Daejeon, July 27–31
The archive of transatlantic slavery suffers from the dilemma between the scarcity of enslaved people’s self-produced records and abundance of Black death and silence shaped by white supremacist knowledge-making. For instance, the U.S. Census slave schedules in 1850 and 1860 list enslaved people only their “age” and “color,” treating them as properties of the enslavers than as individuals. Historians and scholars of Black life have long grappled with these fragmented and denigrated representations to recover fuller Black life and history. Digital archives risk reproducing this abstraction through categorization required for preservation: When enslaved individuals—frequently unnamed in historical documents such as censuses, ship logs, ledgers, auction books, and insurance policies—are digitized without special attention, they are reduced “in databases as ‘1’ or a single pièce d’Inde” (Johnson 2018: 71). With the continual trend of digitizing archives, how can digital archives trace and repatriate lives whose records cannot be easily recovered due to colonialism and slavery?
My digital publication, Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen: Social Networks of Rejected Applicants (https://doi.org/10.21900/pww.26), is a case study that demonstrates how a digital re-representation of archival material can recognize and visualize formerly enslaved individuals whose fragmented records continue to be marginalized in the archive. Cherokee Freedmen are the African-descended people formerly enslaved by Cherokees and their descendants, embodying the intersection of Blackness and Cherokee identity—two races that have been oppressed under white supremacy. While the 1866 Treaty granted them emancipation and full tribal citizenship, they were repeatedly required to apply for Cherokee Freedmen status to secure the same rights as Cherokees “by blood.” My project digitizes and reorganizes the Cherokee Freedmen Collection at Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library and Archive that contains rejected application material from such Black individuals seeking enrollment on the Dawes Roll—the ‘Final Roll’ determining eligibility for land allotments in the early twentieth century. Despite their rejection, the collection’s transcribed interviews and witness testimonies offer rich insight into Black people’s lives in the Cherokee Nation: racial discrimination, frequent relocations, kinship and community networks, and persistent struggles for legal recognition within Cherokee society.
Ensuing from the long contested socio-political status of Cherokee Freedmen under the complex interracial dynamics of settler colonialism, the rejected Black applicants’ materials embody how such vulnerable position gets reproduced in the archive. The collection’s finding aid notes that materials were recovered as they were being dumped at the Federal Courthouse in Dallas, Texas, indicating how the record of rejection was equated with being disposable. Moreover, a close reading of the collection reveals that the names of women and minors applying for Cherokee citizenship were often obscured within documents organized solely under the male family head, making it difficult to search for or identify individuals across the whole collection. My project emphasizes how the digital platform can give shape to Black personhood and their stories that are socially connected, while acknowledging the doubts concerning the veracity of the rejected applicants’ accounts by providing supplementary historical narratives over such tension.
With the long “afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2008: 6), many historians, archivists, and Black digital humanists critique the reproduction of racial hierarchy that determines recordkeeping practices, and endeavor to transform the infrastructure of digital archives beyond its colonial power as a knowledge system. As Kim Gallon defines Black Digital Humanities, the field emphasizes both the “technology of recovery” of Black lives, and understanding its impossibility, a critical reflection on the “digital episteme of humanity” that sustains or creates new forms of racialization. Black DH thus moves beyond recuperation to question how humanity is digitally constituted and represented. Safiya Noble further demands that “Critical Black Digital Humanities” intervene in the social inequalities and ecological issues newly produced by the rapid development of digital technologies and their infrastructure.
Efforts to engage with records of enslaved people therefore focus on identifying individuals through community collaboration and “reparative description”—defined by the Society of American Archivists—, which seeks to remediate archival descriptions that harm marginalized groups. For example, these include creating metadata that can contain silenced and erased individuals (Enslaved.org; SlaveVoyages), community-centered mindset. Michelle Creswell specifically calls for “liberatory memory work” that centralize archives of the oppressed communities to intentionally unsettle multiple oppression such as western colonialism, hetero-patriarchy, and capitalism (13).
Using visualization, embedded links, and critical metadata practices on Scalar—a free, open-source digital publication platform, Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen offers an alternative means to reconstruct the lives of Black applicants by weaving together their social connections and individual experiences accessible through limited material.
The project starts by historicizing the slavery in Cherokee Nation and the implications of creating Cherokee census rolls that determined citizenship that guaranteed economic and social benefits, which contributed to the multiple marginalizations of (rejected) Cherokee Freedmen between their Black identity and Cherokee sovereignty. These narratives provide the essential contextualization for the controversial recognition of Black people in the Cherokee Nation, as the Nation itself was undergoing dispossession under settler colonialism.
Within this context, I close-read the Cherokee Freedmen Collection to visually map out the social networks found in the interviews. While Orlando Patterson defines enslavement as “social death” that alienates enslaved people from all social connections since their birth, these Black applicants mobilized extensive networks of witnesses—childhood friends, families of former enslavers, neighbors, and lawyers—to support their claims to Cherokee citizenship, revealing their rich interracial social ties. Because this sociality is also reflected in the collection’s intertextuality, the project uses Scalar’s built-in visualization of a force-directed graph to organize the archival materials by their connections instead of numerical or alphabetical ordering. For example, Martha Albert, absent from the original collection’s finding aids, appears in the digital project through a dedicated biographical “page” linked to the pages of her nephew and niece, Robert Barnes and Lula Knalls, for whom she testified. The visualization links each applicant’s “page” figured as a node, connected by edges to the nodes of the related persons found in the collection.
The project features sixteen applicants, who were selected for their prevalent connection with other applicants, and relevant individuals across race who appear in the collection through direct appearance or reference. Each individual’s pages contain an interactive timeline, using Timeline JS, that chronologically features the scanned images of the original collection item with descriptive title, summary of each scanned document, and manually typed transcripts. The metadata for these materials lists the names of all individuals documented in the records, including the minors homogenized under the “et al.” in the current document’s title, so that their names are searchable. A research-enhanced biographical narrative of the person follows, enriched with embedded links that direct the user to related resources within and without the project. These decisions are made to give a fuller image of their lives beyond the original material in a more intuitively accessible and legible form, even to those using screen readers.
Despite the rejection of their claims to citizenship, the visual rearrangement of archival materials as a force-directed graph resists the singularly hierarchical classification of the application materials that puts the child documents under the parent category, a telling metaphor of a patriarchal system. This rhizomatic visualization also favors the individual Black personage in the content of the collection over their application materials as the documents are only accessible through clicking at a particular person’s node—or the individual’s name—to access their biographical page.
Enrolling as Cherokee Freedmen educates the public on the history of Cherokee Freedmen and the oppression on their multiple-marginalizations under colonialism and racial slavery, publicizes archival materials beyond the institutional threshold, and demonstrates
how archival biases can be digitally remediated. For example, the network density of Martha Albert, a Black woman, whose heavy presence in the collection is veiled in the traditional archival setting, amplifies her rich social connections in the visualization of archival materials. The network analysis also illuminates Harry Still, a Cherokee Freedmen who is also one of the “professional witnesses,” getting paid for allegedly testifying in between 200-400 cases for the Dawes enrollment, (Littlefield 229). Still’s repeated presence enlarges the fervent need of Black people that applied for citizenship and how certain people commodified that desire to take advantage of their desperate efforts in the way that their separate stories cannot. Contextualizing the marginalization of Cherokee Freedmen applicants give nuanced interpretations over the different reasons for the high density of Martha Albert and Harry Still.
The stringent foregrounding of marginalized individuals by naming them in metadata, as titles of archival materials, and visually connecting them to related people demonstrates a more enriching description of the enslaved people. These approaches support living descendants seeking connection and identity through genealogy, while challenging academic gatekeeping by advancing more public-facing and accessible archival projects. Similar techniques can be applicable to other archives that challenge power-laden archival systems by centralizing silenced voices.