Reply to Alaina E. Roberts

What this looked like in practice for Cherokees were social welfare institutions recognizable to non-Native Americans: educational institutions, orphan and mental health asylums, and a prison.2 The latter institution has particular salience in the wake of the McGirt decision. The Cherokee Nation regularly advocated on behalf of citizens dragged before the federal courts.4 And unlike its southern counterparts, the Cherokee Nation, despite its slaveholding past, never used its prison system to reinstate the more brutal aspects of forced labor as other penitentiaries did, nor did it disproportionately fill its prison with formerly enslaved people.5 But as Roberts points out, the Cherokee Nation’s lack of policing authority over non-Indians left all of Indian Territory vulnerable to the depredations of the hordes of intruders who moved into Indian Territory following the 1862 Homestead Act and the opening of the Unassigned Lands. 2 My first book explored how ideas about social welfare changed over time within the Cherokee Nation, which culminated in the Cherokee Nation’s adoption of universal public education in 1841; its female and male seminaries; and in the post-Civil War period, its prison, mental health facility, and orphanage.