to stem the tide of human suffering. After the storm, there was, and still is, the need for repair on multiple levels: structural repair, political repair, economic repair, and emotional repair. Because it was raw and recent at the time of the New Mexico Crossing Breath
conference, Katrina became more than the event itself in my mind; it became a metaphor for the storm of slavery in Native American history, for the betrayal of relationships, the devastation of lives, the complicity of tribal governments, and the necessity of repair in slavery’s aftermath.
Six years later, I wrote in a New York Times Room for Debate forum on Cherokee citizenship conflicts that the history of slavery and racial prejudice in the Cherokee Nation calls for reparations, by which I meant a collaborative project of repair, reconnection, and healing. In closing that piece, I said, The Cherokee people and the progeny of those once enslaved in their territory share a story. It is a story of colonialism, slavery, removal, Civil War, injustice, survival and resilience, yet and still, one that their ancestors shaped together.
² My view, reflected in Ties That Bind and a second history of Cherokee slavery, The House on Diamond Hill,³ is that historical understanding can contribute to bridging the breach caused by slavery—a social, cultural, economic, and political occurrence of natural disaster–like proportions for its victims as well as its perpetrators.
Ties That Bind is at heart the story of a family formed at the crossroads of colonialism, slavery, and gender domination in the nineteenth-century American Indian South. It is the story of a domestic unit created through what was likely a coercive sexual relationship between a Native slaveholding man, Shoe Boots, and a black enslaved woman, Doll. This was a family whose members occupied vastly different power positions, a family shaped in the context of tremendous change, whose children tested the means and measure of belonging in the Cherokee Nation. In the book, I argue, in the dialogic form of questions, three main ideas: that slavery and anti-black prejudice existed in Cherokee society since at least the late 1700s, that slavery developed in tandem with a growing Cherokee nationalism and suppression of women’s direct political influence, and that kinship mitigated the worst effects of slavery for Afro-Cherokee people, who were often accepted by community members. I stress that community acceptance of some Afro-Cherokee individuals occurred alongside the alienation and mistreatment of blacks who were not defined as Cherokee by descent or adoption. I also demonstrate through the pieced-together biography of Doll that the families of enslaved black women were doubly disadvantaged in this matrilineal society because they lacked crucial clan membership in a system in which the children inherited the mother’s status.
My sense of the significance of the Shoeboots family story as a means of interpreting the workings of slavery in the Native South and Indian Territory was greatly influenced by the work of several scholars, mainly ethnohistorians, who studied slavery in the Five Tribes and published classic monographs from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. These include historians Theda Perdue, William McLoughlin, Rudi Halliburton, Daniel Littlefield, and James Merrell.⁴ Anthropologist Jack Forbes’s broad and detailed study of Africans and Native Americans in the colonial period was also highly influential. Anthropologist Circe Sturm’s revealing book Blood Politics was crucial to my developing work, as she was the first scholar I had read who took up directly, through the use of interviews, the issue of anti-black prejudice among Cherokees.⁵ Rather than go on at length about scholarly precursors here, I point your attention to historiographical essays and a database about Afro-Native histories at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.⁶
I published Ties That Bind with a feeling of trepidation about how it would be received. Given that a Tuscarora academic had vehemently informed me of her disagreement with my argument that Cherokees in the 1800s had marginalized blacks, and a black woman at a public talk had heatedly told me she rejected the possibility that the black wife
of Shoe Boots could have been a slave, I had reason for concern. In the end, I was grateful for such challenging comments.⁷ This critical feedback pushed me to work harder to understand the role of race in Cherokee legislation and to imagine the ways in which an unequal sexual union might at the same time involve intimacy and emotional connection. I was deeply relieved and grateful when the book garnered an overwhelmingly positive response. I also found that after hearing the story of the Shoeboots family, people often wanted to share their own family stories with me. One reader sent census information that by all indications traces the family of Lewis Shoeboots, one of Shoe Boots and Doll’s twin sons who was lost to slavery in the Southeast.⁸ I was moved to receive gifts of beaded jewelry, music, and books, as well as letters and emails, from other readers.⁹ They seemed relieved to discover a complex, interracial family story discussed openly and with sensitivity to both African American and Native American experience.
Readers who had criticisms of the work voiced them respectfully and pointed out ways in which it could have spoken more powerfully to them. One Native high school student who read the book with eighty other Native and Latino teenagers in a program sponsored by Pomona College thought my chapter on Cherokee removal was far too short. A Seneca elder said he felt that the book was prescribing what the Cherokee Nation should have done in a way that diminished tribal authority. Most people who had critiques quibbled good-naturedly about genealogical details and the spelling of names. This is not to say that Ties that Bind is a perfect book. That is far from the case, and this new edition includes a few minor corrections. Rather, this is to say that the book seems to have met a desire held by many people at the start of a new century to read a documented story that reflects the racial travails of their own mixed-race black, Native, and white families. Because I had managed (after much labor, trial, and error) to relate the material in a narrative interpretive vein, Ties That Bind avoids the objectifying distance of a traditional social historical treatment and conveys the story of a Cherokee family, a black family, an American family, with empathy and directness. The book’s subject matter, together with an increased public interest in mixed-race identities spurred by the multiracial movement and a new option on the 2000 U.S. census to check more than one box for racial identity, attracted an open-minded readership of scholars, students, and genealogists.
When the book was published in 2005, it was accompanied by a work on the Afro-Creek Grayson family, written by the award-winning historian Claudio Saunt.¹⁰ Since the nearly in tandem publication of my book and Saunt’s Black, White and Indian, a number of works have been published, symposia organized, and conference panels planned on subjects in the subfield that is often referred to as Afro-Native studies, Black Indian studies, or indigenous slavery studies. These works span historical, anthropological, and literary fields but are situated for the most part in Native American history, ethnohistory, and, increasingly, African American history. Some of the most inspiring work published over the past decade includes Celia Naylor’s unflinching look at Cherokee slaves and freedpeople in Indian Territory, Fay Yarbrough’s detailed monograph on the racialized legislation of marriage in the Cherokee Nation, Barbara Krauthamer’s bold book on slavery and the struggle for citizenship in the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations, David Chang’s innovative study of multiracial land use in the Creek Nation, Malinda Maynor Lowery’s astute reconstruction of Lumbee history in the Jim Crow era, and Christina Snyder’s comprehensive examination of Native slavery in the Southeast.¹¹ As a result of the visibility of strong work at this intersection of historical streams, numerous books on Native American history, African American history, and trans-Atlantic slavery outside this subfield now attend to interrelated black and Native issues. For instance, Ariela Gross’s illuminating treatment of race trials and freedom suits demonstrates the degree to which claims of Native maternal ancestry were critical for blacks. And Rose Stremlau’s engaging book on the impact of allotment on Cherokee families delves into the issues of family structure, differential gender ideals, and federal assimilation policy by following a selection of families, some of which were descended from slaveholders.¹²
A plethora of new scholarly work has helped us better understand the causes and effects of colonialism and slavery on Native communities and on the black communities within them. The more layered of these studies also include analyses of women’s and gender history or issues of place and land. None of these books upholds the celebratory narrative about natural black and Indian alliance that has sometimes appeared in popular treatments and certainly maintains a place in the popular imagination. As historian James Hugo Johnston documented in the Journal of Negro History in the 1920s, relationships between people of African descent and indigenous people in what would become the United States were extensive, long-standing, and multifaceted, consisting of alliances and skirmishes, friendships and feuds.¹³ Native Americans and African Americans were people, and they did what people do—made love and war, aided one another and injured one another, joined together and moved apart through the course of lives and generations.
At our present moment, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the mood writ large of black and Native relations is sobering. Despite the plentiful academic work just described and the pathbreaking IndiVisible exhibition coproduced by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of African American History and Culture, stories still circulate about Afro-Native people who find themselves questioned, criticized, and even ostracized by members of their families and communities.¹⁴ This negative tone is exemplified in the public arena by the recent series of court cases and tribal elections in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma that turn on the political status of descendants of slaves within the nation. Historians Celia Naylor and Daniel Littlefield have documented the early struggles of former slaves of Cherokees to attain and maintain citizenship rights in the Cherokee Nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁵ The continuing conflict is over whether descendants of Cherokee-held slaves who cannot adequately demonstrate blood ties via the Dawes Rolls should receive standing and benefits in the nation equal to those of Cherokees by blood.
Similarly, these descendants argue that the post–Civil War Treaty of 1866, the ties of kin relationships, a shared cultural past, and a moral code that recognizes the human rights abuse of slavery should guarantee their place in the nation. Some Cherokee citizens support this cause; others see the issue through a racial lens and feel that these descendants are black
rather than Indian
and therefore not entitled to hard-won resources distributed by tribal governments; some also feel that the descendants’ appeal to the United States government for a remedy undermines tribal sovereignty and the right of the Cherokee Nation to determine who is Cherokee.
There were legal challenges to these freedmen and freedwomen descendants’ citizenship status in 1997 and 2004, with membership appeals brought in the Cherokee courts by Bernice Rogers Riggs and Lucy Allen. Although Riggs lost her petition, Lucy Allen won in a 2–1 decision by the Cherokee Supreme Court.¹⁶ Principal Chief Chad Smith was among numerous enrolled Cherokees who disagreed with this judgment. Matters came to a head in 2007 when a Cherokee Nation special election resulted in a constitutional amendment that barred approximately 2,800 freedmen and freedwomen descendants from citizenship. Representatives of the U.S. government responded swiftly. The Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior sent a letter to the Cherokee Nation stating that the descendants’ citizenship could not be withdrawn. Representative Diane Watson, a Democrat from California, introduced legislation to block $300 million in federal funds earmarked for the Cherokees, and Representative Melvin Watts, a Democrat from North Carolina, submitted an amendment to the federal housing bill to withhold funding from the Cherokee Nation. The Department of Housing and Urban Development suspended more than $37 million that would have been distributed to the nation.¹⁷
A media firestorm followed. Descendants of freedpeople—such as Marilyn Vann, president of Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes—protested. Supporters inside and outside the Cherokee Nation argued the case for inclusion. Ojibwe literary scholar and Indian Country Today columnist Scott Lyons challenged the merits of the requirement in the new constitutional amendment that citizens be Cherokee by blood
in a lineage traceable to the Dawes Rolls. He argued that for well over a century the Cherokee Nation has been a multiracial nation, one whose sovereignty rests largely upon treaty-based relationships with others,
and he urged the nation to protect its hard-won national identity
by upholding its agreement in the Treaty of 1866. Osage literary scholar Robert Warrior wrote an opinion piece asserting that the moral case against the Cherokees is straightforward
and asked Native American writers, scholars, and artists, not to mention elected leaders, presidents, and chiefs, to stand up and be counted on the right moral side of this question.
¹⁸ A temporary agreement reached in federal court in September 2011 permitted freedpeople’s descendants to vote for principal chief. Their participation likely contributed to the election of new principal chief Bill John Baker.¹⁹ Currently, the Department of the Interior is pursuing a clear resolution to the Cherokee freedperson citizenship question through the federal courts.
In her article Tribes and Tribulations: Beyond Sovereign Immunity and toward Reparation and Reconciliation for the Estelusti
(a term used to refer to Afro-Native people, especially in the Seminole Nation), legal scholar Carla Pratt outlines the histories of slavery in the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes, arguing that slavery benefited these nations and individuals within them.²⁰ She calls for micro-reparations
for descendants of these slaves from both the U.S. government and the tribal governments. I find her take on the cultural transformation and subjectivity of American Indian slaveowners too monolithic, and she feels that my representation of Cherokee slavery does not go far enough in condemning those who perpetuated it. I hold out hope for a multitribal or United Nations–arbitrated forum for hearing these disputes that is fair, ethical, and outside the bounds of U.S. courts, while Pratt focuses on strategies within the U.S. courts and the waiving of sovereign immunity by Native nations. Nevertheless, I was struck by her article—by her bold recognition that there is a deep wound in black and Native relations. We agree on the need for a rebuilt relationship, for a repair, between former slaveholding nations and the progeny of their former slaves, lest the damage to the spirit of black and red communities continue.
The Cherokee court cases and the vitriol surrounding them are both signs and symptoms of a distance between peoples who at times have been close geographically, culturally, and relationally. This distance has been created and cemented, in large part, by policies of the United States government (such as civilization, slavery, racial color coding, and removal) imposed on these groups, rather than by long-standing cultural values and behaviors rooted in the groups themselves. The sensibility of separation that characterizes the citizenship cases stems from a time when intense racialization, the expansion of slavery, Indian Removal, Jim Crowism, and race-based vigilante terrorism were the norm and when people of color were propelled and sometimes compelled to participate in oppressive systems that left indelible marks on ways of thinking and being. We must not allow our hearts and thoughts to be mired there—to be stuck in a late nineteenth-century logic of race-based exclusion and hierarchy that did not originate in indigenous American or African diasporic communities. It is, I believe, to our detriment and to the detriment of healthy and whole communities to define ourselves and one another within such a frame.
The weight of race in U.S. history is bearing down on us, so much so that we have not escaped its mark. But instead of allowing ill-conceived ideologies and policies of the past to confine us in the present, we can turn to a people’s history to aid us in struggles for justice: to provide models of inspiration, to document relational ties that may have been forgotten, and to map places in the landscape with communal significance. In order to move forward from here, we need a full view of the past: long, intricate, and joined to an ethos of healing. To quote Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Baker, who made this comment during the tumult of 2011, It’s time for the healing to begin.
²¹
I am grateful for and surprised by the opportunity to issue a new edition of Ties That Bind a decade after its initial publication.²² I hope the book will be viewed not only as a scholarly study but also as a work that furthers a project of relational reunion by telling the story of a shared past. I hope too that readers find within these pages an account that reveals an inspiring, though difficult, history, illustrates the storm of slavery in the Native South, shows causes for the breach in black-Native relations today, and fosters a spirit of reconciliation.
NOTES
1. Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). For a study of Native people’s experience with Hurricane Katrina, see Brian Klopotek, Brenda Lintinger, and John Barbry, Ordinary and Extraordinary Trauma: Race, Indigeneity, and Hurricane Katrina in Tunica-Biloxi History,
American Indian Culture and Research Journal 34, no. 2 (2008): 55–77.
2. Tiya Miles, Why the Freedmen Fight,
Room for Debate, New York Times, September 15, 2011, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/09/15/tribal-sovereignty-vs-racial-justice/wjy-the-freedmen-fight [sic].
3. Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
4. Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); William McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Rudi Halliburton, Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokees (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977); Daniel F. Littlefield, The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979); James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (New York: Norton, 1991).
5. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
6. Tiya Miles and Barbara Krauthamer, Africans and Native Americans,
in A Companion to African American History, ed. Alton Hornsby Jr. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 121–39; Tiya Miles and Celia E. Naylor-Ojurongbe, African-Americans in Indian Societies,
in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 14, Southeast, ed. Raymond Fogelson (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2004), 753–59; Barbara Krauthamer, African Americans and Native Americans,
in Origins, Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, ed. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), 91–135, and online at African Americans and Native Americans in North America, ed. Krauthamer (Ann Arbor: ProQuest Information and Learning, 2005), The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere, http://bsc.chadwyck.com/search/displayEssayItemById.do?ItemID=10KRAU&ItemNumber=8&QueryName=essay&fromPage=essayList; Tiya Miles, Native Americans and African Americans,
in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson, vol. 24, Race, ed. Thomas C. Holt and Laurie B. Green (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 114–20; Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles, Afro-Native Realities,
in The World of Indigenous North America, ed. Robert Warrior (New York: Routledge, 2014), 224–48.
7. I expect that the Native scholar mentioned here would want it known that she later read the book and expressed appreciation for the finished work. The chapter on Cherokee nationhood would not have been nearly so strong if not for her verbal pushback against my ideas.
8. The following censuses list a Lewis Shoeboots and his family members: 1870 U.S. Census, Colbert County, Alabama, population schedule, Townships Four Range Ten, Leighton Post Office, page 6, citing National Archives (NA) microfilm publication M593, roll 10; 1880 U.S. Census, Colbert County, Alabama, population schedule, Townships Four Range Ten, page 19, citing NA microfilm publication T9, roll 8; 1900 U.S. Census, Colbert County, Alabama, population schedule, Leighton Beat, page 26, citing NA microfilm publication T623, roll 26; 1900 U.S. Census, Concordia County, Louisiana, population schedule, Seventh Ward, page 8, citing NA microfilm publication T623, roll 562; all available as digital images at Heritage Quest Online (http://heritagequestonline.com), accessed May 23, 2014. Notably, this Lewis had a daughter named Elizabeth, as did Shoe Boots and Doll. I am grateful to Rodney Dillon for sharing this information with me.
9. It was through reader feedback that I learned about the existence of a novel that chronicles the experience of Shoe Boots’s first wife, Clarinda Allington. See Ilene Shepard Smiddy, Daughter of Shiloh (Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books Library, 2000).
10. Claudio Saunt, Black, White and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
11. Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); David Chang, The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832–1929 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Malinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
12. Ariela Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
13. James Hugo Johnston, Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians,
Journal of Negro History 14 (January 1929): 21–43.
14. In July 2014, yet another development occurred in Washington, D.C., with the formation of the National Congress of Black American Indians, an organization that aims to foster Black Indian cultural, spiritual, and historical affirmation.
15. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory; Littlefield, Cherokee Freedmen.
16. See Miles and Naylor-Ojurongbe, African-Americans in Indian Societies,
758–59; Adam Geller, Past and Future Collide in Fight over Cherokee Identity,
USA Today, February 10, 2007.
17. Evelyn Nieves, Putting to a Vote the Question ‘Who Is Cherokee?,’
New York Times, March 3, 2007; Murray Evans, Cherokees Pull Memberships of Freed Slaves,
Associated Press, March 4, 2007; Jeninne Lee-St. John, The Cherokee Nation’s New Battle,
Time, June 21, 2007; Jerry Reynolds, Housing Amendment Would Punish Cherokee over Freedmen,
Indian Country Today, July 27, 2007, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2007/07/27/housing-amendment-would-punish-cherokee-over-freedmen-91190; Frank Morris, Cherokee Tribe Faces Decision on Freedmen,
NPR, February 21, 2007, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7513849; Alex Kellogg, Cherokee Nation Faces Scrutiny for Expelling Blacks,
NPR, September 19, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/09/19/140594124/u-s-government-opposes-cherokee-nations-decision.
18. Scott Richard Lyons, Cherokee by Text,
Indian Country Today, October 18, 2007, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2007/10/18/lyons-cherokee-text-91628; Robert Warrior, Cherokees Flee the Moral High Ground over Freedmen,
News from Indian Country, August 7, 2007, http://indiancountrynews.net/index.php/news/119-editorialletters/1106-cherokees-flee-the-moral-high-ground-over-freedmen.
19. Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, Cherokee Court’s Ruling May Affect Baker’s Apparent Election Win,
Tulsa World, October 12, 2011; Brian Daffron, Bill John Baker, Policy-Maker: An Interview with the New Cherokee Principal Chief,
Indian Country Today, March 7, 2012, http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/03/05/bill-john-baker-policy-maker-interview-new-cherokee-principal-chief-101239.
20. Carla D. Pratt, Tribes and Tribulations: Beyond Sovereign Immunity and toward Reparation and Reconciliation for the Estelusti,
Washington and Lee Race and Ethnic Ancestry Law Journal 11, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 61–132.
21. Krehbiel-Burton, Cherokee Court’s Ruling.
22. This new edition would not have been possible without the astounding research assistance of graduate students Emily MacGillivray and Michelle Cassidy. I thank them for their excellent work and support.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
When I began work on this book several years ago, I wanted to tell a story. I imagined it would be about the intersecting lives of blacks and Indians in nineteenth-century America, about interracial and intercultural alliance, about shared meanings and joint resistance to slavery and colonialism. In the intervening years, however, I found, as veteran storytellers have known for longer than I have been alive, that the story
is rarely what it seems on the surface and often encompasses many more stories. As I read secondary-source materials on Native American and African American histories in preparation for writing this book, the story that most arrested me was one about a slave woman: a black slave woman, owned by a Cherokee man who would later father her five children. Her name was Doll, his was Shoe Boots, and the tale of their life together was both complicated and painful.
The Shoeboots family¹ story opened up an entire history that I, growing up in an African American family, majoring in Afro-American Studies in college, and studying Native American history in graduate school, had never heard. And yet this story seemed vital to gaining a full understanding of the American past, since it moved through and encompassed key moments, issues, and struggles both in African American and American Indian histories. The more details I uncovered about Doll and Shoe Boots’s life and family, the more committed I became to writing into the historical silence that often surrounds interactions between black and Native people.
While conducting research and speaking about this project in public and in academic venues, however, I found that the story of Doll’s life in the Cherokee Nation was, in the view of many, an unspeakable thing. The specter of slaveowning Indians stirred up emotional, intellectual, and political trouble for contemporary African Americans and Native Americans alike who remember and imagine this past in differing ways. Some black people, I found, were reluctant to hear about American Indians who engaged in trading and owning slaves because they imagined Indians as the historical protectors of black runaways; still other African Americans were disinterested in hearing about American Indians, thinking that such a focus would siphon attention from black justice struggles. Some Native people felt regretful and even ashamed of this history; others denied it outright. And ironically, like their black counterparts, some Native people saw any engagement with African American history as detracting attention and stealing energy from American Indian justice struggles. It seemed that black slavery within Native American nations was an aspect of history that both black and Native people had willed themselves to forget. Their reactions seemed to echo an assessment made by cultural critic Sharon Holland, that there exists an ever-present attempt in America to disremember a shared past.
² For black and Indian peoples in the United States, this imperative to disremember
is even more pressing, because memory contains not only the suffering we have endured in the vise of colonial expansion, genocide, and slavery but also the suffering we have endured at the hands of one another in this context of brutal oppression.
The desire to disremember, the desperate need to blot out the horrors of the past, is a central theme in Toni Morrison’s epic novel of slavery in the United States, Beloved. This novel is now considered a classic by many scholars of American literature. In my view, the work still stands alone in its intuitive sense and articulation of the power of the unspoken. The resonant quality of Beloved, its enduring ability to mediate between our present selves and shrouded pasts, has echoed in my thoughts throughout the process of writing this book and thus has left an imprint on the story that I tell. In the world of Beloved, the memory of the ravages of slavery, of its distortions of human relations, refuses to be suppressed despite desperate attempts by the main characters to suppress it. The memory of slavery continually returns to haunt the protagonist and her family, first as a ghost and later as a flesh-and-blood woman with the power to poison relationships in the present. At the end of the novel, the narrator repeats these words like a mantra: It was not a story to pass on . . . it was not a story to pass on . . . this was not a story to pass on.
³ And yet, in her remarkable portrayal of the impossibility of remembering, the impossibility of speaking the stories of the slave past, Toni Morrison does pass it on. Even as she denies the possibility of telling her tale, she unveils it layer by layer. She gives us the story in one hand and with the other takes it away. This, I believe, is a necessary feint. For the very stories that pain us so are the maps to our inner worlds, and to the better worlds that we envision for our children. In the words of Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko, through the stories we hear who we are.
⁴
Recently when I was speaking in a public forum about black and American Indian relations in colonial and early America, a respected Indian elder from a Great Plains tribe impressed on me her strong desire that I cease speaking about this topic. Her fear, as she expressed it, was that documenting the intermarriage of black and Indian people would give the U.S. government just one more reason to declare Native people inauthentic and soluble and then to seize their remaining lands and any vestiges of political autonomy. At the end of a private conversation following the session, the woman said, Don’t write your book; it will destroy us.
I was pained by her words, just as she had been pained by mine. I couldn’t help but question the efficacy, and even the ethics, of denying the existence of the relationships forged by our forebears. I wondered, too, about the impact of such denial on descendants of black and Indian couples who are too often marginalized in Native and sometimes black communities, as well as on the communal well-being of the many Native nations with mixed-race citizens. I also saw in her formulation of the risk involved in acknowledging black and Indian kinship, a reiteration, indeed a reformation, of the triangulated relationship between Indian, African, and European American people. This relationship has existed ever since African and Native people came into contact in massive numbers during European colonial expansion and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it continues to prohibit blacks and Indians from speaking directly with one another, forcing them instead to speak through and against the material and discursive structures of American colonialism. During this conversation, I was reminded of an observation made by black feminist theorist bell hooks more than a decade ago: For Native Americans, especially those who are black, and for African Americans, it is a gesture of resistance to the dominant culture’s ways of thinking about history, identity, and community for us to decolonize our minds, reclaim the word that is our history as it was told to us by our ancestors, not as it has been interpreted by the colonizer.
⁵ In this elder’s plea that I not write, I saw even more reason for doing so. For the void that remains when we refuse to speak of the past is in fact a presence, a presence both haunting and destructive.
It is my hope that black and Native people can bear the weight of this, my telling, and also the weight of the complex history that we share in America. As the court cases pending in the Cherokee Nation and the Seminole Nation about the place and citizenship rights of descendants of black slaves within those tribes demonstrate, this history continues to shape our lives, both separately and together. The following account is a Cherokee story, an African American story, an American story. In the words of historian Nell Irvin Painter, it is a fully loaded cost accounting
of who we have been and who we can become, as peoples whose lives have been intertwined on this land for centuries.⁶ It is a heartfelt and imperfect offering.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Conceiving, researching, writing, and rewriting this book has been an arduous yet fulfilling process that, thankfully, I have not had to undertake alone. The input, advice, words of encouragement, words of caution, research skills, artistry, and empathy of many people made this manuscript possible. I discovered partway through writing it, to my relief and delight, that there existed a community of people willing to nurture this project. I am thankful for the lifelong love and support of my family: my grandmother Alice Banks, who first told me stories and remains my inspiration; my mother, Patricia Miles King, who is my foundation; my husband, Joseph Gone, whose commitment to me and to social justice revived my flagging courage; my father, Benny Miles, and stepmother, Montroue Miles, for continuous encouragement; my stepfather, James King, who understood my intentions from the start; my always-there-when-I-needed-them siblings, Erin and Erik Miles; my sister-in-law, Stephanie Iron Shooter, who asked me why I was writing about Cherokees often enough that I was finally able to articulate an answer; my mother-in-law, Sharon Juelfs, who helped care for my newborn twins while I edited; and my dear friend, Sunita Dhurandhar, who read and edited the manuscript in dissertation form.
I am forever grateful to and in awe of my primary advisors at the University of Minnesota. David Roediger noticed me in a class where I barely said a word, encouraged the seedling of my idea to grow, and convinced me that I could become a writer in historian’s clothing. Carol Miller never let me forget that the heart of this project lay in its story. Jean O’Brien rescued me from emotional and archival despair and convinced me that if the Shoeboots lived, I would find records. My additional dissertation committee members, Brenda Child and Angela Dillard, offered constructive criticism that helped to reform my outlook on the work.
Along the journey, I was fortunate enough to meet many more good souls who advised me and shaped the book in significant ways. I am deeply grateful to Raymond Fogelson, Nancy Shoemaker, Peggy Pascoe, Rowena McClinton, Celia Naylor-Ojurongbe, Deborah King, and Angela Walton-Raji. I am also grateful to my fellow co-organizers of the Dartmouth College conference on African American and Native American relations, Stephanie Morgan and Celia Naylor-Ojurongbe, and to our advisors, Deborah King, Colin Calloway, Vera Palmer, and Judith Byfield. Our collaborative effort on this project and the gathering of people from many walks of life that resulted illuminated both the trauma and the power inherent in this subject.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to genealogist Tressie Nealy, who ferreted out documents at the Oklahoma Historical Society that became essential to this book. I am thankful also to Jack Baker, to Phyllis Adams, and to all the incredibly helpful people at the Oklahoma Historical Society, as well as to Kristina Southwell and John Lovett at the University of Oklahoma Western History Collections. I am grateful to Clara Sue Kidwell at the University of Oklahoma and to Phyllis Murray of the Montford Inn in Norman for making Oklahoma a