American Indian Culture and Research Journal

After the Revolutionary war, agrarian capitalism expanded throughout the Southeastern sector of North America, including the Appalachian Mountains where the Cherokees resided. Between 1800-1838, the Cherokees constructed a centralized government based on dispersed farming and patrilineal families. Because of their outward quiescence toward the white ”civilization program,” the Cherokees have been described by many scholars as the most acculturated of the Southeastern Indian nations. However, the Cherokee cultural transformation was neither as homogeneous nor as pervasive as previously thought. Historically, agrarian capitalism (a) has shifted control of households, land, and the means of production to men; (b) has triggered public policies that disempower women; and (c) has engendered a new ”cult of domesticity’’ to rationalize the inequitable treatment of wives. Using archival sources and statistical analysis of 1809-1835 censuses, this article will investigate how those three historical processes impacted post-Revolutionary Cherokee women. Moreover, this research will examine the strategies through which Cherokee women resisted the cultural, economic and political changes that threatened their matrilineal powers and rights.