Kinship is, of course, a preoccupation of anthropologists and has been for decades. Rather than simply a substitute for the word family, kinship refers to the structural, systemic, and symbolic elements of the relationships shared among people who identify as kin, whether that be on the basis of blood, obligation, or a mixture of both (Fox 1967). The earliest social science studies of kinship emerged in the British mold of social anthropology, building out theories of kinship based upon the observations of so-called primitive societies (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940, Radcliff-Brown 1952, Fortes 1953), mostly those on the African continent who blended political and kinship structures in a way inconsistent with the state bureaucratic apparatus of Europe and the United States. The anthropological study of kinship has been critiqued from a number of scholars within and beyond the discipline, chief among them David Schneider. Schneider argued that the anthropological approach to kinship studies relied on an unstated assumption that ‘blood is thicker than water.’ He called this assumption part of the ‘ethnoepistemology of European culture’ (1984, 175) and concluded that anthropologists have to grapple with the implications of this tacit assumption, or else abandon the study of kinship altogether.

(Drake 2019)

Axes of Archival Work (Drake 2022) include - exclude possess - dispossess inherit - disinherit embody - disembody

In 2019, archivist and scholar Jarrett Martin Drake made a provocative case: archives function as institutions that decide who counts as family and who qualifies as citizen.

Drake’s argument emerged from an unlikely pairing of work experiences—archives and prisons. These two institutions, he came to see, are mirror opposites in the machinery of belonging. “Whereas archives instantiate and help to facilitate kinship and citizenship ties,” he explains, “the prison exists to ensure their erasure.” Together, they form opposing poles in what Drake calls “processes of belonging and un-belonging”—establishing who is and isn’t legitimate before the state (Drake 2019).

The Family Fetish Drake identifies American archival practice’s “family fetish”—an obsession with genealogical documentation that shaped the field from its inception. Early U.S. archives weren’t national projects but private historical societies collecting family papers of wealthy merchants, enslavers, and politicians. When public archives emerged in the post-Reconstruction South, they served a specific purpose: documenting white Southerners’ lineage to Confederate soldiers for monument dedications, pension claims, and membership in organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (Drake 2019). This genealogical emphasis persists today. Drake notes that despite archivists’ preferred self-image, “the most consistent and persistent user base of archival repositories have been genealogists”—whether the archive is a public government agency or a university library division. This system made archives the gatekeepers of kinship. Technological standards like EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context) still inscribe family as a natural, stable entity. But as Drake argues, “this assumption barely holds up for white people, and it certainly does not hold up for the black, indigenous, and Latinx peoples who have had to forge and re-forge familial ties in particular forms as a way to cope with white supremacy, cisgender heteronormativity, forced migration, mass criminalization, and invading armies.” (Drake 2019) ¹

The Myth of Neutrality

The claimed neutrality of archives masks this gatekeeping function. As historian Howard Zinn argued in a then-controversial 1970 speech to archivists, “the archivist, even more than the historian and the political scientist, tends to be scrupulous about his neutrality, and to see his job as a technical job, free from the nasty world of political interest.” But Zinn insisted that “the archivist, in subtle ways, tends to perpetuate the political and economic status quo simply by going about his ordinary business. His supposed neutrality is, in other words, a fake.” (missing reference) Cherokee people are among the best-documented Native populations in America. The National Archives holds numerous Cherokee rolls and census records spanning from 1817 to 1924, including emigration rolls, reservation rolls, payment rolls, and citizenship rolls maintained by both Cherokee tribal government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (National Archives 2016) The dual nature of genealogical archives—simultaneously protecting and destroying the communities they document—appears throughout modern history. Jewish communities across Europe maintained meticulous records of births, marriages, and religious affiliations, essential for cultural continuity and religious practice. Nazi authorities weaponized these same records, transforming synagogue membership lists and vital statistics into tools of genocide. What had been archives of belonging became registries for extermination (missing reference) The Cherokee rolls operated through similar contradictions. Initially, some documentation served Cherokee governance and kinship recognition. Later, the US government would use these historical rolls not to recognize Cherokee sovereignty but to dissolve it, transforming communal land into individual allotments that could be more easily appropriated, while assimilating an oppositional culture into a more palatable form—patriarchal, slave-and-property-owning nuclear families with uneven wealth distribution. While the Cherokee clan system remained, its social cohesion was subtly broken down by an intervention in its system of kinship posed by an alien concept: race. The archive’s “neutrality” collapses in the face of the reality of its uses by power. The same documents that could affirm Cherokee citizenship and kinship became instruments of removal, individualization, and erasure—depending entirely on who controlled them and toward what ends. As with Jewish genealogies under Nazi rule, Cherokee documentation reveals that archives are never neutral repositories. They are technologies of power whose effects depend fundamentally on who holds authority over their interpretation and use. Despite troves of documentation, white Southerners routinely claimed Cherokee ancestry based solely on family lore, absent any evidence. These claims began in the 1840s-50s as a way to legitimate their “native-born status as sons or daughters of the South”—using supposed Indigenous kinship to assert authentic white regional identity, even as actual Indigenous people were being removed (missing reference). By the post-Reconstruction era, such claims often functioned as dogwhistle signifiers of Lost Cause Confederate allegiance, echoing Cherokee siding with Confederate armies during the US civil war. The archive accommodated these undocumented white claims while demanding rigorous proof from actual Cherokee descendants.

The Shoeboots Family: Kinship vs. Racial Citizenship

The archive’s racial violence cut deep within mixed-heritage Cherokee families. The Dawes Commission, tasked with creating final citizenship rolls from 1898-1906, established three distinct classifications: “Cherokee by Blood,” “Intermarried White,” and “Freedmen.” This imposed racial categories that hadn’t previously structured Cherokee kinship, splitting families across bureaucratic lines—and sometimes erasing them entirely.

The Shoeboots family exemplifies this rupture. Shoe Boots (Tarsekayahke), a Cherokee warrior, and Doll (Congeeloh), an enslaved African woman he owned, had five children together between 1807 and the late 1820s. In 1824, Shoe Boots petitioned the Cherokee National Council for the freedom and citizenship of his three eldest children—Elizabeth, John, and Polly. His language invoked kinship: “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” (missing reference)

The Council granted it, recognizing both kinship obligation (Shoe Boots was Wolf Clan, and Council members would have been his clan brothers) and evolving patrilineal descent. But the decision revealed deep tensions. On the same day they freed Shoe Boots’ children, the Council banned intermarriage between Cherokees and enslaved people and expelled all free Blacks from the Nation. Kinship obligation prevailed in this case—but only barely, and only for these specific children.

Two younger sons, twins William and Lewis, were excluded from the 1824 petition. When Shoe Boots died in 1829, his sisters Peggy and Takesteskee fought for the twins’ freedom under traditional kinship obligations, but the National Committee refused. Later, when Thomas Woodard, Shoe Boots’ own nephew and estate administrator, acquired his cousin Elizabeth, he “chose to define Doll and the children as property rather than kin”—a stark moment revealing how racial citizenship could override kinship recognition even within families.

The Dawes Rolls completed this erasure. “The Dawes Roll of 1898–1914 and the Guion-Miller Roll of 1909–1910…do not include any people named Shoeboots.” Over 1,400 Cherokee Freedmen applicants were rejected despite witnesses testifying to their Cherokee language fluency, cultural participation, and kinship ties. The archive demanded “blood” where lived kinship existed, making citizenship a matter of documented racial classification rather than lived familial bonds.

Archives and Citizenship

Archives don’t only arbitrate kinship—they also cultivate citizenship. They preserve constitutions, laws, and governmental records that theoretically allow citizens to contest grievances and hold the state accountable. As Drake explains, “It is within the archive that the subject becomes a citizen, fully aware of the benefits guaranteed in the legal system(s) designed for her enjoyment.”

Yet as Zinn observed, “the existence, preservation, and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the public.” The accessibility of archives is presented as fundamental to democracy—but access itself is structured by existing hierarchies of power.

The Cherokee Freedmen case demonstrates how archival power operates through structural design, not just document preservation. The 1866 treaty explicitly granted freed slaves “all the rights of native Cherokees”—the document existed, preserved in the archive. Yet the Dawes Rolls, established as the authoritative citizenship archive, structured exclusion through racial classifications that contradicted the treaty. Blood quantum requirements and “Cherokee by Blood” designations became the operational archive—the mechanism that determined who could actually claim citizenship.

The archive preserved the treaty while simultaneously constructing an apparatus that denied it. Which document counted as authoritative? The answer reveals that archives don’t neutrally preserve history—they actively determine whose claims to citizenship will be recognized.

Prisons: The Opposite Pole

If archives instantiate kinship and citizenship, prisons systematically destroy them. Drake details how prisons sever family bonds through expensive phone calls, remote locations, and dehumanizing visitation policies. They strip citizenship by removing voting rights and access to the government records that archives preserve. Forced sterilizations of incarcerated women prevented future kinship ties altogether.

As Drake explains, prisons render people as “non-family and non-citizens. By stripping incarcerated people of fundamental human and democratic rights, prisons strive to make non-humans out of humans and non-citizens out of citizens.” He describes prisons as “graveyards of exclusion”—the ultimate sites of un-belonging.

But archives can function similarly when they memorialize certain families while disappearing others, validating some claims to belonging while denying the rest. The difference is that archives cloak this violence in the language of neutrality and preservation.

Rebel Archives

Drake calls for “rebel archives” that resist rather than reinforce exclusion. The Shoeboots family created their own. In 1887, at age 64, William Shoeboots—one of the twins denied freedom in 1829—applied for Cherokee citizenship. His testimony before the Cherokee Commission on Citizenship opened by naming his relatives: “My mother was ‘Dolly’—a black woman—she had six children by Tarsekayahke—My brothers and sisters named as follows—Lizzie Shoeboots, Jno [John] Shoeboots, Polly Shoeboots, Lewis Shoeboots, William Shoeboots (myself). Lewis and myself were twins.” He named his seven children. He spoke of his father’s service in the Creek War and his mother’s Cherokee name, Congeeloh (missing reference).

The Cherokee Commission wrestled with his case. Commissioner Henry Barnes testified that “the evidence produced before the Commission proved to the satisfaction of the Commission and beyond all doubt that the claimant, William Shoeboot, was the son of old Shoeboot, well known as a prominent citizen of the Cherokee nation.” They recognized William as “a Cherokee man deserving of Cherokee citizenship.” (missing reference)

But they couldn’t grant it. Shoe Boots died in 1829, before the 1835 roll that had become the legal baseline for proving Cherokee descent. Without an ancestor on that roll, William had no claim—even though everyone involved knew his father had been Cherokee. The archive’s arbitrary date cutoff erased what everyone acknowledged as fact (missing reference).

When William’s children Rufus and Lizzie appealed to the Dawes Commission in 1896, the response was harsher. Written in handwriting at the bottom of a form letter: “Wm Shoeboots mother was pure blood African who was never married to his father an Indian. That said applicants are negroes and not entitled to citizenship in this Nation.” (missing reference)

The Cherokee Nation’s attorneys reinforced this, clarifying that “prior to the war, descendants of Cherokee men by women of the African race were not considered by the Cherokees as members of the Tribe: Section 5, Article 3 of the Constitution of the Cherokee Nation.” They noted a further problem: because the family claimed to be free-born Cherokees (which Elizabeth, John, and Polly were, by the 1824 Council decision), they couldn’t appeal to the 1866 treaty that granted citizenship to freed slaves.

“To be a black citizen of the Cherokee Nation,” the logic went, “required always having been a slave.” A family that was black and Cherokee, enslaved and free, had no place within the streamlined racial categories. The archive couldn’t accommodate their reality (missing reference).

Intergenerational Testimony

Yet the Shoeboots family persisted in creating their own archive through these citizenship applications. Across generations, they produced their own documentary record, insisting on kinship and citizenship that official archives denied.

John Cochran, Shoe Boots’ great-nephew (likely grandson of his sister Peggy who had fought for the twins’ freedom), testified on William’s behalf: “Capt. Shoeboots was a Cherokee by blood. Shoeboots was my mother’s uncle. Shoeboots was in the wolf clan.” He wove Shoe Boots and his family into the web of familial, clan, and tribal relationships, indicating that “long before the Cherokees became a race-conscious nation, Shoe Boots was a Cherokee. And in accordance with the logic of kinship, so too were his children. (missing reference)”

Liberation Work

Howard Zinn anticipated Drake’s call for rebel archives fifty years earlier, arguing that if “the normal functioning of the scholar, the intellectual, the researcher, helps maintain those corrupt norms” in society, “then what we always asked of scholars in those terrible places is required of us in the United States today: rebellion against the norm.”

The archive has always decided who belongs. Drake’s challenge is direct: “If archivists care as much about families and citizenship as much as their websites, publications, and projects profess, then they would begin to see the prison as the ultimate rupture of those notions and envision their work as seminal in contesting these graveyards of exclusion.”

As he insists, “Nobody belongs in prison,” and the work of creating archives that affirm rather than deny belonging requires “an insurgent intentionality and an orientation to the work that, if practiced, brings us all to a more approximate version of freedom. That is the labor, and if we do it right, that is also the liberation.”

1. Drake, Jarrett M. 2019. “‘Graveyards of Exclusion:’ Archives, Prisons, and the Bounds of Belonging.” Sustainable Futures.