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Cherokee Women in Crisis: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and Allotment, 1838-1907. By Carolyn Ross Johnston. Contemporary American Indian Studies. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 227. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-5056-X; cloth $53.00, ISBN 0-8173-1332-X.)
Carolyn Ross Johnston contends that removal, the Civil War, and allotment of tribal lands in Indian Territory sparked a "crisis in gender" for the Cherokee (p. 2). After a succinct summary of the aboriginal Cherokees' egalitarian gender roles, she outlines how trade and the adoption of plantation agriculture created an elite class that embraced Euro-American gender roles, establishing a Constitution (1827) that shifted political power from the matrilineal clans to a patriarchal government. While women lost...