Cherokee women in the West faced the daunting challenge of rebuilding their lives after the Civil War. Their experiences varied depending on class, race, and educational opportunity. Traditional Cherokee women were in the majority but were generally poor and increasingly viewed as backward because of their resistance to civilization.
The Cherokee Male and Female seminaries, established in 1850, reopened after the Civil War to train the future leaders of the nation. English was the official language of the schools. Assimilation was not strictly imposed on the Cherokees,1 but women who attended the Cherokee National Female Seminary saw the adoption of white American values as necessary for survival. In federal boarding schools such as Chilocco and Carlisle, as well as in the Cherokee seminaries, American Indians took what they needed but did not abandon their traditional cultures. Some used their knowledge to defend tribal interests and identity. Like African-American women in the late nineteenth century who aspired to middle-class gentility and respectability, Cherokee women saw education as a vehicle of mobility and considered white values something to be learned and then used to benefit their interests.
Cherokee women’s power declined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but those women who attended the Cherokee National Female Seminary helped prepare the way for a resurgence in the twentieth century. The Cherokee National Female Seminary enabled many of its students to become physicians, businesswomen, educators, and prominent social workers. Some who attended the seminary genuinely embraced white values, abandoned speaking Cherokee, and adopted Christianity. Most of these women were from families who were already highly assimilated. Educated women contributed tremendously to the survival of the Cherokee Nation. At the same time, the social atmosphere at the school contributed to tensions between progressive Cherokee girls of mixed heritage and those from more traditional, uneducated backgrounds. Traditional, full-blooded women did not attend the seminary in large numbers. Only 2 full-bloods attended the Cherokee National Female Seminary the year it opened, in 1851. Only 160 full-bloods eventually enrolled in the seminary, about 9.6 percent of the total.2
Isabel Cobb, perhaps the first Cherokee woman trained as a physician, attended the seminary. Her life revealed the ways in which students there went on to become professional women and community leaders. The curriculum at the seminary was modeled on that of Mount Holyoke, and a number of the teachers were from the East. The students rose at five-thirty and studied subjects including the English language, Latin and Latin mythology, philosophy, ancient languages, Roman history, Paradise Lost, Ovid, Cicero, Goethe, Livy, moral science, chemistry, algebra, and geometry. Their catalog and newspaper articles reveal a lively intellectual atmosphere.
Cherokee women who were in the upper class increasingly viewed education as a vehicle of success. They adopted many of white society’s Victorian values of morality, culture, and progress. They also cultivated the domestic arts and adopted outward symbols of gentility and respectability, from their style of dress to the ways in which they furnished their houses.
However, just as the earlier adoption of spinning wheels and calico dresses had not led Cherokees to stop strongly identifying with their own culture, so, too, this later acculturation did not eradicate the traditional ways. African-American women fought for their share in the Cherokee Nation’s land and treasury and endured discrimination and destitution. In the post–Civil War period, no consensus emerged within the Cherokee Nation regarding meanings of gender. Many Cherokee women in Indian Territory and in North Carolina continued to participate in traditional ceremonies and resisted assimilation as they faced new pressures. Meanwhile, the United States government’s concerted campaign to dispossess the Cherokees of their land and tribal sovereignty continued relentlessly.
The following selections introduce the “new” women who attended the Cherokee National Female Seminary and published their own newspaper. In a time when few American women had access to an education, the Cherokee policies were quite advanced.
1 Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Secretary of the Interior, Reports of Superintendent of Schools (Washington: GPO, 1900), 112–13.
2 Devon A. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 2, 3, 5, 30, 69, 81, 83.