In Sustaining the Cherokee Family, published in 2011, Rose Stremlau made the following observations about allotment.

When I remember it, I see the handful of small children following the adults around the fire. Some wore the glow necklaces and bracelets that I once loved to wear as a child at Fourth of July celebrations. The smallest ones wore the sneakers that light up with each step. I like this memory because when it was hard to read through the records of the Dawes Commission or write about this egregious mistake in the U.S. government’s relationship with indigenous nations, I thought about those Cherokee kids in their light-up shoes taking the fire with them wherever they go in their everyday lives. I envisioned them sparking their way through the hallways of schools in which the Cherokee language is taught once again. Or perhaps they spark down the aisles of the big Wal-Mart in Tahlequah with their grandmas, who remain powerful forces in Cherokee families. In trying to quantify, codify, and reduce what it meant to be Cherokee, the Dawes Commission tried to smother these bonds of family, identity, and community that had brought these children to that ceremonial fire. Allotment wrought unspeakable damage, but, ultimately, it failed. A century after the presumed dissolution of their republic and their proclaimed assimilation into American society, Cherokees survive as families, communities, and sovereign governments. That they have embraced elements of mainstream American life, including even big-box stores, should not be surprising because this is what Cherokee families do—they change in order to persist.¹

ENDNOTES

¹ Rose Stremlau, Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 246–47.