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• 1 2023-11-09T15:38:26+00:00 About This Book 26 plain 2025-04-07T17:30:35+00:00

  Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants

  by Hai In Jo

  Published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW), Urbana, Ill., an imprint of the Illinois Open Publishing Network. Published as part of the AFRO Publishing Without Walls  (AFRO-PWW) series.

  ISBN 978-1-946011-29-9

  Please cite this book using the DOI 10.21900/pww.26.

  Synopsis

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cherokee Freedmen—the people of African descent formerly enslaved by the Cherokees—and their descendants were required to apply for enrollment on Cherokee census rolls, administered by the United States, to receive land allotments, annuities, and benefits as Cherokee citizens. This publication chronicles and revitalizes the lived experiences of the Cherokee Freedmen applicants who were rejected and marginalized from the Cherokee Nation, the United States, and the Cherokee Freedmen community. Using non-linear visualizations of their social networks and electronic copies of their testimony transcripts, the project offers a less hierarchical experience of digitized archival materials. This project also explores the process, goals, and limitations of the Cherokee census rolls to contextualize how the Cherokee Freedmen status has been determined by the Cherokee Nation’s racial, economic, and bureaucratic dynamics.

  Technical Note

  This book is optimized to be viewed on a desktop computer.

  Image Notes and Credits

  The header image for the chapter "Slavery and Racial Discrimination" is an AI-generated image created by the author using Adobe Firefly with subsequent modifications. The AI-generated image has no copyright. Modified image Copyright © 2025 Hai In Jo.
  
  Scalar splash page image and book cover created by Hai In Jo.
  
  Special thanks to Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives for the permission to use page scans of historical documents used in the Social Networks of Cherokee Freedmen Applicants section of the site.
  
  Other image rights information and permissions can be found in the details of individual media items.

  Funding Notice

  This work is a digital humanities project that was developed as part of a collaboration with the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars Program, an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, and African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO-PWW 2) at the University of Illinois, funded by the Mellon Foundation. AFRO-PWW 2 collaborates with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black Studies scholars at PWIs, and community-based memory institutions to produce open-source digital publications that document Black lives and experiences. Accessibility review and improvements were completed with the support of The Robert and Kay Merrick Family Endowment Fund at the University of Illinois Library.

  Copyright

  Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants copyright © 2025 Hai In Jo.
  
  
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License, unless otherwise noted.