You may be looking in the wrong places. There is no documentation to support the claim that Louiza was Cherokee. There is no one named Shumate/ Shoemake/ Shoemate or anything similar in any Cherokee records of the period. If she was Cherokee her family would be on the 1835 Cherokee census and she would have been married in the Cherokee Nation, not in the State of Alabama (interracial marriage was illegal there). Someone named Toliver Shoemate was married in Marshall County in 1833 suggesting there was a family by that name living there. Louiza and James did not go to Indian Territory when the Cherokee were removed from Alabama, they went to Arkansas another place the Cherokee had been Removed from. None of Louiza's children applied for a share of the Eastern Cherokee payment in 1907 which was available to Cherokee and Cherokee descendants all over the United States.
