THE CHEROKEES: IN WAR AND AT PEACE, 1670-1840″ by David Narrett (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 608 pages, $35).
“Tennessee” is derived from the Cherokee noun Ta-Nas-Ce, “river with a big bend,” which could allude to scores of streams and meanders in the state’s watershed but likely refers to a bend and village along the Little Tennessee River in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. David Narrett’s magisterial, detailed “The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840” maps the Indigenous nation’s outsized influence on the history of the republic that dispossessed them of so much land and esteem.
Narrett, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, flexes his academic muscles here, tracing the trajectory of the Cherokees from their initial brushes with Europeans to the Trail of Tears, just before the Civil War, when East Tennessee served as a point of embarkation. He offers crucial background: Cherokee speech, for example, belongs to the Iroquoian language family, unique among Native tongues in the South, suggesting an earlier migration from the Great Lakes region and a sense of remove from neighbors. They often skirmished with other Indigenous groups. They observed a color protocol: red dress and banners signaled conflict while white indicated coexistence and fruitful dialogue. When colonists encountered the Cherokees in the late 17th century, the Natives were clustered amid mountains and tributaries in present-day Georgia and the Carolinas — small settlements known as the Lower and Middle Towns — and those on the western flanks of the Appalachian divide (Overhill Towns). Political authority was diffuse, drawing, at the local level, on egalitarian ideals such as income redistribution.
“The Cherokees” devotes a sizeable chunk of chapters to the 18th century, as the villages found themselves pawns in the bloody struggles between the British and French empires. Their formidable rivals, the Creeks, also challenged their territory, sparking a frenzy of alliances, sudden betrayals and treaties rarely honored. “Though the Shawnees and Cherokees were former adversaries, their old enmity was not a barrier to cooperation when both parties had something to gain,” Narrett writes. “Creative Native diplomacy came to the fore as a counterweight to chaos, displacement and violence.”
He’s particularly strong in depicting the essential role women played in brokering peace. “Cherokee women maneuvered on a diplomatic front outside formal Native-colonial conferences. It was precisely when official negotiations were in disarray that women’s influence was most keenly exerted.”