Review of \u3ci\u3eRace and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century\u3c/i\u3e By Fay A. Yarbrough

Fay Yarbrough\u27s Race and the Cherokee Nation adds to recent literature, including Tiya Miles\u27s Ties That Bind (2005) and Celia Naylor\u27s African Cherokees in Indian Territory (2008), that reexamines racial ideology among slave-holding American Indians. Through the use of Cherokee statutory law, marriage licenses, newspaper articles, court records, and WPA interviews, Yarbrough argues that nineteenth-century Cherokee politicians adopted racial laws to serve as a demonstration of sovereignty and reconfigured Cherokee identity by intermingling blood, race, and legal citizenship. Matrilineal clan descent no longer provided the principal claim to Cherokee identity; race increasingly replaced clan identification to determine those who could be Cherokee. Adoption and intermarriage continued to provide secondary paths to inclusion, but through the passage of marriage and citizenship laws legislators recognized that marriage was not solely a private matter of personal choice but an institution that had much larger consequences for the continued existence of the Nation as an independent political and cultural unit