Over the course of a single semester, 12 students in Ellen Cushman’s Multimedia Writing class researched the “Allotment Era” in the Nation’s history, then produced content, collected images and created interactive programming. The students included advanced undergraduates in the Professional Writing program and graduate students in the Digital Rhetoric and Professional Writing program and the Critical Studies in Literacy and Pedagogy program. A CD-ROM based on the Web site will be released next year.

The project, the first of three planned collaborations between Cushman, associate professor of writing, rhetoric and American culture, her students and the Cherokee Nation, can be accessed at www.cherokee.org/allotment/ The new site was unveiled during the 53rd Cherokee National Holiday, which was celebrated during the 2005 Labor Day weekend in Tahlequah, Okla., capital of the Cherokee Nation.

The resource created by Cushman and her students uses the words and images of the people of the Cherokee Nation to describe their experiences during the “Allotment Era” (1887-1934), when Cherokees were forced to abandon community-maintained lands and ways of living. In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Act, or General Allotment Act, which divided Native American reservation land into individually owned parcels. Congress ultimately repudiated the policy represented by the Dawes Act with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934.

The idea for the project was developed in the fall of 2004 by Cushman, Tonia Williams, webmaster for the Cherokee Nation, and Gloria Sly, director of the Cherokee Nation’s Cultural Resource Center.

“I had been teaching service-learning courses and researching community literacies for some time, but not in Native communities,” said Cushman, a Cherokee Nation citizen. “Then, in the spring of 2004, I met with an elder from the Eastern Cherokee tribe who told me that I should be doing more with and for Cherokee people. She gave me the name of someone to contact in the Western tribe to see if there was something I could offer. It is quite an honor for us to be doing this work in partnership with the Cherokee Nation.”

The new Web site contains five main sections: stories, land, governments, citizenship and identity, plus links to further resources. Each includes first-hand accounts, historical photographs, video and audio files that together describe the impact of the Dawes Act on the Cherokee people and the resulting rush of squatters, Sooners, settlers and grafters who seized the opportunity to claim vast tracts of land in Indian Territory.

“I believe that the project will provide a great deal of information about this era that is not otherwise available to the public,” Williams said. “There is so much history to the Cherokee Nation both before and after the Trail of Tears in 1838-39, when the Cherokee people were forced west. This is one step in educating people about that history.”

The collaboration between MSU and Cherokee Nation will continue this semester with the creation of an educational multimedia resource on the events leading up to the “Allotment Era,” and next semester, when students will undertake an oral history project.

Additional contacts:

Tonia Williams, Cherokee Nation: Tonia-Williams@cherokee.org