Matrilineal Kinscapes in Cherokee Nation

• In Event: In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Abstract

This paper will discuss some of my family’s land allotments and the complex histories, complicities, and entanglements they engender. These family lands sit directly on the border between the state of Kansas and Cherokee Nation. They tell a story of everyday Cherokee women’s multigenerational commitments to maintaining matrilocal kinship structures in the face of Removal, allotment, and statehood. As such, their story helps enrich our understandings of the ways Cherokee women continued to assert agency, self-determination, and Cherokee matriliny despite the ever-encroaching influence of settler patriarchy. However, the narrative these farmlands tell is not a simple one. It is one interwoven with the legacy of my white Southern great-great-great grandfather who served as a Confederate soldier in Indian Territory. His presence upends a purely celebratory narrative of Cherokee women’s endurance; it demands contention with legacies of enslavement and anti-Blackness in Cherokee Nation. In this paper, I use my family’s story to think through complicated histories of land, gender, race, and kinship in the Cherokee Nation.

Author

• Katie Walkiewicz, University of California San Diego