Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Fall 2010

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 30:4 (Fall 2010).

Comments

Copyright © 2010 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

The federal acknowledgment process is a highly contested procedure under the best of circumstances. For the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma the negotiations to establish their national identity while living within the physical boundaries of the Cherokee Nation continue to divide its members and challenge modern interpretations of enrollment. Brice Obermeyer, a cultural anthropologist at Emporia State University and NAGPRA representative for the Delaware Tribe, provides a comprehensive discussion of this historic relationship.

Obermeyer summarizes the histories that brought the Cherokees and Delawares to eastern Oklahoma and the legal efforts to establish an independent Delaware identity since the 1867 Cherokee-Delaware Agreement. He argues that the Delawares are not culturally or historically related to the Cherokees despite the legally imposed Cherokee identity. In perhaps his most nuanced argument, Obermeyer argues that the signing of the 1867 agreement was divisive and reflected a schism within the kin-based groups of Delaware who relocated after 1829 from the White River region in Indiana. The schism, broadly defined, fell along lines of those Delawares who became Christians and those who continued to honor the Big House ceremony. In what Obermeyer describes as a "veiled Delaware cultural geography," he analyzes Delaware settlement patterns within the Cherokee lands. While both lineages resisted being subsumed ethnically as Cherokee, the author suggests that these divisions informed the expression of that resistance.

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