Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines Cherokee clothing as a tool of diplomacy, symbol of identity, and weapon of resistance against Euro-American encroachment in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, the cloth/deerskin trade established clothing as one of the most important factors in economic and diplomatic relations between Cherokees and Euro-Americans. Cherokees consciously used clothing to construct various images of themselves to other Native and Euro-American nations. In the early 1790s, at the beginning of the cotton revolution, Cherokee women began growing cotton, and in a few decades, they transformed the Cherokee economy from one centered on the cloth/deerskin trade to one that centered Cherokee women’s labor in agriculture and textile creation. Women developed a system of cotton agriculture that provided a viable alternative to the plantation economies Euro-Americans created from dispossessed Native lands. As an argument against Removal, Cherokees pointed to women’s agricultural labor and the fruits of women’s labor on the land—cotton cloth—to prove their “civilized” status and ownership of the land. Cherokees argued they were “civilized” and thus had a right to remain because they had replaced the cloth/deerskin trade with cotton agriculture and cloth production and dressed in a way that fit Euro-American definitions of “civilization.” At the same time, Cherokees developed innovative new styles that also symbolized Cherokee identity. Pro-Removal Euro-Americans responded to Cherokee arguments by claiming that Native Americans were racially inferior, and that race, rather than clothing, was the primary marker of identity.
DOI: 10.17615/f192-v068
Author: Dawson, Patricia
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Smithsonian Institution
OpenAlex ID: W7077511066
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