sarah

Wilma A. Dunaway

A CHEROKEE LIFE HISTORY:

FROM BIRACIAL FAMILY IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH TO THE REVISION OF

HISTORICAL CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

Delivered for the Joseph Campbell Lecture

at Sarah Lawrence College, 29 April 2005

This Article Is Copyrighted: When citing this article, refer to this website.

Family History in the Segregated South

My people have been in the Southern Appalachian mountains longer than Europeans have had societies. My true name is Aniykawi usildi, and I am the great-great-granddaughter of the Deer Clan of the Eastern Cherokee. After the forced removal of 1838, my ancestors wandered the countryside for three generations, struggling to survive at the bottom of the economic and racial pecking order in east Tennessee. Moving frequently as migratory laborers, they often built shelters in trees along the rivers to work temporarily at spring planting and fall harvests. I look back now and realize that I should have been shocked that there were no grandfathers in the accounts about our family. Only after my research over the last decade have I come to understand why those males are absent. Three generations of my grandmothers were the victims of white sexual exploitation. Only 3 years ago, I learned that my great uncle left home at age 10 to work on a regional railroad. His economic goal was to buy a watch dog and a gun to protect his mother from the white men who came to their sharecropper shack to molest her. My great uncle was the offspring of one of those absent grandfathers, carried the first name of his mother’s exploiter, and later inherited from his invisible father 10 acres of land on which our family lived until the 1980s.

In similar fashion, my grandmother married the poor white male who impregnated her, only to be abandoned by him as soon as my father was born. Using Tennessee segregation laws, my grandfather annulled his marriage-- without his wife having the legal right to be present in court or to demonstrate to the judge that it was not possible for her or her infant son to hide their “Indianness” from an unsuspecting husband.

I was born into an interracial sharecropping family before the segregated South roared out its loud death gurgles. My Irish mother and I were the only white faces in our ethnically-mixed family. Our extended kin included my grandmother and great uncle who taught us the language and culture of the indigenous people from whom we were geographically isolated. As an interracial family, we were seriously handicapped by the segregation laws. Until the passage of federal Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, the local court house refused to register our small family farm in my father’s name, so the deed listed my white mother as the sole owner of our land from its purchase in 1935.

When I was 5 years old, my father was severely beaten by the Ku Klux Klan and left for dead in the fields. His social crime was that he permitted my Caucasian mother to carry the noonday meal to colored workers in the fields. After a lengthy recovery, my father recruited a squad of tenant farmers to retaliate and to protect us from the KKK. Many years later when I was better educated about white lynchings of racial troublemakers like him, I asked my father why he risked his life that way. He taught me something I keep at the forefront when I study the resistance of indigenous peoples and slaves: "Life without dignity," he said, "is worse than physical death."

Education was also a problem. While there were separate public schools for white and black children, Tennessee made no room in its public schools for Indian children. And my parents were just too poor to send us to board at the school on the Cherokee reservation in western North Carolina. So my mother hit upon a creative solution. All her children had been born at home, and we had no birth certificates. In other words, there was no "paper trail" to identify us racially as Indian. Before we could begin school, however, she must take us to a doctor to have documents filed with the state. My Caucasian mother bundled me up-- her only blonde baby-- and we went to visit a white doctor in an adjacent community where no one knew our family. The doctor looked at the two of us, and he wrote in "white" as the race for all my mother's children. Now my family was armed with the legal right to have its children attend the public schools.

In the years that followed, my siblings and I were the "alien others" in middle-class schools where teachers and students exhibited material prosperity that was unattainable for my kin and my neighbors. Attending school meant running a violent maze everyday. White males hid along the roads to assault us as we walked to and from school, and teachers watched silently as my brothers were daily beaten on school grounds. We were denigrated and despised by the dominant white society around us, as I discovered when I was expelled from school in the fifth grade for reciting a Cherokee blessing rather than the required Protestant prayer. To avoid punishment and racism, we hid our strange culture, and we silenced our Cherokee language. As a result of such pressures, I am the only child in my family who graduated high school and had any hope of going to college, and I am convinced that white skin provided the privilege for me that the others did not have.

Although my extended kin could read and write in Cherokee, they were functionally illiterate in English. While my grandmother could maintain a regular correspondence with our distant kin among the western Cherokees, she could not read a newspaper and she could not clearly sign her name in English. Despite their illiteracy, my grandmother and great uncle passed along to us the oral histories that became the foundation for many of the questions I now pursue in my research. As a child, I did not understand that many of those oral histories challenged much of the white-produced “official” history of the eastern Cherokees. My grandmother’s accounts of DeSoto’s 16^th century exploration of the mountains and her detailed descriptions of the fur trade situated the Cherokees within the expansion of global capitalism and colonialism-- long before I learned any international theories. She often described how much her people were changed and harmed by slave raids and by the fur trade, and she emphasized the roles of women and Cherokee resistance against culturicide. My work has pursued 4 significant questions that I derived from those oral histories.

What happens to an indigenous people when they are incorporated into the world capitalist system?

The first of those questions is What happens to an indigenous people when they are incorporated into the world capitalist system? The history of the Eastern Cherokee offers us powerful clues about the destructive changes that impact contemporary indigenous peoples who stand in the way of the so-called “progress” brought by globalization. During the 1700s, England, France and Spain rivaled for the position of hegemonic world power. As part of that international rivalry, all three nations established settlements along the eastern seaboard of North America. After colonies were established at Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, each of the European powers sought to control the Southern Appalachians. All three colonizers knew that the master of the Appalachians would hold the key to advancement toward and beyond the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. In those mountains, the Cherokees occupied sixty towns of 22,000 people, and they formed the geographical divide between British-allied Indians to the east, French-allied Indians to the north, and Spanish-allied Indians to the south.

Incorporation into the capitalist world-economy bore a high cost. The international fur trade transformed the Cherokee economy into a putting-out system that generated dependency upon European trade goods and stimulated debt peonage. Within a few decades, Cherokee villages were restructured into export economies in which hunting for slaves and deerskins assumed primacy over traditional subsistence activities. In the early 1700s, Charleston merchants exported as many as 121,355 skins annually; and that number rose steadily to 255,000 skins by 1730. The average trading company received 500% to 600% profit on the goods advanced in exchange for skins, but the Cherokees became debt peons to those traders. The unpaid debts of any single member of the town became the obligation of the entire settlement. In 1711, the Cherokees owed British debts amounting to 100,000 deerskins annually. By the 1720s, debts mounted as villages purchased food and tools from the British.

By the mid-1700s, British trade goods had supplanted many indigenous crafts, and elders taught young Cherokees how to use expensive imported tools that did not last more than a few months. Commercial hunting, population declines and frequent warfare lowered production in those indigenous activities that were essential to the autonomous survival of the villages. The introduction of every new import left indelible prints on the indigenous culture , and such trade-induced acculturation provided the leverage needed by the British to manipulate the Cherokees into land cessions and war alliances. The greater their export of deerskins, the more deepened was Cherokee dependency upon external trade. Once the Europeans generated indigenous demand for imported merchandise, native industries were abandoned. By 1765, European commodities were necessities of survival for Cherokee villages where so much social and ecological change had occurred that indigenous crafts had died and subsistence agriculture was endangered.

The expansion of capitalism is accompanied not only by economic reorganization but also by the reformulation of the local political structure. Global trade necessitated a political structure that permitted the Europeans to manipulate the Cherokees as a single corporate entity. Thus, the British sought to deal with a few elites who would effect contracts that were binding on all the separate villages. The British pressured the loosely-knit Cherokee towns toward centralization of political control. By 1725, British officials behaved as though there were only four Cherokee leaders in control of all the settlements scattered through present-day North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. The British sought to hold the entire community accountable for the actions of each member and to keep all the independent villages responsible as a group for the violations of any one town. In 1730, the colonial authorities orchestrated a structural reorganization of the Cherokees under a single hand-picked ruler-- a change which permitted the British to co-opt key town elites more easily. In the treaty that followed, the Cherokees acknowledged their subjection to the King of England, agreed to keep the trading paths peaceful, and surrendered key aspects of their political autonomy. Trade diplomacy was transformed into a racist exchange in which the British acculturated Cherokee elites to idealize European material productivity as a sign that the capitalists were more "favored" by the Great Spirit. British paternalism cast the Cherokees into the role of "children of the King," who were reminded, during treaty negotiations, of the grim conditions of their precontact civilization. Small war parties and sudden raids gave way to political alliances with the British and the permanent restructuring of village governance around war and the fur trade. European-style diplomacy led to a shift from part-time subsistence hunting to a commercial extractive industry. Hunting was expanded into year-round production of deerskins for export, disrupting the seasonal rhythm of traditional economic, political and cultural activities.

Articulation with the European world-economy stimulated slavery, warfare, famines, alcoholism, and depopulation. During the 1700s, 93 epidemics spread among the southeastern Indians, and a devastating disease was transmitted to Cherokee towns every four years. Because of higher mortality from those new illnesses and from increased warfare, Cherokee population declined by 90 percent in the 18^th century. The Cherokee ecosystem was also ravaged. Commercial hunting wasted the pool of natural resources upon which villages relied. Many Appalachian forests were burned annually to attract deer herds to fresh meadows or to develop European-style farms. Reckless slaughtering extinguished buffalo and elk in the early 1700s and endangered the deer population by the mid-1750s. Mountain ginseng was depleted through large exports to the world-market.

However, the most dooming articulation between Cherokee ecosystem and European world-system was the British “debt for nature swap.” In about a half century, the British confiscated nearly 44 million Cherokee acres. At the rate of less than $2 debt per 100 acres, the Cherokees lost more than half their ancestral lands before the Revolutionary War.

Enslavement of Cherokees

There was a second area in which my grandmother’s oral histories contradict the conventional wisdom about American Indians. Even though she had never read written histories, my grandmother was knowledgeable about the enslavement of Cherokees during the colonial era. But she also claimed that enslavement of Indians continued throughout the 19^th century. She passed along the names and family histories of Cherokees who disappeared into the interstate slave trade after the Revolutionary War. My research supports these claims of my illiterate grandmother and calls into question the conventional wisdom. Scholars have argued that the enslavement of Native Americans ended abruptly when Africans were introduced into the New World. In contrast, my research demonstrates that there was no sharp break between the two forms of slavery. In fact, one of every 8 Appalachian slaves had both African and Native American predecessors. Alongside information about African genealogy and culture, those households passed from one generation to another vague memories of an indigenous past in the Appalachians and of the government removal of their ancestors. Ethnically-mixed slaves described several experiences through which they had acquired their Native American heritage.

A few of the slaves or their parents were Indians who had been sold into the interstate slave trade by their Cherokee owners. However, a majority emphasized four other methods through which Cherokees were enslaved. First, the Indian survivors of white military actions were routinely sold to slaveholders who exported them to the Lower South. While academics have carefully documented the Redbird uprising near Chattanooga, they silenced what happened to the Indian survivors of that rebellion. Women and children, including Sarah, the daughter of the chief who led the rebellion, were sold into slavery. Though she had never interacted directly with the Cherokees, Sarah’s biracial daughter transmitted indigenous myths, folk medicine, and oral accounts of clashes with white settlers. The second method of enslavement resulted from the actions of white parents of Cherokee children. Maggie Broyles was the daughter of an Indian mother, but her white indentured father sold her into slavery. Harriet Miller’s young white mother gave her to a slaveholder when she was three years old. The third method of enslavement was the practice of “blackbirding” in which free blacks and Indians were kidnaped by slave speculators and exported to the Lower South. Fourth, black slaves interacted with adjacent Indians, intermarrying with them so frequently that a distinct marriage ceremony is documented in the WPA slave narratives. Even though laws defined enslavement in terms of the legal condition of the mother, early court rulings refused to free black children who were descendants of Indian women.

The Disempowerment of Cherokee Women

I also acquired questions about Cherokee women from my grandmother’s oral histories. While the conventional wisdom is that females participated democratically in political affairs, she told us that Cherokee women were gradually disempowered and that they resisted their loss of political rights over several decades. Once the Cherokee economy was transformed into a capitalist putting-out system, more than half the village's collective labor was reallocated to the fur trade. Traditional labor arrangements were replaced by a new gender bifurcation of tasks. Cherokee males were exclusively engaged in export and diplomacy activities, leaving women responsible for all the subsistence production. As villages became dependent upon European commodities purchased with male-controlled skins, the status of women diminished-- at the same time that their work load intensified. By the mid-1700s, Cherokee women were solely responsible for agriculture, but fur production drained away six months or more of female labor time. During the early years of the fur trade, women walked fifteen or twenty miles a day, carrying sixty to eighty pounds of skins. After men killed the animals and dressed the hides in a preliminary fashion, women spent much more time curing the skins. At the peak of the Charleston fur trade, Cherokee males were marketing 255,000 skins per year. Consequently, village women must have invested more than one million labor hours to subsidize male commodity production.

Despite the heightened demands on their labor, women did not participate equitably with men in the fur trade. Capitalist trading evolved into a bifurcated system in which males dominated export trade and diplomacy while women informally peddled crafts and foodstuffs to whites. In an attempt to limit female marketing, Europeans began to ban their commodities from white consumers. British Commissioners prohibited traders from accepting women's baskets, pottery, and mats because these items were cheaper than imported manufactured household goods. Moreover, the British put in place a "pass" system to regulate the peddling of women in the streets of Charleston. Consequently, British restrictions on women's informal trade deepened village dependence on the male-dominated fur trade.

While their traditional work load may have been inequitable, Cherokee women occupied a pivotal position within their communities. In precapitalist villages, women produced more of the subsistence requirements than males, and their work was as publicly valued as that of males. However, the shift to a cash export economy led to a decline in the community rituals that exhibited respect for women's contributions. Moreover, women's labor in the fur trade remained hidden behind that of males. To produce the deerskins needed to pay debts, the Cherokee woman became an invisible employee of the men of her clan. Women carried loads, assisted with burnings, prepared meals, and cured skins during annual hunts-- thereby contributing more labor-hours than men. Because this part of her work was now an extension of male work, the Cherokee woman lost the separate labor identity she had traditionally held. While women maintained control over their agricultural crops and their crafts, they had no power over the deerskins they helped to produce.

The capitalist fur trade externalized to women several ecological costs that males did not experience. At the edge of villages, women engaged in field work and purity taboos that made them easy targets for war parties and slave raiders. Females experienced a higher mortality rate from new European diseases. After the fur trade ecologically degraded the Southern mountains, women's natural resources diminished, increasing village reliance on imports. Because of the damage caused by European horses, hogs and cattle, women’s subsistence agriculture outputs fell sharply, increasing the frequency of village famines.

As the Europeans expanded their diplomatic and trade manipulation of Cherokee males, the political participation of women eroded. Traditionally, matrilineal clans and a Women’s Council played key roles in village politics. With the advent of regional council meetings, the role of clans and towns narrowed, limiting the political participation of women. In the traditional Cherokee way of life, women controlled decisions about village lands. By the mid-1700s, however, Cherokee men were ceding lands to Europeans to settle trading debts, without the input of women.

My research also documents the extent to which women were further disempowered after the Revolutionary War. After the Revolutionary War, the Cherokees were forced to adapt new survival strategies in the face of increased white encroachment on their lands, a degraded ecosystem, and falling prices for their deerskins. Pressured by the US civilization program, Cherokee leaders committed themselves to an assimilation agenda which would eliminate matrilineal family structure and communal landholding. The 19^th century Cherokee national government was dominated by mestizo male elites who patterned Cherokee political decision-making after the gender-polarized democracy of Euroamericans. Women could not hold office, vote, or participate in public decision-making. The National Council shifted control of family lineage and land to men; implemented public policies to disempower women; and embraced the capitalist "cult of domesticity" to rationalize the inequitable treatment of wives.

Cherokee Resistance against Acculturation

Despite the disempowerment of women, my grandmother’s oral histories did not support the claim of white historians and anthropologists that Cherokees were more highly acculturated by the early 1800s than any other southeastern Indian group. Like capitalism itself, incorporation is a dialectical historical process that involves both social structure and human agency. On the one hand, transformations are determined by hegemonic forces in the capitalist world-system. Incorporation is the long-range civilizational project of capitalist colonizers. This historical process unfolds over several generations, requiring fifty years or longer. Driven by the cultural logic of historical capitalism and by their ethnocentric sense of superiority, the intruders mythologize their economic domination as a lofty mission to implant civilization on backward barbarians.

On the other hand, social change is never imposed unilaterally from the top down and indigenous people are not passive recipients of external cultural change. While they may be economically-dependent and politically oppressed, indigenous peoples on frontiers of the world-system do not lack agency entirely. In sharp contrast to the imperialistic goals of the interlopers, the indigenous group seeks to safeguard its established way of life. Change is deterred and its devastating effects are ameliorated because the impacted people act, react and resist. As a result, the dominated confound and disrupt the agenda of the colonizers. As evidenced by the Cherokee example, the push for cultural hegemony can spawn indigenous resistance. Even when they do not stop incorporation, antisystemic dissidents can create political obstacles and financial costs that slow the process greatly. It was this lack of total domination on all fronts that permitted the Cherokees an historical window by which they prevented their cultural annihilation.

Using the racist manuscripts of white missionaries, I have documented the methods that Cherokee women used to resist their political and cultural disempowerment and to prevent the destruction of their indigenous culture. In fact, only a tiny segment of ethnically-mixed middle-class Cherokee households were highly acculturated. A majority of women resisted the cultural change agendas of white missionaries and kept alive traditional customs. Only a tiny number of Cherokee children attended white schools, but most mothers taught reading and writing of the Cherokee language at home. Although excluded from national politics, women continued their traditional roles in clans, towns, and local decision-making.

In the 1820s, the Cherokee delegation predicted to President Adams that "the day would arrive when a distinction between their race and the American family would be imperceptible." Cherokee women did not see the future as did their national leaders. The most dramatic evidence of successful resistance is the degree to which matrilineal family structure prevailed. As late as 1827, missionaries were still documenting that Cherokee children belonged to the clan of the mother. Despite outward appearances of centralized governance, matrilineal clans did not die, as evidenced by their resurgence soon after relocation to Oklahoma. Women still headed a majority of eastern Cherokee households in 1860. Many Cherokees were still practicing matrilineal marriage, lineage, and divorce customs in the 1900s. Until the 1930s, eastern Cherokee women were still the economic centers of households, owned family land, and engaged in traditional agriculture and community rituals. In fact, the matrilineal kinship structure was still partially in existence among eastern Cherokees as late as the 1950s.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to offer an important piece of research advice to students. The journey toward my research is more important than all the publications themselves. Without the powerful clues provided by the oral histories of my illiterate grandmother, I would never have been empowered to ask the questions I do nor to prioritize the issues that I select. We academics tend to place higher value on the knowledge we construct about the past while stigmatizing those people– like my grandmother– who transmit their historical experiences through oral accounts. According to Rolph Trouillot, silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments:

1. the moment of fact creation -- when sources are selected and declared reliable knowledge by powerful elites;

2. the moment of fact assembly -- when narratives are legitimated through their selection for storage in official archives;

3. the moment of fact retrieval -- the point at which scholars select evidence from the narratives available at official archives; and

4. the moment of retrospective significance -- the point at which biased and limited sources are transformed into official history that silences the voices of those whose knowledge dissents from that of powerful elites.

Convinced that indigenous myths were worthy of a lifetime of research, Sarah Lawrence’s renowned professor Joseph Campbell challenged scholarly production of knowledge that devalues the significant insights provided by oral accounts. History does not just belong to those who are highly educated or to those economic and political elites who are reified in government and archival documents. The past is also owned by survivors of inequality and by those who live through injustice at the hands of the powerful elites who are idealized in dominant cultural mythology. Any knowledge production process which silences or devalues such sources can only lead to a flawed history, for survivors carry the past within themselves.

Sources

This lecture is derived from these published works of Wilma A. Dunaway:

Slavery in the American Mountain South. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

"Rethinking Cherokee Acculturation: Women's Resistance to Agrarian Capitalism and Cultural Change, 1800-1838." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21 (Spring 1997).

"The Incorporation of Mountain Ecosystems into the Capitalist World-System." Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 19 (Fall 1996): 355-81.

"Incorporation as an Interactive Process: Cherokee Resistance to Expansion of the Capitalist World-System, 1560-1763." Sociological Inquiry 66 (4) (Fall 1996): 455-70.

"'The Disremembered' of the Antebellum South: A New Look at the Invisible Labor of Poor Women." Critical Sociology 21 (3) (Fall 1995): 89-106.

"The Southern Fur Trade and the Incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the World-Economy, 1690-1763." Review of the Fernand Braudel Center 17 (Spring 1994): 215-41.

“Women’s Labor and Nature: The 21^st Century World-System from a Radical Ecofeminist Perspective.” Pp. 183-202 in New Theoretical Directions for the 21^st Century World-System, edited by W. A. Dunaway. Praeger Press, 2003.

“Commodity Chains and Gendered Exploitation: Rescuing Women from the Periphery of World-System Thought.” Pp. 127- 46 in The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge, edited by Ramon Grosfoguel and Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez. Praeger, 2002.

"Women at Risk: Capitalist Incorporation and Community Transformation on the Cherokee Frontier." In A World-Systems Reader: New Perspectives on Gender, Urbanism, Cultures, Indigenous Peoples and Ecology, edited by Thomas D. Hall. Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1999.