Race and the Cherokee Nation
December 02, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2036813 Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century by Fay A. Yarbrough "We…
Fay Yarbrough
Professor Yarbrough is the author of several articles as well as a new book, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century. The book uses innovative data to pose big questions, specifically the complex relationship between the construction of sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and racial identities. The study analyzes how Cherokee lawmakers used marriage laws to construct conceptions of race and gender in the face of Jackson's Indian policies and how the Civil War and Reconstruction reconfigured the thinking of Cherokee legislators. Informed by a sophisticated analysis of marriage records, district clerk records, legal statutes, contemporary newspapers, and personal papers, the book guides the readers into the complex world of Cherokee communities, how marriage laws functioned in the life of everyday people in the Cherokee Nation, and how Cherokee and African-American conceptions of sexuality and interracial sex differed. Professor Yarbrough is also co-editing a collection of essays, tentatively titled Gender and Sexuality in the Indigenous Americas, 1400-1850, and has embarked on a new study of marriage, sex, race, and identity, this time among the Choctaws with the focus primarily on one family, specifically that of William Beams, a white man who married a Choctaw woman and had several children with both her and, later, with a slave woman of African descent. Her other new project is an examination of the impact of the American Civil War on the Choctaw Nation. Professor Yarbrough teaches courses on nineteenth-century American history, including a new offering titled the " Nineteenth-Century Black Experience." Professor Yarbrough received her Ph.D. from Emory University.
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