Marking Native Borders

Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country
Since time immemorial, Native peoples’ understandings of space and territory have defined the landscape of the Tennessee Country—the region drained by the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries. Marking Native Borders challenges the narrative of inevitable U.S. expansion by exploring how Cherokees and Chickasaws used these notions of space and territory in new and different ways to counter the encroachment of white settlers and land speculators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

When settlers began to trudge over the Appalachian Mountains, intent on making new homes on Native land, Cherokees and Chickasaws fortified their territories by creating clear borders around their nations. They further defended their permanent, inherent right to these bordered spaces by combining Indigenous ideas of communal land use with aspects of European property law. The Cherokees and Chickasaws, however, did not always agree on how to maintain control of their lands, and Lucas P. Kelley’s comparison of their differing strategies provides a nuanced, more accurate picture of Native peoples’ lived experiences in this turbulent time and place. He also describes how white settlers and speculators, in turn, revised their own strategies for expansion in response to the Cherokees’ and Chickasaws’ success in defending their national lands.

The story of the early Tennessee Country is one of competing geographies, contested sovereignties, and disputed boundaries among Chickasaws, Cherokees, settlers, and land speculators. It is a history of conflict and contestation that influenced Native sovereignty and shaped the construction of an American empire. As this book suggests, it is an ongoing story, as Native peoples’ notions of space and territory continue to impact the Tennessee Country today.

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