Abstract

"Cherokee Nation Industries and the Turn to Tribal Enterprise During the 1970s"

Sam Schirvar, University of Pennsylvania (schirvar@sas.upenn.edu)

This paper follows the early history of Cherokee Nation Industries (CNI), an electronics manufacturer that was incorporated in northeastern Oklahoma in 1969. Because CNI was entirely owned by a tribal government, it differed from almost all of the over 200 assembly plants built near rural Native communities during the 1960s. While some of these plants closed or relocated overseas during the 1970s, Cherokee officials kept CNI in operation to preserve tribal members’ employment. As it expanded during the 1970s and 1980s, CNI employed hundreds of Cherokees to produce wire harnesses, printed circuit boards, and other electronic goods for private and public customers such as International Business Machines and the Department of Defense. Building on a growing field of scholarship which has analyzed Native nations’ struggles to control mineral wealth during the late twentieth century, this paper argues that the Cherokee Nation sought ownership of industrial capital to ensure that tribal members’ labor benefitted the tribal community rather than non-Native employers. Furthermore, CNI was just one stark example of a broad national trend. During the 1970s, tribal governments across the US took on new roles as regional economic planners in rural regions in response to disinvestment by settler capital. Drawing on the archives of the Cherokee Nation government and US federal agencies, as well as oral histories, local newspapers, and the personal papers of Cherokee leaders, this paper examines the confluence of electronics manufacturing, business development, and tribal sovereignty.