The Cherokees in Transition: A Statistical Analysis of the Federal Cherokee Census of 1835

McLoughlin, William G.; Conser, Walter H.

doi:10.2307/1887236

Cited by 14 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Given this explanation, if Cherokees were willing to lower crop yields to ensure against crop failure, then these lower yields on Cherokee farms should be not taken as evidence of productive inefficiency. For example, derisive comments about the North Carolina Cherokee society began during the early inception of the "civilization" program when government officials claimed they were "at least 20 years behind" other Cherokees in the acculturation progress (McLoughlin and Conser, Jr., 1977). During the enumeration of the 1835 Cherokee census, Nathaniel Smith (qtd.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Persistence as Behavior Towards Risk: Evidence from the North Carolina Cherokees, 1850-1880

Gregg¹

2009

JID

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Can economic theory help explain the persistence of a cultural enclave among the Cherokee Indians living in North Carolina during the nineteenth century? To date, Fogelson and Kutsche (1961) and Finger (1984) have identified the continuation of a communal, labor-sharing, agricultural institution called the gadugi as an example of Cherokee agency during a period of substantial upheaval. I contribute to the historiography on ancestral labor traditions by adopting Kimball’s (1988) framework on the function of farming cooperatives to test whether this arrangement sprung up as a form of insurance against the idiosyncratic risk inherent in southern agriculture. Data collected from the 1850-1880 manuscript census returns on North Carolina Cherokee farms are used to compute the variance of household self-sufficiency, which appears substantial enough to warrant a non-market mechanism to pool risk.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%