The evolution of the agricultural settlement pattern of the Southern Cheyenne Indians in western Oklahoma, 1876-1930 /

Abstract

The development, or lack of development, of American Indian agriculture after the subjugation of the Indians by European-Americans, has often been studied as merely one component of the general accommodation ("acculturation"), or failure of accommodation, of Indian societies to non-Indian cultures. In this dissertation, however, the methods of ethnohistorical research are employed to demonstrate that the rate of adoption of economically advantageous agricultural innovations among the Southern Cheyenne Indians of western Oklahoma, during the time perod 1876-1930, was not necessarily associated with the adoption of many other aspects of non-Indian culture.

In particular, it is shown that the non-Indian ideal, enforced to some extent by the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the context of general allotment policy, of a settlement pattern characterized by independent, dispersed, nuclear-family farmsteads was not necessarily conducive to agricultural development. To the contrary, comparisons among the several Southern Cheyenne farm communities indicate that greater success in agricultural growth by some communities than others was largely dependent on the degree of success attained by the Indians in utilizing such forms of cooperation as are usually facilitated by nucleation of settlement.

Emphasis on achievements in cooperation proved of more explanatory utility than theories of agricultural growth that feature the importance of increases in community demand for food resulting from increases in population pressure, or theories that stress the importance of degrees of proximity of farms to marketing facilities. These factors seem to have helped to shape some local configurations of agricultural settlement during certain time periods. More important than increases in gross population numbers, however, were increases in effective manpower (the value of "human capital"), resulting from better integration of the activities of Cheyenne wives and husbands in the division of farm labor, and from progress in "on-the-job" training of Cheyenne farmers. More important than relative proximity to marketing facilities was degree of development of cooperative marketing patterns, which permitted Cheyenne farmers in some communities to adjust the timing of their sales to the fluctuations of farm market prices.