Surfaces and Allotments of the Heartland

Chapter 2, “Surfaces and Allotments of the Heartland,” opens by placing Dorothea Lange’s most famous image of the Dust Bowl, Migrant Mother, within the historical conditions of its subject, Florence Thompson. Lange did not name Thompson and did not realize she was a Cherokee woman originally from just outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The chapter argues that Lange’s nonrecognition of the Indigenous woman is emblematic of a surface reading of the Dust Bowl that reifies abject whiteness, as seen in texts such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). It then demonstrates how policies related to Indigenous oppression and settler expansion, such as the General Allotment Act of 1887, created the environmental conditions of the Dust Bowl. This historical context informs sustained readings of Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs’s works Green Grow the Lilacs (1930) and The Cream in the Well (1940), further illuminating the Indigenous contours of the Dust Bowl story.