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• 1 2023-07-10T11:54:39+00:00 Social Networks of Cherokee Freedmen Applicants 13 plain 2025-03-04T21:22:15+00:00 This visualization is a representation of the social networks between the Cherokee Freedmen applicants, their witnesses, and related persons as gathered through the application materials during the Dawes Commission. While some Black applicants were accepted for enrollment and others were rejected, all the individuals indicated as “Freedmen applicant” in this visualization were denied enrollment in the Dawes Roll. They are among more than 1,400 freed people whose applications were rejected.¹ 
  
  These rejections negated the Black applicants’ official connection to Cherokee citizenship, omitting them from the historical records. However, the rich social network they cultivated, visualized here, foregrounds their existence that is veiled within the official records of the Dawes Roll. 
  
  Click through the names (or nodes) to view the detailed lives of the Cherokee Freedmen applicants below. Once you land on an individual’s page, you can read the original application materials by clicking on events within the timeline. Embedded links in each account can be freely followed across families and neighbors, demonstrating the social networks connecting these applicants. You may also browse a list of individuals included in the visualization to access their pages.
  
  Transcriptions of the original application documents are provided on each individual’s page through a link. While the original testimonies lack punctuation after 'Q' and 'A' for questions and answers, the transcript includes a period after each to ensure proper pronunciation by screen readers.
  
  For additional information about the data, scroll past the visualization. 
  

  1. About the Data

  The application materials of the Cherokee Freedmen that appear in this project include transcribed interviews of the applicants; testimonies from the applicants’ witnesses; letter reports between the commissioners, lawyers, and the secretary of the interior; and the culminating decision letters. These selected materials are digitized versions of documents in the Cherokee Freedman Collection, part of the Africana Studies Collections at Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives.² These documents are dated from 1900 to 1907.
  
  This data presents a rich cultural resource for investigating the different obstacles faced by the Freedmen applicants, including their frequent movements across states throughout the Civil War, and the close family ties and friendships they held across race and heritage. Although all applicants included in this project were rejected for citizenship, this collection nevertheless reveals the intimate ties beyond blood that make up the Black figure marginalized between Blackness and the desire to be recognized as Cherokee. The Black applicants’ authentic and lively voices, preserved through transcripts, demonstrate their strong awareness of their tribal identity in navigating bureaucratic pressure throughout the process of citizenship application, as well as the racial derogation that dispossessed them of education and a sense of personal and social knowledge.
  
  According to the Dawes Commission, the most important criteria for enrolling Freedmen in the census included being listed on the 1880 tribal roll as citizens and their timely return to the Cherokee Nation by February 11, 1867. Additionally, those who were too young to have appeared on a previous tribal roll were required to prove that their parents and grandparents were eligible for citizenship. Marriage and birth certificates also carried significant weight in the evaluation process.
  
  The application process for the Freedmen further sheds light on the interactively constructed nature of citizenship in the nineteenth century, a complexity that official census records often obscure. From the outset, the interview format necessary for obtaining citizenship exemplifies how the bureaucratic authority of the Department of the Interior’s Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes shapes national identity through interpellation, where the applicants are interrogated to assess their qualifications under the requirements of the Treaty of 1866. This process can be contrasted with the Eastern Cherokee Applications collection, which consists of standardized, one-sided questions that the applicants filled in, with little opportunity for dialogue, indicating that the Cherokee Freedmen interviews were a more dynamic process. Unlike the rigid format of the Eastern Cherokee applications, these interviews showcase how Cherokee and Black identities were actively shaped by systemic interactions. A close reading of these Cherokee Freedmen interviews demonstrates how Cherokee citizenship was determined by various conditional elements such as knowledge of the enrollment process, the ability to travel for enrollment, finding effective witnesses, and the changing citizenship status of enslavers, rather than solely based on factual documents.

  Metadata

  The effort to center the individual applicants through a data visualization model builds on the various efforts put into transforming the practices of metadata and taxonomy to bring light to the unnamed and inconspicuous enslaved individuals whose names do not ultimately appear on the census rolls due to their rejection from Cherokee citizenship. Metadata, or descriptive data that provides information about data (e.g., documents, images, any anything cataloged in an archive), culls the most relevant information from the already-reduced form of knowledge. As a doubly reduced piece of information, it only provides a glimpse of what the archivist deems most relevant and representational about the material, risking the erasure of other information determined to be less important. At the same time, metadata is generally the first information that a researcher comes across through browsing or searching. Therefore, when no specific attention is given to the various materials that mention enslaved people, especially those unnamed in historical documents like censuses, ship logs, ledgers, auction books, pay books, insurance policies, etc., the existence of the population can easily go missing within the large breadth and depth of the digital collection. 
  
  Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen therefore assigns metadata for all the names of the Black applicants in the data visualization, including the minors homogenized under “et al.” and the witnesses referenced in the Cherokee Freedmen Collection, so that all the names are searchable.
  
  “Description” summarizes the document. “Date” refers to the date of the interview, or the date a letter was written. “Subject” indicates the applicant and any person whom the applicant is also applying for. “Contribution” marks any person testifying for the applicant, commissioners conducting the interview and signing the transcript, stenographers who created the transcripts, and the letter receivers.

  2. Networked Visibility: Amplifying Absent Voices of Rejected Black Applicants 

  The records for the rejected Black applicants for Cherokee Freedmen status stop short at the list of those denied recognition, leaving their status unresolved. These Black individuals are doubly marginalized: on one hand, the Cherokee Nation denies their claim to Cherokee citizenship, while on the other, they lack any social, cultural, and familial ties to American citizenship. The rejection effectively erases these Black individuals from formal and legal recognition, rendering their voices absent in both the Cherokee and American national contexts. As a result, these Black individuals become doubly excluded from the narrative of both communities, and their stories are no longer documented or traced. This results in limited material to verify the applicants’ testimony or to follow their lives after their rejection from citizenship. The inclusion of data relevant to the lives of select Cherokee enslavers in the visualization offers a more detailed narrative, affirming the archival gap between the officially recognized Cherokee citizens and the rejected Black applicants. This contrast is more problematic, as it reproduces the inequal power dynamic between the Cherokee enslaver and the Black enslaved. 
  
  The visualization of Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants offers a glimpse into the lives of these rejected Black Cherokee Freedmen applicants, whose historical presence has slipped through the archival gap, given the erasure of their names from census rolls. Despite their rejection from Cherokee citizenship, these applicants brought a multitude of witnesses—childhood friends, families of former enslavers, neighbors, and lawyers—into the courtroom to support their claims to Cherokee citizenship under the provisions of the Treaty of 1866. The neighborly knowledge of these witnesses became essential in establishing evidence of enslavement and residence within the Cherokee Nation, and reveals the extent of the social networks the Cherokee Freedmen created in order to support their applications and one another with and without the benefits of citizenship.
  
  While these testimonies had limited influence on the final decisions of the Dawes Commission and other governing bodies determining Cherokee citizenship, they preserve records of social relationships beyond immediate family ties, broadening our understanding of the communal networks that shaped the lives of these Black Cherokee Freedmen applicants. The social networks were primarily based on geographical proximity. Many people within the networks were neighbors—both the Cherokee enslavers and their families, as well as the enslaved Black people—along with family and friends. Some of those within the networks were also connected through business relationships. These relational networks paint a richer, more dynamic narrative that counters the silencing of their voices and effectively traces the lives of Black individuals otherwise absent from official census rolls. Through their social bonds, the rejected applicants transcend the “social death” typically associated with enslavement, demonstrating that they were never truly isolated, even in captivity.³ These relationships, crossing racial lines, underscore the fact that the formerly enslaved Black people were deeply embedded in the Cherokee community during and after their enslavement, challenging the notion of their historical erasure.
  
  The social network visualization and naming practice in this project also allow seemingly peripheral figures to gain attention that reflects the sociocultural power they had on different levels. For example, the frequency of one’s name appearing in the documents becomes a measure for one’s social influence. The name Harry Still comes up as a witness in several applicants’ documents in this project. The larger scale of research noted by Daniel F. Littlefield in The Cherokee Freedmen: From Emancipation to American Citizenship identified Still as one of the “professional witnesses” who allegedly testified in two to four hundred cases for the Dawes enrollment. Still’s repeated presence enlarges the fervent need of the Black people who applied for citizenship and how certain people commodified that desire to take advantage of their desperate efforts.⁠ In a way, the full connection between the cohort of applicants and Harry Still illumines information about both the Black applicants’ wishes and the newly formed social power built upon that corpus in a way that their separate stories cannot. 

  3. Decolonizing the Archive: Making Sense of the Visualization 

  Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen provides a new approach to the presentation of the Cherokee Freedmen Collection by using the built-in visualization features of the digital publishing platform, Scalar, to enhance the visibility of the lives and social networks of the Cherokee Freedmen applicants. The digital visualization tools make it possible to reconstruct the lives of Black applicants by weaving together their social connections and individual experiences through embedded links and visual resources, offering an alternative means to bring these absent figures into life, despite the limited archival material available. 
  
  Scalar’s built-in visualization in the form of a force-directed graph represents the social network between the individual Cherokee Freedmen applicants and related persons found in the collection. Each participant is figured as both a node connected by edges and a separate page. The individual’s personal page works as a central node in the force-direct graph as it connects to other individuals or nodes, not restricted to applicants. This visualization reveals the connections between the individuals mentioned in the documents, thereby also indicating the particularly significant intertextuality between the data and materials in the Cherokee Freedmen Collection. For example, the nodes in the visualization demonstrate that some of the applicants not only applied for Cherokee citizenship for themselves and their families, but also testified for other applicants in the collection. This interconnectedness additionally reveals the intimate social ties between the applicants and their collected effort to be enrolled as Cherokee Freedmen, which can be veiled within a traditional archival setting that generally presents materials in only a linear direction. This non-hierarchical, interconnected, rhizomatic visualization thus centralizes each applicant or witness, in contrast to the approach of conventional archival collections that typically present data in a numerically or alphabetically consecutive order. 
  
  Each individual’s page serves as a central node that visualizes the chronological portrayal of that person’s biography and contextualizes their personal history. The visual timeline marks the dates of their application materials, which can be clicked through to review and read scanned image files of the original documents. As these materials are only accessible through clicking a particular person’s page, the person is highlighted more than the documents. A narrative biography follows, which mostly interprets the documents, complemented by outside sources whenever available. Embedded hyperlinks direct users to related pages in the project or outside resources. A link to the “Migrations of Blacks Among the Cherokees,” section of the project is also included to help users visualize the frequent geographic movements of the applicants. 
  
  Creating space for the liminal and marginalized presence of the rejected Cherokee Freedmen applicants rearranges the conventional structure of information hierarchy typical of historical archives and data-writing. By adopting a visualization of lateral connections between people and documents, coupled with a sequential presentation of the personal history, Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen helps users experience the data as a network that can continuously be navigated in any direction. Through this visualization, users navigate flexibly from person to person or between the actual documents, without following a set course of information hierarchy designated by the original archival finding aids. 

  4. Rights 

  The application materials appearing in this project are digitized versions of documents in the Cherokee Freedman Collection, part of the Africana Studies Collections at Texas A&M University’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archives. These original documents are out of copyright but accessed under agreement requirement permission for reuse.⁴ Similar documents from successful and rejected Cherokee Freedmen applicants for Cherokee citizenship are available through the National Archives. 

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  Footnotes

  1. Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 185.↵
  2. For doing research on the archival material at Cushing, this project was funded by a Cushing-Glasscock Graduate Award at Texas A&M. I am especially grateful to Dr. Rebecca Hankins for introducing me to this collection and helping me with the project.↵
  3. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982).↵
  4. I have received permission to publish the digitized scans of this collection. ↵