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Oldham, Kayleigh

History

2013

M.A.

The enslavement of African-descended people by the Cherokee in the nineteenth century and the legal code created by the Cherokee Nation both east and west of the Mississippi River for the institution's regulation, serve to illustrate the lengths to which the Cherokee Nation was willing to go to preserve and defend the sovereignty of the nation in the face of hostility from the United States. This thesis argues that, rather than a manifestation of Cherokee victimization at the hands of American cultural and political pressures, or a mere facet of the juggernaut of acculturation, the race-based slavery practiced by the Cherokee was the result of a series of carefully chosen cultural and political traits, selectively adopted by the Cherokee governing body, calculated to assert Cherokee sovereignty in diplomatic relations with the United States.
Using an array of sources including Cherokee media publications, journals, published and unpublished primary materials, and legal documents, this thesis illustrates the progression of Cherokee'actions from a stark and calculated separation of indigenous culture and politics from those of Euro-Americans to a selective and limited adoption of particular traits from Euro-American political and cultural norms following the American Revolution and continuing through the forced removal of 1838. An analysis of this source material reveals tensions between emerging economic classes within the Cherokee Nation that tended to and adopted certain aspects of Euro-American culture, the "progressives" and those who largely rejected any changes to what they considered the true Cherokee identity, the "traditionalists." The upper economic class was made up of "progressive" Cherokee who, in turn, largely controlled the political system as well, cementing their interests in Cherokee code of law, interests that were tied up in and tied to the enslavement of African-descended people within the Cherokee Nation.
The findings presented in this thesis illustrate the previously unrecognized selectivity of Cherokee "acculturation" or adoption of Euro-Americ~cultural and political traits. An understanding of the relationship between "acculturation" and sovereignty is essential in understanding the Cherokee of the nineteenth century as motivated actors with a significant degree of control, or agency, in their own destiny, and serves to correct the error of the doctrine of victimization that has permeated Native American history. Additionally, the exclusionary racial policies of the Cherokee Nation in the nineteenth century continue to play a role in political and legal conflicts and tensions in the Cherokee Nation in the twenty-first century. The continued racial divisions within the Nation necessitate an understanding of the circumstances under which those divisions were conceived, circumstances this thesis will explore in detail.