Plat Maps and Kinscapes: (Re)Mapping Allotment Documentation Through Indigenous Placemaking

To create its privatized world of property boundaries and resource extraction, allotment produced mountains of paper and documentation—survey plat maps, land certificates, tribal enrollment cards, interview transcripts, and many other forms of bureaucratic texts. This documentation attempted to extend colonial land relations and racial regimes of ownership across Indian Country. This presentation looks to the settler bureaucratic world of paper produced during the allotment of Cherokee Nation in the early twentieth century to situate allotment’s racialized, gendered production of privatized space within longer histories of colonial place-making. Although this documentation attempted to overwrite Native sovereign landscapes and storied places, in the hands of Native people, including my own family, these texts have often been repurposed to maintain Indigenous worlds and nationbuilding projects. This cartographic place-making counters settler histories and mappings of allotment space and affirms enduring relations to community, kin, and non-human relatives that extend above, below, and across the confining surfaces of privatized allotment land. In this presentation, I argue that the production of what Daniel Health Justice (Cherokee Nation) has called cartographic kinscapes—produced during and after allotment’s administration—theorizes spatial forms of Indigenous grounded relationality and resurgence within privatized geographies. At the same time, these kinscapes participate in a spatial politics of refusal, rejecting allotment politics of belonging and recognition based on colonial formations of “Indian landownership.” By (re)mapping allotment’s administrative documentation within Cherokee and other Native place-making traditions, this presentation reconsiders allotment histories that have imagined the policy within a singular historical and geographic frame, organized around the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 and imposed west from Washington, D.C. and other places of federal power.