In her book Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation, Rose Stremlau carefully and thoughtfully “humanize[s] the impersonal process of allotment” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Cherokee Nation (initially part of Indian Territory and later Oklahoma) (7). She explores the federal government's land allotment policies and the ramifications for a select group of Cherokee families in Chewey and the surrounding area within the Cherokee Nation. Though recognizing that this sample of three dozen families cannot be viewed as representative of all Cherokee allottees, Stremlau offers a very compelling portrayal of the lives of Cherokee allottees before, during, and after land allotment in the Cherokee Nation. The multifaceted stories she weaves throughout this book demonstrate that “allotment was not solely about property but about families and their role as basic units of social and economic production, reproduction, and political authentication” (19). Drawing on a range of sources, including Cherokee and US census records, Cherokee tribal records, Dawes Commission enrollment applications, maps, private papers, newspapers, county probate records, family histories, and contemporary oral interviews, Stremlau uncovers rich, complex stories that not only disclose the horrors and tragedy of allotment, but also demonstrate the agency, volition, and survival of Cherokee individuals and families in response to removal and land allotment processes.

Stremlau initially introduces the selected families in their southeastern homeland prior to their forced removal to Indian Territory. She emphasizes key elements of nineteenth-century Cherokee family and community organization, including the role of matrilineality, the flexible configurations of matrilocality and ambilocality, the presence of intermarriage with European Americans, fluid conceptions of intimate relationships reflected in patterns of serial monogamy, and the significance of literacy and bilingualism. Overall, she describes Cherokee families as “egalitarian, flexible, inclusive, and decentralized” (51). She then examines how Cherokee families enrolled with the Dawes Commission, highlighting their myriad strategies for adapting to and resisting the procedures of the Commission and the federal government regarding land allotment. She concludes by illustrating how Cherokee families sustained critical aspects of kinship and a sense of communal belonging and ownership even in the decades immediately following land allotment. As a result, she argues that the persistence of Cherokee conceptions of (extended) kinship networks, reciprocity, hospitality, and collectivity served as the foundation for the adaptability and durability of Cherokee families in the wake of the Dawes Commission's “dismemberment” of the Cherokee Nation (152).

One of the crucial aspects of Stremlau's work centers on the ways “[a]llotment was a profoundly gendered policy” (84). She underscores how European American notions of femininity/womanhood and masculinity/manhood framed interventionist postures, policies, and projects related to assimilation and land allotment. Moreover, she explores how European American mores about sexuality constructed Cherokee women's bodies and intimate relationships as sites of immorality and indecency. This necessitated and justified the urgent actions of reformers and US government agencies in the “regulation of Indian sexuality” (129). As Stremlau contends, “the regulation of Indian families must be understood in conjunction with the privatization of communal property and the Dawes roll seen as a step in the progressive intervention into Indian people's private lives” (129). In fact, the Dawes Commission's work should be understood not as the beginning of a process of dehumanization of Cherokee women (135), but as a continuation of the long legacy of European and European American racialized, gendered, and classed (re)presentations of Indian women's bodies and their supposed hypersexuality.

Throughout the book Stremlau describes the individual and collective stories of Cherokee people as rooted in egalitarianism, harmony, and adaptability. In order to represent further the complicated, nuanced, and holistic elements of Cherokee survival and collectivity, Stremlau could have integrated and elaborated on moments of intrafamilial conflict and disagreement. All members of the families in her book did not always agree with the choices and decisions about the utilization of land and other resources during and after land allotment. For example, how did gender, age, status, and other factors shape “collective” decisions about the purchase, sale, and “renting” of land and associated improvements (223–25), as well as choices related to the diversification of food and income sources (232–37)? A sense of egalitarianism did not erase conflict and tensions regarding familial decisions before, during, and after land allotment. Stremlau could have interjected and analyzed to a greater extent the particular narrative(s) emerging from her primary sources in this regard. Furthermore, she could have considered how some sources could also have “obscured” (246) particular aspects of these accounts, including the intricacies of collective decision-making processes and power dynamics in Cherokee families. A discussion of intrafamilial conflicts and resolutions could have reinforced the very durability and adaptability of Cherokee families posited throughout this book.

Stremlau's work substantially contributes to the scholarly discourse concerning the impact of land allotment on individuals and families in the Cherokee Nation. Her book presents Cherokee people not as objects who could only react to removal and land allotment, but as subjects who acted in their own right as individuals, families, and communities to adapt to, challenge, and survive the horrors of land allotment. Even today, the Dawes Roll remains prominently positioned (though at times interrogated) within the citizenship requirements of the Cherokee Nation. Indeed, conflicting conceptions and definitions of belonging and citizenship continue to permeate Cherokee politics, and this, too, speaks to the durability and adaptability of the contemporary Cherokee Nation.