Review by Eve Eure
Project authored by Hai In Jo
Eve Eure teaches in the English department at Lehman College, CUNY. She is currently working on a book project titled The Grammar of Kinship: Black and Native Intimacies in the Nineteenth Century, which examines the literary and legal effacement of Black and Native bonds, as well as the new forms of kin-making and literary production that accompanied that effacement in the nineteenth century. Her work has appeared in Early American literature, American Periodicals, American Literature (Special Issue on New Citizenship Studies) and is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Literature and Migration.
The digital project Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: The Social Networks of Rejected Applicants represents an important addition to a growing body of research on Black Native experiences of enslavement, community-building, and land-based relationships in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The project’s creator Hai In Jo centers lesser-known stories of those Cherokee Freedpeople, the formerly enslaved persons of the Cherokee Nation and their descendants who were denied legal citizenship, by reinterpreting petitioner interview transcripts, decision letters, and denied enrollment cards. This collection of archival documents highlights understudied social relationships obscured in archival practices of cataloging metadata. Using a data visualization framework to excavate the stories of rejected applicants, Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen offers new directions in the study of Black Cherokee communities by “bring[ing] light to the unnamed and inconspicuous enslaved individuals whose names do not ultimately appear on the census rolls due to their rejection from Cherokee citizenship.”
Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen includes six chapters that provide a textual and visual record of the forced migration and community-building practices of denied Black Cherokee petitioners, including their engagements with Cherokee and US citizenship rolls and courts. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 outline this history of forced migration and social relationship and its entanglements in US chattel slavery, interracial prohibitions, dishonored treaty relations, and the creation of Cherokee and US census rolls. For Hai In Jo, the digital platform of the publication itself elucidates this entangled history and opens the potential to “reconstruct the lives of Black applicants by weaving together their social connections and individual experiences through embedded links and visual resources, offering an alternative means to bring these absent figures into life, despite the limited archival material available” (Jo). Chapter 2, for example, features a reproduced map of Indian Territory marking Civil War battle sites and connects it to excerpts from the Treaty of 1866, which granted citizenship rights to Freedpeople and their descendants. By embedding these multimodal intertextual documents within the project, we can visualize the social relationships and narratives of forced mobility and community-making that connected Black Cherokee peoples across multiple geographies. The citizenship petitions of Henry West, Colly Albert, Samuel Starr, and Caroline Starr, among others, illustrate how social networks underpinned their claims and were deeply intertwined with practices of placemaking. Chapter 3 turns to the stories of individual Black Cherokee applicants while Chapter 4 illustrates through interactive maps the underexamined experiences of Black Cherokee peoples during the Trail of Tears, their knowledge of the physical geography and waterways, and their caretake work. The latter chapter also examines their lives before and after the US Civil War. The project also includes two chapters on the creation of Cherokee and US rolls and stories of how Black Cherokee communities navigated enrollment protocols.
These denied enrollment narratives will become an important resource for scholars and non-academics engaged in the study of Black Cherokee people’s collective pursuit for legal belonging and self-making. They point to new avenues of study for Black Cherokee histories but also for Black Native experiences in the four other Southeastern Nations (Choctaw, Muscogee/Creek, Seminole, and Chickasaw Nations). Hai In Jo’s Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen is a needed addition across Black Studies and Native and Indigenous Studies, and because it presents new intertextual possibilities for the reexamination of Black Native peoples’ experiences, the project will be useful for multiple communities engaged in the study of Black social and political life.