LINDA W. REESE

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LINDA W. REESE | CHEROKEE FREEDWOMEN IN INDIAN TERRITORY, 1863-1890 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.3 | The History Cooperative

CHEROKEE FREEDWOMEN IN INDIAN TERRITORY, 1863-1890

The following article is a preliminary exploration of the contested identity, wartime dislocation, and economic survival strategies of the former slaves of the Cherokees in Indian Territory. Freedwomen negotiated the shifting social terrain, enduring desperate circumstances, redefining race relationships, and transforming themselves into free persons.

WRITER AND ACTIVIST ALICE WALKER delivered the commencement day address to her alma mater, Spelman College, in 1995. She offered the graduates a gift of some of her poetry as a record of "glistening stones along the moist riverbank of trial and error I have walked along." One of those poems honored her triple inheritance of African, European, and Cherokee ancestry. In preparing the speech, Walker wondered how she could enable the students to embrace the diversity within themselves. "What can I give you," she asked, "to help you know this fusion is a source not of disgrace but of lived presence in the history of our troubled country? A source of strength, and also of humor?" The emergence of scholarly interest in African American history in the 1960s has created a large body of literature on slavery and the freed people in the South and a developing list of works on blacks in the American West. One area that has received little attention is the history of the freedwomen in Indian Territory after the Civil War. This neglect is due in part to the assumption that the circumstances of freedwomen were the same as those of freedmen. 1

Women of color frequently subordinated gender issues to those of race, choosing unity over empowerment and obscuring a separate identity. Historians have been reluctant to add the factor of gender to the already complex interpretation of the multiple variables of race, culture, region, and time. Finding the sources to document and give voice to the "lived presence" of Indian freedwomen and discovering the boundaries of the fusion understood by Walker has proven to be a daunting task for historians ¹ . . . .

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