This research poster will feature three thematic sections, including an overview, results, and a case study, as well as photos and snapshots of primary sources. The content of the poster will show early findings on two important and under-researched trends during allotment: the material infrastructure of dispossession and matrilineal descent. The story of allotment is best told when you follow the money.
The case study will focus on Maggie Mae Poff, a Chickasaw minor that launched strong legal self-advocacy in Indian Territory Courts at the turn of the twentieth century. Her precedent-setting case reveals racial and gendered logics behind both resistance and dispossession.
Research for this poster was conducted under the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Mellon-funded US Law & Race Initiative’s digital history project, entitled the Equality Before the Law, an open educational resource currently under development with UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Poster content will be published as a teaching module on the database. These teaching modules place key primary sources in conversation with a guiding narrative and support critical pedagogy to begin conversations about law and race. Materiality & Matrilineality represents an early contribution to the collection and is meant to be iterative, with future modules on Native American legal history creating a critical discourse of allotment.