This dissertation works to uncover the experiences and slaveholding practices of Cherokee women between 1800 and 1865. Elite Cherokee women used slaveholding as an avenue of power in the nineteenth century, as the United States and some Cherokee men worked to limit their political and economic power. The Cherokee Nation centralized their political system in the early nineteenth century and modeled their government after the United States, with some differences. This change took political power away from matrilineal clans and Cherokee women and gave it to a small group of elite men in a centralized government. These slaveholding women melded together older Cherokee gender roles alongside aspects of Euro-American gender roles in how they practiced slavery. Building off the scholarship of historians who studied white women and Native American slaveholders, this dissertation further expands the conversation surrounding chattel slavery by adding previously unstudied group of slaveholders. A variety of archival sources are used in this project including governmental sources from both the Cherokee Nation and the United States, court records, and Christian missionary records and letters, and newspapers. Sources from Cherokee women used include letters and diaries. It also uses oral history interviews conducted in the 1930s of Cherokee freedpeople and Cherokee women slaveholders. The interactions between enslaved people and Indigenous people are critical to understanding this period in Cherokee history and are discussed in this project. Grounded in ethnohistory, this dissertation argues that Cherokee women played central roles in the adoption, growth, and maintenance of chattel slavery between 1800 and the end of the Civil War. They found additional sources of economic power through the forced enslavement of Afro-Cherokee people.