Abstract
This article extends Tiya Miles’s study on the Black Cherokee Shoe Boots family by reading the legal documents they submitted to the Cherokee Nation—citizenship applications and land deeds as intergenerational testimonials. These documents, the article argues, constitute intergenerational testimonials because they record how the Shoe Boots family produced their own archive, their own print record across time and for future generations, as one strategy to build a livable world within and on Cherokee lands. As intergenerational testimonials, they transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging. The article argues that the collaborative political labor of submitting claims captures the plurality of expression in the documents. What appears as an individual claim, the article contends, is instead linked to a network of familial ties. Put another way, the article reads the use of “I” in a family member’s citizenship application, for example, as constituting a collective utterance that embeds the desires of family members, whether living, lost, or dead.
In 1887, William Shoe Boots appeared before the Cherokee Citizenship Commission (CCC) and narrated a genealogy of Black Cherokee belonging that exceeded legal and national definitions. The CCC assessed citizenship claims through the terms of the Treaty of 1866, which guaranteed that “freedmen,” “all free colored persons,” and their descendants would have “all the rights of native Cherokees.”1 However, William withheld his former status as an enslaved person in his citizenship application and instead framed his claim to Cherokee citizenship in relation to the family’s presence in the Cherokee Nation as long-standing members who were known to the community. William died before his claim was resolved. However, his children, Rufus and Lizzie, working with their father’s application, petitioned the CCC in 1896 to assert their right to belong as Black Cherokees. Their applications, along with the land deeds of William’s mother, Doll, demonstrate a Black Cherokee politics of collective placemaking that shows how intergenerational community and family knowledge and relationships structured their conceptions of belonging. This article argues that William and his family created what I identify as intergenerational testimonials, an emergent literary practice that created a Black Cherokee politics of collective belonging defined by intergenerational community and family knowledge and relationships. Intergenerational testimonials transmit histories of unfinished familial claims and materially contain the fragmentary echoes of a collective set of desires. These testimonials refuse a racial and colonial conception of belonging, and they show how Black Cherokees developed strategies to build a livable world within and on Cherokee lands.
William’s citizenship application and the appeals of his descendants replicate the “polyvocal,” “fragmentary[,] and embedded” features of eighteenth-century Caribbean slave narratives, while simultaneously developing a distinct form of testimony that is created out of the particular experiences of Black Cherokee communities living in the Cherokee Nation (Aljoe 2012: 18). Their documents share common features with these narratives in the way they use the pronoun “we” to represent a single claim and in how they narrate their story of belonging to the Cherokee Nation through what might be called a fragmentary community testimony that is embedded within multiple archives. My argument follows literary historian Nicole N. Aljoe’s (2012: 18) scholarship on West Indian slave narratives, which she argues “manifest the elusive structural form of the fragment” and are texts often “embedded” in other works. William’s citizenship application and his children’s appeals share some of the characteristics of these texts but also have a particular orientation to family, community, and “authorship” that sets this writing apart. These texts displace the individual petitioner as “author” and instead, present the application as representing a “collective utterance” that, I argue, embeds the political and social desires of family members and friends, whether living, lost, or dead (Hartman 2019: 286).
The Shoe Boots family, especially William’s mother, Doll, have been written about in several monographs on Black Cherokee communities in the nineteenth century. Historian Tiya Miles’s seminal book, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005), focuses on Doll and her family’s lived experiences of slavery in the Cherokee Nation. In the book’s epilogue, Miles (2005: 109) turns to William’s testimony to reveal continuities between older traditions of inclusion that emphasized “kinship rather than race” and practices of belonging adopted by Black Cherokee peoples in response to the creation of the Cherokee Constitution of 1827, which denied citizenship to African-descended persons. As Miles (2005: 242) notes, William’s citizenship petition highlights the centrality of intergenerational family and community relations, which he used as both “strategy as well as conviction” that “race should not be a determining factor in his right to citizenship.” Miles’s discussion of William’s testimony as emphasizing links among more inclusive, kinship practices of belonging provides the groundwork for this article’s discussion of intergenerational testimony. I use the term intergenerational testimonial to show how William and his descendants used their family documents—citizenship applications and appeals and land deeds—as a collective act of placemaking. These intergenerational testimonials form an emergent literary practice that I argue William and his family created in the process of producing their own print record, their own archive, through their awareness of the power held by these court documents. My contention is that their testimonial transcription comprises collective stories that disclose models of belonging based on family, community responsibility, and their distinct experiences living in the Cherokee Nation that drew on “long-practiced traditions [of] a socially compassionate ethics of inclusivity” and reciprocal kinship relations that were called into question in court (Nelson 2014: 24). In calling attention to William and his family’s documents, and calling these applications and appeals collective, intergenerational testimonials, I seek to reveal the radicality of their insistence on a recognition of themselves as Black and Cherokee, which posed very real political and ethical challenges for the Cherokee Nation.
The article focuses on William Shoe Boots’s citizenship claim, the appeals submitted by his descendants, Rufus and Lizzie, and the land applications of his mother, Doll. Her significance to William and his family’s petitions for citizenship is critically tied to her status as an enslaved person and the transference of that status to her descendants. The Cherokee Nation, one of the five Nations removed to what was called Indian Territory during Andrew Jackson’s presidency in the 1830s, reimagined their society in the context of Indian and African colonizationist ideas through adopting chattel slavery and US governmental structures, both of which were reconceptualized to suit the nation’s own ideas of ownership, governance, and belonging. When Cherokees rewrote their constitution in 1827 and 1839, they modeled these documents on the US constitution. Enslaved peoples, as these new constitutions proclaimed, could not marry Cherokees and, thus, remained external to Cherokee cultural and political activities. In this context, enslaved and free Black people were excluded from citizenship and political participation and from the terms of kinship and belonging in the Cherokee Nation. As I will discuss, despite these exclusionary laws, William and his descendants created their own meanings of belonging that were grounded in creating good relations with family and a broader Cherokee community, where they rebuilt severed relations with the land and the other-than-human world.2
Throughout the article, I use the term Black Cherokee without the hyphen to show how William and his family and mother understood their sociopolitical subjectivities as bound up within Cherokee society. I draw on Reid Gómez’s (Diné) (2021: 186) critical writing on unfixing the and that is always placed between Black and Native, Native and Black to capture the practice of belonging that William and his descendants adopted to signify their own meanings of Cherokee identity. In using the label Black Cherokee, I also want to highlight how the Shoe Boots family navigated and transgressed US and Cherokee citizenship, land, and enrollment policies that did not grant dual citizenship status to African-descendant persons. As Marilyn Vann (Cherokee) (2021: 3), president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes Association notes, “tribal freedmen were not entitled to US citizenship under the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution as they were not slaves of U.S. citizens . . . [and] did not receive U.S. citizenship until the 1901 Five Tribes Citizenship Act was passed.” Thus, the Shoe Boots family’s mobilization of their intergenerational testimony was a collective technique for navigating and refusing a bifurcated system of legal affiliation that narrowed citizenship to official census records, in which African-descended persons were recorded as separate from Cherokee peoples. If we were to view William’s insistence on being identified as Black Cherokee in this context, a much wider perspective on Black Cherokee political and social forms of placemaking would be revealed.
Mapping the Limit of Citizenship
William Shoe Boots was the son of Doll Shoe Boots, an enslaved Black woman, and her enslaver, Tarsekayahke Shoe Boots, a Cherokee warrior. He was Doll’s fourth child and a twin. William’s older siblings—Elizabeth (Lizzie), John, and Polly—were also born to Shoe Boots and Doll and became Cherokee citizens after Shoe Boots submitted an emancipation petition to the National Council in 1824. The National Council ordered Shoe Boots not to have any more children with Doll, but he had two more, William and his twin brother, Lewis. What this meant was that William and Lewis could not become citizens and their status would be tied to Doll’s condition as an enslaved person, and, despite the petitions of Shoe Boots’s sisters requesting that the council change their previous ruling, William and Lewis were not granted citizenship. After the Civil War, when formerly enslaved persons were able to petition for citizenship, they were made to do so through the Treaty of 1866, which explained their presence in the Cherokee Nation as the consequence of slavery rather than through marriage or adoption. William’s testimony omitted his status as a formerly enslaved person; instead he narrated his own story of the experiences that his family lived as Black Cherokees occupying what historian Alaina E. Roberts (Black Chickasaw) (2021: 65) calls “a liminal space of neither citizenship nor total societal disconnection.” His omission then was an act of Black Cherokee placemaking and self-sovereignty that demonstrates the way some refused to honor a treaty which deliberately failed to recognize not only their intergenerational presence in the nation but the fact of their Cherokee ancestry and social relations with Cherokees.
The story William told to the court was based in the deliberate narration of his family’s presence in the Cherokee Nation. In his statement, William asserted: “I am the party who has this application on file for children in the Cherokee Nation—I have seven children, named: Lizzie Davis Shoeboot about 32 years old, Willie Shoeboots about 28 years old, Rufus Shoeboots age 23 years old, Flora Shoeboots age 19 years, Jno [John] Shoeboots aged 17 years, Jim Shoeboot aged 14 years, and Sophia Shoeboots aged 13 years . . . ” William, then, stated that “My mother was “Dolly”—a black woman—she had six (sic) children by Tarsekayahke [Shoeboots]—My brothers and sisters named as follows—Lizzie Shoeboots, Jno [John] Shoeboots, Polly Shoeboots, Lewis Shoeboots, William Shoeboots (myself). Lewis and myself were twins.”3
In his application, William spoke directly about his childhood. He noted that he was young when his father Shoe Boots died but he remembered him, and that after his father’s death, he and his mother “remained with John Ridge,” a prominent Cherokee politician and enslaver. William mentions that his twin brother, Lewis, was “stolen and carried off” though he does not add into enslavement or that he was never seen again. William also states that he was apprenticed twice, first “to learn the carpentry trade,” then “to learn the Blacksmith trade.”4 He indicates that his mother died before the war and that in 1852 his sisters, Lizzie and Polly, were given money and had children. William uses the proceedings to renarrate his own familial history by describing his mother as “a black woman” rather than identifying her as a formerly enslaved person and by mentioning his experiences of apprenticeship and their presence in the Ridge household. William’s renarration suggests more than an already-known status as a formerly enslaved person; it discloses the intentionality of his description of Doll and the significance of his elision of her enslaved status in favor of situating her in a broader Black Cherokee narrative in which community belonging, not enslavement, is the key social and legal feature. In the context of William and his descendants, these documents are legal records kept personally or within official archives, which simultaneously repress their voices and bring them into view as challenges to Cherokee marriage laws, land rights, and citizenship and tribal national enrollment policies.
In 1887, William learned that while the CCC agreed that William “was the son of Shoe Boots,” because his father “died before the roll of 1835” was created, William was not “entitled to Cherokee citizenship as the evidence showed he deserved.” Rather than an outright denial of his claim, the CCC placed William’s application on a “doubtful claimants” list that ultimately collapsed the distinction between those cases requiring more evidence and those individuals considered “intruders,” as indicated by the title given to the list, “Summary of Colored Citizens and Colored Intruders Resident in the Several Districts.”5 The roll of 1835 was a preremoval federal census roll that anticipated the Dawes Commission’s creation of a racialized criterion for determining eligibility for land allotments in the same year the CCC ruled on William’s case. This roll was important because the methods of classification that established the presence of Black persons as external became the sole legal record for determining citizenship; in other words, persons had to appear on this roll to “prove” their Cherokee ancestry. The roll recorded Cherokee families in present-day Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia as either “slaves” or “Black persons” but not as part of Cherokee families.6 William’s testimony asserted his right to belong by narrating his family’s relation to Cherokees, and while he omits mention of his status as a formerly enslaved person, I argue that he does so in order to tell his own story, rather than because his status would have already been known. Moreover, his petition is deliberate in situating slavery and colonialism “not [as] a moment but rather an ongoing experience” that structures their family’s response (Roberts 2021: 65).
William’s petition highlights the tensions created by the external mandate from the US government to draft the Treaty of 1866 that combined with already-present constitutional restrictions on the ability of Black Cherokee persons to become citizens of the Cherokee Nation. These realities intensified the narrowing of citizenship qualifications, on the one hand, and increasingly tethered nearly all claims by Black Cherokees to a treaty that was viewed as an infringement on Cherokee sovereign right to create its own citizenry, on the other. In this context, William’s citizenship application and his children’s appeal disrupted the CCC proceedings by insisting on their own meanings of belonging which drew from Cherokee kinship traditions, and which William and his children used in their cases to demonstrate the contradiction of the court’s ruling against them.
The CCC numbered among many commissions created between 1868 and 1886 to primarily adjudicate citizenship claims pertaining to formerly enslaved and Black Cherokees living in the Cherokee Nation before the Treaty of 1866. In 1870, when the first court cases were heard, the CCC only “admitted 5 freedmen and their families to citizenship and rejected 131 cases, 93 of them because they had not returned within the six-month limitation” period (Littlefield 1978: 77). For many formerly enslaved, Black Cherokees, and free Black persons who had lived in relation to Cherokees before the war, returning to the nation within six months was often not possible, and it was also not how many framed their claims on belonging when they appeared in court. Petitioners invoked kinship networks and frequently submitted collective citizenship applications taken up by individuals who did not claim a biological kin relation to their copetitioners in order to direct their lives in the nation. Like many that did return and had their petitions denied, they responded by cultivating and sustaining their own meanings of belonging that resonate with Roberts’s description of her own family’s practices in the Chickasaw Nation. Referring to her great-great-grandmother, Josie, among other Black Chickasaw peoples, Roberts (2021: 63–64) notes, “instead of pursuing citizenship, [many] opted for belonging–creating their own communities through possession of land, the establishment of institutions, and the maintenance of kinship ties.” William’s testimony and witness affidavits reveal a similar response to the social and political exclusion his family endured, though his petition also demonstrates how obtaining legal citizenship was bound together with Black Cherokee knowledge and memory of their connections and relations to place, land, and Cherokees that William insisted on continuing to honor as a legally recognized member of the nation.
In the US context, formal recognition did not necessarily mean that Black persons had the ability to exercise the “rights and entitlements” of citizenship (Hartman 2022: 271). According to Black feminist literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, “not only was political equality greatly contested and social equality opposed, but even the enjoyment of basic civil rights was unrealized” (217). The recognition of legal citizenship expressed what Hartman calls “the double bind of freedom: being freed from slavery and free of resources . . . sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject” (205). Literary scholar Koritha Mitchell (2011: 54) focuses on how lynching playwrights enacted this “double bind of freedom” that “created opportunities for African Americans to engage in embodied practices of belonging” and claim “a citizenship that was at least two fold: they belonged in black communities as well as the nation.” Mitchell’s argument that the “practice of belonging” became important to Black community making and national connection recalls William Shoe Boots’s assertion of belonging in his insistence on being legally and socially recognized as Black Cherokee. Mitchell’s ideas about the “practice of belonging” echo literary scholar Derrick R. Spires’s (2019: 5) theorizations of citizenship as a practice of making and collective action. The citizen subject, as Spires contends “invokes a civic ethos and protocols of recognition and justice that call on audiences to think about their relation to citizens and others as one of mutual responsibility, responsiveness, and active engagement, a relation in which membership and individual rights come with moral obligations to a collective” (5).
The model of belonging that I propose is created through a web of social relations that are not defined or given meaning by Cherokee citizenship courts. These social relationships depend on an ethics of reciprocal responsibility to a community, a family, the land where being claimed by members is one organizing principle. This mode of reciprocal recognition describes an active mode of relationality that is built through community acknowledgement and a grounded history and deep relationship with and responsibility to the land. For Black Cherokee peoples, like William Shoe Boots, belonging was lived in part as a practice of “hold[ing] ground as relational” to use literary scholar Jodi A. Byrd’s (Chickasaw) (2019: 219) term for a kind of Indigenous relational space-making practice. Black Cherokee petitioners offer models of belonging that emphasized social relationships, reciprocity, and responsibility to a community that encompassed land and an other-than-human world that were not merely shaped by Cherokee citizenship courts. The resonances between Spires’s theorizations of Black citizenship practices and my articulations of belonging show how African-descended communities across geographies remade the meanings ascribed to political and social relationships by adopting relations grounded in collective and community responsibility to each other. These were ongoing practices generated from within their own community spaces and did not disappear because of exclusionary Tribal National and US citizenship rules.
Intergenerational Testimonials
Collective writing practices were crucial to the citizenship appeal that Rufus and Lizzie submitted in 1896 to the CCC. This form of writing allowed them to infuse the document with the histories and stories of their Black and Black Cherokee ancestors. They described their citizenship application as a “continuation of one claim” that included “fifteen persons in all,” demonstrating the “polyvocal,” “embedded,” and intergenerational character of their document.7 This act of submitting collective citizenship petitions was not unique to Rufus and Lizzie or only adopted by biologically related family members. For example, Jeffrey Holt and eleven other formerly enslaved persons collectively submitted an application for Cherokee citizenship in 1875 and declared they should be seen as “equal with the Indians” (Smithers 2015: 221). Collective petitioning was one example of an alternative Black Cherokee placemaking practice that was well-established by the time Rufus and Lizzie brought their case to the CCC.
Despite abundant evidence attesting to claimants’ relations to their respective Nations, however, tribal-national courts overwhelmingly rejected citizenship applications of persons with African ancestry or claims that rested on connections with such individuals, as was the outcome in both Rufus and Lizzie’s and Jeffrey Holt’s case. The CCC ruled that since Jeffrey Holt and his copetitioners possessed “African blood,” they were not only ineligible for citizenship but could not be understood in “equal” relations to Cherokees (Smithers 2015: 192). Yet, these court rulings failed to dissuade petitioners from filing citizenship applications and claiming a reciprocal social and kinship relation that they honored in their own communities. In the context of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, historian Barbara Krauthamer describes a similar claiming of citizenship despite the Nation’s efforts to deny them legal incorporation. Drawing on historian Michael Vorenberg’s concept of affective citizenship, a concept that describes the self-fashioning political practices of free Black communities in the postemancipation United States, Krauthamer (2013: 124–25) argues that “the concept of ‘affective citizenship’ . . . helps us understand that freedpeople might reference their cultural, social, and personal affinity with the Choctaws and Chickasaws and cast themselves as citizens of the nations even though Indian lawmakers insisted they had not and could not become legal citizens.” But what legal citizenship offered was the ability to share in political decision-making and help to direct the nation’s present and future direction, and, thus, it became necessary for Black Cherokee communities to obtain.
Rufus and Lizzie viewed the CCC’s indecision on their father’s case as unjust and refused to wait while the court settled the case. That same year, in 1896, they petitioned the Dawes Commission for assistance as many Black Cherokees and formerly enslaved had done when their cases were denied in Cherokee courts. Their petition to the CCC asserted “ . . . that if he, William Shoeboots, was entitled to the rights of Cherokee citizenship we his children and grandchildren are entitled also” and that because “William Shoeboots, our ancestor, having died while his application for citizenship was pending, we his children, respectfully submit the evidence presented by him.”8 Their statement forced the CCC to reconsider both their intergenerational presence and how the adoption of race to distinguish “Native Cherokee identity” from their “Black” kin distorted Cherokee kinship traditions. By highlighting their family’s long history in the Cherokee Nation, they demonstrated not only how their existence predated the Treaty of 1866 but also how they would continue to fight against the narrowing of Cherokee identity and belonging.
Rufus and Lizzie made strategic use of the CCC’s rejection of their application by appealing directly to the Dawes Commission. The Dawes Commission was tasked in 1893 with continuing the imposed process of allotting land that had been communally held by the Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Seminole, and Chickasaw Nations in the Southeast into individually owned plots and creating a roll of tribal members. In the CCC’s response to Rufus and Lizzie, they argued that the siblings’ claim “failed to prove a lineal descendant on any of the authenticated rolls of the Cherokee Nation” and that “there was a weakness in their proof not then discovered [when their father’s application was reviewed]. For prior to the [Civil War], descendants of Cherokee men, by women of the African race were not considered by the Cherokee as members of the Tribe.”9 The CCC noted that Rufus and Lizzie “may be entitled under the Treaty of 1866, though the difficulty in the way is that they attempted to establish by their proof that their ancestors, though of the negro race, were free at the time of the birth of William Shoeboots from whom they claim descent.”10 Just like their father, William, Rufus and Lizzie sought to claim their citizenship through eliding their grandmother Doll’s enslavement.
The Dawes Commission was the only other governing entity for Rufus and Lizzie to make a legal claim to Cherokee citizenship. After the Cherokee Nation’s decision in 1896, they petitioned the Dawes Commission, sending agents a letter that explained their ongoing case and asked for them to review their application. They begin the letter by asserting that their application is a collective document that the Cherokee court has neglected to properly rule on. “The application now made by myself and my brothers and sisters and . . . fifteen persons in all are all in one . . . claim or continuation of one claim.” The letter continues that their claim is, “ . . . based upon the fact that we are all descendants of William Shoeboots who had a claim for Cherokee citizenship pending . . . before the Cherokee authorities for at least ten years before his death which took place on the 9th of December 1894.”11 Rufus and Lizzie then provide an account of the reasons why their application was rejected by pointing out the flawed logic of the Cherokee Nation’s ruling. They note that the Cherokee Nation had determined “Capt Shoeboot was a Cherokee Indian and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and that one of his children by . . . [Doll] . . . ” was William Shoeboot, [their] father.”12 They proceed to list individuals who had supplied testimony of their relations to Cherokees and include the CCC’s justification for its decision which included the acknowledgement of “the validity of William [S]hoeboots claim, . . . [but also how the Commission] was confined by law deciding in favor of those whose ancestors are enrolled on certain Rolls.”13 Rufus and Lizzie use the Cherokee Nation’s admission of their father’s Cherokee ancestry, naming “Henry Barnes, who was one of the . . . Cherokee Commissioners” that acknowledged this fact, to show the illogical and unjust rationale for denying their applications.14 Their letter also indicates a carelessness on the part of Cherokee record keeping, as Rufus and Lizzie indicate that they had to acquire “ . . . copies of the testimony of JJ Adair and of the decision of the Commission, we submitted as the best substitute we could obtain, the affidavit of Henry Barnes.”15 The letter discloses a Black Cherokee archival practice that situates their writing as a political act linked to Freedpeople’s organized conventions held throughout the Cherokee Nation to protest against laws excluding them from financial and land settlement funds. These conventions adopted a similar model of collective action, petitioning the Cherokee Council and the Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller to express their rejection of the unjust distribution of funds. The petition submitted by “fifty residents of Four Mile Branch community and Tahlequah . . . asked the secretary to delay action on the per-capita money and called for an investigation,” while in other districts, Freedpeople mobilized a myriad of political responses to the withholding of educational instruction, political participation, land settlements, and shares of per capita funds (Littlefield 1978: 129–30).
In October 1896, the Dawes Commissioners—Henry Dawes, Frank Armstrong, A. S. McKennon, T. B. Cabanis, and A. B. Montgomery—issued an official response to Rufus and Lizzie’s citizenship application that refused to uphold their collective actions to not only be recognized as Black Cherokee but also to have their traditions of community and kinship honored. The Dawes Commission’s response reinforced the CCC’s decision that Black persons could never be considered Indigenous. In a standard typed form letter, the commission relies that:
Wm Shoeboots, through whom the petitioners claim to derive their right to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation, is not now and has not been a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, since the removal of said Nation, west to the Indian territory at present located and defined; that his name does not appear on any of the authenticated rolls of said Nation; that neither he nor any of his ancestors now reside or ever had resided in the Cherokee Nation and Indian Territory, as citizens thereof . . .
Under this typed section, the commission added a handwritten note in their record.
That wm Shoeboots mother was pure blood African who was never married to his father an Indian. That said applicants are negroes and not entitled to citizenship in this Nation.16
The Dawes Commission further argues that the status of William’s application as pending had been made in error because the court overlooked their mother’s status as a formerly enslaved person and her unlawful marriage, as the 1824 law prohibited the enslaved from marrying Cherokees or white persons. Cherokee marriage laws before the Civil War criminalized marriages between Cherokee men and African-descendant women and did not recognize the lineal descendants, children, or grandchildren of “Cherokee men by women of the African race.”17 Thus, Doll’s name would not have been listed on “any of the authenticated [citizenship] rolls” because African-descended women could not reproduce Cherokee kin that the Cherokee Nation would legally recognize as Cherokee.18
Cherokee literary scholar Daniel Heath Justice (2006: 215) writes that kinship is: “our rights, responsibilities, and relationships as a people, about our sacred relationships to one another, to other people, and to all Creation.” Since many African-descended Cherokee families in the postemancipation period were not understood as Cherokee but often described as intruders on Cherokee lands, they were typically not included in the forms of relationality that Justice describes. By the time William and his children petitioned the CCC, kinship had been absorbed into a citizenship that excluded African-descended peoples through legal and constitutional acts. Racial considerations were at the center of kinship’s transformation, as possessing African ancestry could dissolve clan membership. Cherokee society was matrilineal and organized around a clan system that linked families across nations and geographies prior to the 1827 constitution. But for African enslaved peoples, as historian Sarah Hill (1997: 27) notes, “clans embraced the entire population, weaving patterns of relationships and responsibilities into the fabric of kinship.” Despite the fact that Doll had children who were citizens, because she was enslaved, Doll was not adopted into a clan and so existed outside the clan kinship system. Enslaved persons were not typically adopted into clan networks and, thus, lived with multiple and profound fears about the threat of being kidnapped, brutalized, separated from family, or sold. Tiya Miles (2005: 86) importantly observes, while “Africans could become members of Cherokee clans through adoption, and people of African and Cherokee descent could become members of clans if their mothers were Cherokee, but being an African slave and being a Cherokee clan member simultaneously was unheard of.” Yet, this clan kinship system began to shift as the notion of Cherokee citizenship developed along racial lines, wherein even Black Cherokee women were prevented from becoming citizens. In this context, the claims to citizenship made by William and his children represent a radical stance against the racialization of kinship that their testimony reveals through demonstrating models of belonging grounded in social relationships and their Black community. The family’s citizenship and land petitions disclose not only a desire for inclusion but contain a belief that citizenship and belonging could move in different directions, adopt different principles, and still create and hold space for them.
Literary scholar Brigitte Fielder shows how Seneca forms of kinship in the early nineteenth century were expressed in similar terms to William and his children’s articulations of social relationships. While Fielder is focused on the discussion of the Seneca Nation on Mary Jemison, a white woman who was adopted into the nation and had children who were white-Seneca, her analysis of these dynamics is important because it shows how race and kinship are flexible constructs. As Fielder (2020: 162) notes, “any claims to Jemison’s whiteness cannot preclude the Seneca kinship relations that refigure her as Indian.” Moreover, Fielder argues that “Indigenous identity and belonging are not reducible to race (162). However, Black feminist literary scholar Tiffany Lethabo King (2019: 160) reminds us in her depiction of Black and Indigenous intimacies in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust (1991) that because the stakes of Black and Indigenous “interdependence and cooperation” threaten the US nation-state in ways that white-Indigenous intimacies do not, even when whiteness is “surrendered,” they require a different framework of study. Literary scholar Kathryn Walkiewicz (Cherokee) (2023: 26) describes this threat to the US nation-state through noting how “Indigenous and Black collectivity challenges the ‘naturalness’ of the white supremist state.” Thus, the Shoe Boots family’s efforts challenge logics of white supremacy and antiblackness within both the US nation-state and Cherokee Nation and deform the constructed mythology of the social and political separation of Indigenous and Black collectivity.
Despite the court’s failure to legally recognize Rufus and Lizzie as Cherokee, their documents forced the Cherokee Nation and Dawes Commission to address the presence of Black Cherokees not as a recent history but one that dated to their grandmother Doll Shoe Boots’s enslavement and William’s apprenticeship. While the CCC and Dawes Commission required that William, Rufus, and Lizzie articulate their claim to legal citizenship through the terms of juridical procedure and the language of their respective commissions, this framing also did not prevent them from creating a “loophole of retreat” to use Harriet A. Jacobs / Linda Brent’s (2000: 128) language within the official record. Claims to citizenship were primarily anchored in demonstrating biological connections to Cherokees and were tied to the Treaty of 1866, as the decisions in Rufus and Lizze’s application demonstrate. Thus, Rufus and Lizzie were compelled to express their relations to each other in ways that might not have reflected their own practices but rather the protocols of the citizenship commissions. William’s statement that his mother, Doll, was “a black woman,” is one example of this self-understanding of who should also be considered Cherokee, namely, “black women.” I interpret this assertion as a deliberate act of renarrating his family’s social relationships that his children continued in their citizenship appeals. When Rufus and Lizzie declared that they were legally entitled to Cherokee citizenship, they also did not redescribe their grandmother, Doll, as a formerly enslaved person or define their father’s relation to Cherokees in ways that would erase his status as a formerly enslaved person and his indentureship; instead, they used the testimonies contained in their family records to substantiate their own applications and to challenge the Cherokee courts. Rufus and Lizzie did not rest their claim to Cherokee citizenship on the Treaty of 1866; rather, they showed how their Cherokee father, like them, had maintained good relations with Cherokees but also had constructed his own community and kin relations to the nation that exceeded the restrictive definitions that had come to narrow legal belonging to Tribal National and US rolls. Rufus and Lizzie’s appeal placed tremendous pressure on the CCC to address the claims of Black Cherokees who had been living in the nation for multiple generations, building their own conceptions of belonging—which Doll and her family had done for over seventy-two years.
Rightful Claims to Land
The land bounty applications Doll submitted in 1852 and 1855 are part of this print record to claim recognition. They are connected to the family’s intergenerational archive and writing, and disclose how she challenged the severing of Black Cherokee people’s relations to the land and other-than-human world and the prohibitions against unions between Cherokees and African-descended peoples, free and enslaved. When Doll appeared before an Arkansas court in 1852 to receive land for Shoe Boots’s participation in the Creek Wars, she strategically mobilized US and Cherokee law to secure a land deed by reframing her relationship to him from enslaver-enslaved to husband-wife. Doll told the Arkansas court reporter that she had been married to Shoe Boots according to the laws and customs of the Cherokee Nation. She stated they had “lived together as man and wife” until his death but could not provide a “record of said marriage.”19 In accordance with Congress’s 1850 act that granted bounty land to widows and descendants of military officers, the Arkansas court issued Doll a warrant of forty acres of land. Three years later, Doll petitioned a Missouri court and told a similar story to the account she gave in Arkansas. The court granted Doll not the one hundred sixty acres Congress promised but one hundred twenty. Taken together, Doll’s actions demonstrate how her land deeds sought to craft her own language of intimacy and kinship, her own relations with the land that contrasted with Cherokee and US narratives about the presence of African-descended people in Indian Territory, and the social relationships they created and sustained across generations.
From 1775 to 1855, the United States Congress passed several land distribution acts intended to grant land to military veterans and their descendants for participating in a series of wars that included Indian wars and Indian removals. Doll’s awareness of the power held by these land deeds was instrumental in convincing both courts that she was in fact not enslaved by Shoe Boots but had been “married [to him] by the laws of the Cherokee Nation.”20 In order for Doll to submit her land applications, she had to deliberately disregard the 1824 law that prohibited marriages between enslaved persons and Cherokee citizens in her performance of conjugal couplehood. Her applications illustrate how alternative routes to claiming relations to the land were possible through Doll’s strategic navigation of the court that created a physical space where her Cherokee kin and community could gather and built relations from within and on Cherokee lands.
Because of Doll’s status as a formerly enslaved person, it was unusual that the Arkansas court granted her forty acres and the Missouri court granted her one hundred twenty acres. Even more surprising were the statements from Cherokees attesting to their marriage. Stand Waite, colonel in the Confederate States Army and principal chief, wrote in his affidavit that he was “personally acquainted with the claimant Dolly Shoe Boots” and she “was the widow of Capt. Shoe Boots [who is] deceased.”21 Two other witnesses, Pigeon Halfbreed and Wilson Loowaga, submitted statements testifying to the same marital relations that Waite had described in his affidavit. Miles (2005: 185) suggests that “by attesting to Doll’s ‘marriage’ to Shoe Boots, these men were in effect claiming her, linking her to the broader body of the Delaware District Community.” Rather than interpret their statements as an instance of them claiming her, I argue, they disclose how she claimed them, using their testimony to secure her own relations and community in which her family lived. This emphasis on Doll claiming them is important because, as their family’s documents reveal, their social relationships were rooted in reciprocal relations rather than one-way recognition.
While Congress forcibly appropriated these lands from Indigenous peoples, Doll’s land claim should be understood within the twinned logics of Indigenous and Black dispossession. The logics of which, according to Byrd (2019: 209), “hold two truths in cacophonous balance: U.S. modernity was created through the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the seizure of Indigenous lands, and U.S. modernity was created through chattel slavery.” As a formerly enslaved Black woman who had children that were Black and Cherokee, and who were recognized as members of the Cherokee Nation, Doll was entangled in both types of dispossession. As such, her land claims illuminate how she used US courts with the assistance of Cherokees to create not only a space for her Black Cherokee family and community to belong, but through the land claim she created her own meanings of kinship, of her relationships with place, that her descendant’s would continue to build on in their own collective citizenship applications.
Doll’s performance of normative marriage conventions constituted both an act of self-making and a refusal to live by US and Cherokee legal and social formations. Her successful performance, as Doll was granted land, shows how, when strategically unsettled, interracial restrictions can follow other routes and move toward what Fielder (2020: 20–21) theorizes as “race’s different directionalities.” Whether Doll understood her relationship to Shoe Boots in terms of matrimony or another mode of intimate arrangement concerns me less than how this performance drew on her own knowledge of racial- and gender-specific prohibitions in order to craft her own story of their relationship. By claiming to be the legal wife of Shoe Boots, Doll asserted what Black feminist scholar Tina Campt (2017: 17) describes as “a belief in what should be true . . . [and] the power to imagine beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must be.” What Doll produces is a material record of resistance, of building her own conception of place and relations to the land and other-than-human world that created a space of possibility for her son William and his descendants to maintain and build deeper relationships. Without a record of marriage, Doll’s statements to the Missouri and Arkansas court reporters were acts of renarration that “imagine[d] beyond current fact,” unsettling the prohibitions that erased her presence in the nation.
Even though the family’s petitions often failed to transform Doll and her descendants’ citizenship status, they no less illustrate how Black Cherokee communities built their own meanings of citizenship and belonging that held tremendous significance for them. Far from simply reporting the most basic information about petitioners, their documents represent a challenge to the racialization of citizenship and demonstrate how Black Cherokee communities responded to this transformation. What we see from Doll and her family’s unfinished, intergenerational testimonials is a practice of collective Black Cherokee placemaking that helps us to develop new frameworks for reconceptualizing Black Cherokee belonging and kinship relations. From Doll’s assertion that she was entitled to land to her son William and his children Rufus and Lizzie’s claim to legal belonging, their family points to the ways they used the law to create space for themselves within the Cherokee Nation, a nation that simultaneously sought to exclude and narrow how African-descended Cherokee persons could claim relations to the land and other-than-human world. Their family’s archive of legal records, described as a “continuation of one claim” by Rufus and Lizzie, reflects not only their legal challenge to Cherokee and US courts, but also offers a print record of an alternative model for considering Black Cherokee practices of self-identification that sustained and held future generations on the land.
Notes
See article 9, Ratified Indian Treaty 358, National Archives Identifier 179015384: Cherokee—Washington, DC, July 19, 1986. American Indian Treaties, “Ratified Indian Treaties, 1722–1869,” National Archives. It is important to note that although slavery existed in all five nations, each nation incorporated enslaved peoples quite differently. For instance, the Seminoles absorbed enslaved and free Black peoples within their community.
Here I draw on Kathryn Walkiewicz’s meaning of other-than-human world in Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (2023). In the context of defining their meaning of land, they write, “ . . . I mean the other-than-human world that includes language, lifeways, culture, and understandings of how to be in good relation to our other-than-human relatives” (Walkiewicz 2023: 163).
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots. Statement of William Shoeboots. Cherokee Nation Papers, microfilm 1650, roll 51, no. 4422. Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots. Statement of William Shoeboots.
See “Summary of Colored Citizens and Colored Intruders Resident in the Several Districts 1880,” Indian Archives Division, Oklahoma Historical Society, Cherokee—Freedmen (Tahlequah).
The census also included information about the heads of households, number of family members, degree of blood, ability to speak English, family possessions, and the number of enslaved and Black persons in each family. Superintendent for the Five Civilized Tribes, Muskogee, Oklahoma. Cherokee-Census Roll of 1835. Volume 14. Oklahoma Historical Society.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots. Statement of William Shoeboots.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots, Rufus Shoeboots Appeal, Cherokee Citizenship Commission, Letter to the Dawes Commission.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots, Rufus Shoeboots Appeal, Hutchings, Hastings and Boudinot, Attorneys for the Cherokee Nation.
Ibid.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots, Rufus Shoeboots Appeal, Letter to the Dawes Commission.
Ibid.
Testimony also includes “Edna Mona, Ross Thomas Ridge, Nathaniel Fisk, Ed Carey, and William Shoeboots himself,” and Rufus and Lizzie also make special note that their application contains “the claims [of]–Adair and Allen Ross, two very prominent and respectable Cherokee citizens [who] testified on behalf of [their father].”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Citizenship Application of William Shoeboots, Rufus Shoeboots Appeal, Response from the Cherokee Citizenship Commission.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bounty Land Files, file 838:39 (Shoeboots). Military Service Records, Veterans Records, National Archives and Records Administration. Washington, DC.
Bounty Land Files, file 838:39 (Shoeboots).
Ibid.