Cherokee Studies

Elijah Clark should be remembered as an important frontier leader during the American Revolution in Georgia and South Carolina, and in establishing the peace afterwards. Born in 1742, likely in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, he was the son of ambitious backcountry settler John Clark (1689-1764), although their genealogy remains murky. This article updates the piece that was published in the Journal of the American Revolution.

Extractivism is an extension of settler colonialism designed to exploit the lands and waters by removing material resources, labor, foods, data, and even cultural practices, in order to benefit economically and politically from their commodification and production. Indigenous-led resurgence offers an alternative to extractivism that focuses on a turning away from the state to renew and reinvigorate land and water-based relationships and community-based governance (Corntassel, 2021a, p. 73).

This study investigates the multifaceted and frequently underexamined participation of Native American nations in the American Civil War, a subject that—despite increased scholarly attention—remains marginal within mainstream historical discourse. Employing a comprehensive analysis of political motivations, internal tribal divisions, military alliances, and postwar consequences, the research elucidates the ways in which Indigenous communities engaged with the broader national conflict as part of their ongoing struggle to safeguard sovereignty, territorial integrity, and cultural continuity. Drawing on an extensive range of primary sources, including treaties, correspondence, military records, and oral histories, the study examines the strategic alignments forged with both the Union and the Confederacy by tribes such as the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, situating these decisions within broader contexts of historical grievance, economic necessity, and pragmatic survival.
The analysis foregrounds the leadership and agency of figures such as Stand Watie and Opothleyahola, whose divergent wartime strategies encapsulated the internal complexities of Native political life. Their actions reflect not only the contested nature of allegiance within Indigenous nations but also the adaptability and resilience with which Native leaders navigated competing imperial powers. By interrogating these internal dynamics, the study challenges simplistic portrayals of Native involvement as monolithic or peripheral, instead situating Indigenous actors as central participants in a conflict that reshaped the geopolitical landscape of North America.
In addressing the postwar period, the research critically engages with the patterns of dispossession, treaty violations, and intensified federal oversight that followed Native participation in the war. These outcomes underscore the paradox of Indigenous wartime engagement: substantial contributions to the military and political theaters were met with systemic betrayal and the erosion of self-determination. By centering Indigenous perspectives, this work contributes to a decolonial historiography that reframes the Civil War as a transformative event in Native American history—one that profoundly influenced questions of sovereignty, identity, and survival well into the modern era.

To my all my relations, especially my Grandmothers, Nora L. Ritchie and the late F. Marie Boyle, Grandfathers the late James D. Waucaush and Robert F. Boyle, to my parents Carol A. Boyle and Richard A. Boyle and also to my husband William J. Warn and to my daughter Lillian M. Warn.

"Native Nations: A Millenium" in North America is a highly-acclaimed account of Native-American history over a one thousand year period. It has won both the prestigious Bancroft History Prize awarded by the American Historical Association and the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2025. It author is Kathleen DuVal, chairperson of the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

While the book establishes the continued presence of Native Americans  over 1,000 years base by examining the pre-Columbian mound complex at Cahokia on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, it gives short shrift to the Ancestral Pueblo complexes at Chaco Canyon New Mexico and Mesa Verde Colorado nor the Folsom and Clovis projectile points (spear and arrow heads) found in New Mexico and Arizona, respectively.

But more important is the fact the DuVal includes in her book the Lumbees in North Carolina who have only oral tradition to base their claim on Indian ancestry. She relies on the uncritical acceptance of the work of her friend and former colleague at UNC, Malinda Maynor Lowery, who herself is a Lumbee. The Lumbees have claimed to descend from difference tribes, including the Croatoan, Tuscarora, Cherokee, and Cheraw, but there is extensive genealogical evidence that they descend from free Blacks who came to North Carolina from Virginia in the eighteenth century.

I convey gratitude to the Native researchers who have become before me, those who contributed to changes in perceptions to more positive ones, and those who catalogued the often difficult and painful stories of our ancestors. My friends at OSU, whom I have long referred to as my PhD buddies, have provided ongoing support without which I would not have finished this project. Thank you to Kelli Carney, Sherri Been, Valarie Farrow, LaKrisa Walker, and others who have been there for suggestions, as sounding boards, and for the occasional kick in the butt when needed. I also appreciate Oklahoma State University for providing me with a summer fellowship, assisting me so that I could make one last trip to North Carolina for data collection and allowing me time to focus on this project. While many other friends have been supportive, and I thank them, I would like to express my particular gratitude to Rita Bunch, who was my wonderful boss during much of the doctoral journey, and Sherry Holcomb, my friend upon whom I could always depend to answer any questions related to Cherokee language or tradition. My colleagues with whom I now work have also provided much-needed support and encouragement; I am fortunate to work with such amazing and dedicated educators. Although there are many more whom I should show appreciation, I conclude with my family. My husband, Brian, has been incredibly patient throughout this lengthy process, and my kids, Cassandra, Alysa, and Colton, did not give up on me. My mother expressed her pride and support for what I was doing. I love and appreciate them all, as v Acknowledgements reflect the views of the author and are not endorsed by committee members or Oklahoma State University. well as my many other family members, both via blood and via marriage, who have supported me throughout my educational odyssey.

the Southeastern Tribes (the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played-off the British colonies (North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) against the French colony in Louisiana and the Spanish colony of La Florida (Florida today). Although the Choctaw and Chickasaw were culturally and linguistically related, the Choctaw became allied with the French, and the Chickasaw with the British. While originally the trade with the English was in deerskins, when the deer were depleted, the Chickasaw turned to capturing  other Indians, who then were sold as slaves to be exported by the English in South Carolina to the West Indies. Both the Creek and the Cherokee traded with the English, but the Creek and Cherokee were enemies of each other. Both the French and the English tried to realign these tribes, but the tribes played one against the other.

The situation was complicated by the fact that escaped African-American slaves and Creek took refuge in Spanish Florida, where they coalesced into the Seminole tribe. Governor George Oglethorpe of Georgia attempted to enlist Chickasaw in his attacks against the Spaniards in Florida. The play-off between these tribes and the French ended in 1763, when France ceded the land east of the Mississippi River to England. But after the American Revolution, the trade-off between the Southeastern Tribes, the Spaniards, and the United States continued into the first half of the nineteenth century.

“Who served as a Soldier in the Western Army, in the Massachusetts Line, in the Expedition under General HARMAR, and the unfortunate General St. CLAIR. Containing An Account of his CAPTIVITY, SUFFERINGS, and ESCAPE from the KICKAPOO INDIANS. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF, And published at the earnest Importunity of his Friends, for the benefit of AMERICAN YOUTH.”

This article critically examines the pivotal role education plays in the preservation and transmission of cultural heritage across generations on a global scale. Drawing extensively from the book Heritage Through Learning: How Education Preserves Global Cultures, it investigates how Indigenous knowledge systems, language preservation, migration dynamics, and digital technologies are integrated into diverse educational frameworks to sustain and revitalize collective identities, traditions, and values. Amid the accelerating forces of globalization, rapid technological advancement, and significant social transformation, traditional modes of cultural transmission-including oral histories, rituals, and communal practices-face unprecedented threats. The study underscores the necessity of adaptive and contextually sensitive educational strategies that promote cultural sustainability and resilience. These strategies include the incorporation of Indigenous epistemologies into formal curricula, the facilitation of intergenerational learning processes, and the innovative use of digital platforms to enhance access and engagement with cultural heritage. Moreover, the article highlights the critical importance of authentic, inclusive, and reflexive approaches to heritage education that respect cultural integrity while fostering intercultural dialogue and understanding. Ultimately, it advocates for educational policies and practices that balance preservation with innovation to ensure that cultural heritage remains a living, evolving resource for future generations.

The Lumbee Indians of North Carolina have no Native-American language, customs, or treaty with the United States. They claim descent from the Croatoan Indians, the Cherokee, the Tuscarora, and Cheraw, but these claims are based on oral tradition alone. Their ancestors were listed as free Negroes originally from Virginia. After Reconstruction, they switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party in exchange for being recognized by the State of North Carolina as an Indian tribe and establishing their segregated Indian normal school, today the Pembroke campus of the University of North Carolina. In 1956 they were partially recognized by an Act of Congress  despite opposition by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The compromise was that they would not qualify for the benefits of a recognized Indian tribe. Since then the Lumbees have attempted to gain full recognition by an act of Congress, despite the Cherokee and other federally recognized tribes insisting that the Lumbees be vetted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. A postscript notes that Katherine DuVal's 2024 Pulitzer Prize- winning book "Native Nations: A Millennium in North America" uncritically assumes that the Lumbees are a legitimate Native-American tribe based on the work of her "friend and colleague" Malinda Maynor Lowery, who identifies as a Lumbee.

In the spring of 1990, a prehistoric burial site in a small cave in Cherokee National Forest, Johnson County, Tennessee was almost completely destroyed by artifact collectors. Archaeological investigation of the disturbed deposits, conducted with the consent of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, ...

Samuel Mason’s life reflects the violent, shifting loyalties of early America. Born in 1739, he served under George Washington but quickly gained a reputation as a thief, counterfeiter, and river pirate. From frontier forts to the outlaw stronghold of Cave-In-Rock, Mason led a gang that terrorized travelers along the Mississippi River and Natchez Trace. Once a justice of the peace, he died in disgrace—his severed head returned for bounty. From Soldier to Scoundrel traces Mason’s descent into infamy and examines how blurred the line between patriot and predator could be in the lawless American frontier.

Recent implementations of Bayesian chronological modeling of Indigenous North American archaeological sites have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach when encountering calibration plateaus and reversals, such as the series which spans the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries AD. High-precision dating of this time period is especially relevant to researchers of the North American Southeast, as this coincides with the initial interactions between Late Mississippian chiefdoms and late medieval Europeans. Southeastern American archaeologists who study this period have until recently favored other indirect dating techniques, including ethnohistoric data and the presence/absence of European-sourced materials. This can lead to a conflation of materiality and chronology, erasing Indigenous agency in the construction of history in the early modern world, simplifying the diverse stratagems employed by Indigenous polities. New high-precision AMS radiocarbon data, combined with Bayesian chronological modeling structured by Native materials, spaces, and ethnohistoric data, offer researchers an opportunity to create robust chronological models that push beyond these unfortunate settler-colonial constraints and Indigenous narratives in North American history. Through this method, this paper expands the historical narrative of the landscape of Joara and its neighbors, who dominated the political landscape of Western North Carolina before, during, and after early Spanish colonial attempts.

The Private John G. Burnett letter1 has long been considered one of the primary source2 documents related to eyewitness experience of the Trail of Tears. The Letter memorializes the experiences of a Soldier who accompanied the Cherokee across country on the Trail of Tears. It is arguably the most quoted and referenced document related to the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee Removal. Shockingly, the document has been proven to be a fabricated artifact, containing fictitious stories, which, while being widely cited in many academic works, has avoided academic scrutiny for over one hundred years. Three questions arise. First: What evidence supports the claim that the Burnett Letter and its contents are a hoax? Second: How has this Hoax survived and thrived for so many years? Third: If the information truly is fiction and lies, what misinformation, flawed historical narrative, and historically harmful consequences have resulted from the wide dissemination of these lies? Transcripts of the Burnett Letter Note: The entire letter is fourteen pages and often excerpted or truncated. Several sources of complete Letter are: • Museum of the Cherokee People website-see digital scan and read the actual artifact.

In March and April of 1825 General LaFayette , "the Nation's Guest" journeyed through the Creek Nation as he traveled from Georgia to Alabama. In 1825 the Creek Nation was still an independent nation. How would the Creek leaders respond to a former enemy? Would he be welcomed or would be shunned? Surprisingly the entire Creek Nation enthusiastically welcomed and honored the man they referred to as, "The Favorite Father" and "The French Captain."  They respected him because he clearly believed in equal rights for all.

This article examines Native American political strategies that were leveraged in the design, construction, and eventual preservation of the mid-nineteenth-century civic architectures of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), and Seminole Nations. Predating a turn toward the “politics of recognition,” these architectures advanced what could be described as “cultural misrecognition,” as they presented an appearance of assimilation to U.S. cultural and political norms while nonetheless supporting the Five Tribes’ resistance to one of the most fundamental operations of U.S. governance: the treatment of land as a privately owned exploitable resource. In the absence of detailed historical records attesting to the architectural choices made by the Five Tribes’ leaders, this article reads architecture through the political histories of the Five Tribes in order to understand how these buildings served the nations in their struggles to maintain sovereignty.

Reuben Gold Thwaites'in kaleme aldığı The Romance of Mississippi Valley History, Mississippi Vadisi'nin zengin ve dramatik tarihini, epik bir anlatımla sunuyor. İlk yerli halkların yaşamından, Avrupalı kaşiflerin maceralarına, sınır boylarındaki destansı mücadelelere ve kıtanın şekillenmesine kadar uzanan bu eser, tarihin kuru bir anlatıdan çok daha fazlası olduğunu gösteriyor. Thwaites, tarih ile hikâye anlatıcılığının iç içe geçtiği bir yaklaşımla, okuyucularına Mississippi Vadisi'nin bilinmeyen köşelerini keşfetme fırsatı sunuyor. Kolonileşme dönemindeki Fransız, İspanyol ve İngiliz etkilerini, Amerikan Devrimi’nden Batı’nın fethine uzanan olayları ve vadinin nasıl bir ulusun kaderini şekillendirdiğini, büyüleyici bir üslupla aktarıyor. Tarih, yalnızca akademik bir alan değil, bir milletin kimliğini oluşturan canlı bir hikâyedir anlayışıyla yazılan bu eser, tarih severler kadar edebiyat tutkunları için de kaçırılmayacak bir kaynak. Mississippi Vadisi'nin romantizmi ve destansı geçmişiyle tanışmaya hazır olun!

Kudzu, a vine originating in East Asia, is notorious in the South for its invasive nature and destruction of the environment. This article describes the impact of Western European culture on Cherokee culture brought about by sustained exposure to one another. Kudzu is employed as a metaphor to describe the destructive, invasive impact of Western European values at the expense of the Cherokee people. The creep of Western European culture upon the Cherokee culture started subtly, but over time and through stealth, Cherokee culture has not only been overtaken but torn apart in a way that was unnoticed until it was too late to fully recover. This essay serves as a warning to not only the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (ECBI) but to Americans in general. The lessons of encroachment by cultural kudzu must be learned and understood by all. In the current state of American society, we are on fertile political ground for the expansion of cultural kudzu. Much like the planting of kudzu, it only takes one cultural seed, dropped in fertile soil, to propel the invasive creep that can infest and destroy other cultures in America.

This thesis explores the complex, divided landscape of Cyprus and the resulting disparities in archaeological practices and cultural heritage preservation, particularly between the Republic of Cyprus (ROC) and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). It explores the exclusion of Turkish Cypriot communities from archaeological discourse, raising questions about identity politics, heritage ownership, and belonging. Ethnographic methods, specifically in-field interviews and surveys, were employed to explore the perspectives of archaeological practitioners operating within a de-facto state, giving voice to their experiences. Survey respondents critique rhetoric and enactments of nationalist dominance in Cypriot archaeological practice and scholarship, calling for more inclusive and reflexive approaches that prioritize collaboration, multi-vocality, and the participation of marginalized groups. Drawing on community-based and decolonial methodologies (Atalay, 2007; González Ruibal, 2018), the study highlights the importance of bi-communal strategies to address contested spaces of heritage and archaeological knowledge production.

The study introduces dyadic terminologies to reflect multiple identities and historical narratives, which, survey and interview participants highlight are relevant to their lived experiences on a divided island. Acknowledging these terms will foster a shift in narrative and present new dialogue within the fields of heritage and archaeology. Participants criticize the limitations of policies like the Hague Convention, which reinforce nationalist narratives and fail to recognize northern realities (Knapp & Antoniadou, 1998; Summerer et al., 2023). Engagement without political recognition is discussed as a potential strategy, though concerns persist about professional risks (blacklisting) and political implications (recognition). The bi-communal model is highlighted as a way forward, despite ongoing skepticism and management flaws, emphasizing the importance of continued collaboration and its generative impacts on the future of archaeology in Cyprus.

MIKAELA M. ADAMS: Who Belongs? Becoming Tribal Members in the South (Under the direction of Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green) As a third race in the Jim Crow South, Indians struggled to maintain their political sovereignty and separate identity in the face of racial legislation and discrimination. To protect their status as tribal members and to defend their resources from outsiders, Indians developed membership criteria that reflected their older notions of kinship and culture, but also the new realities of a biracial world. This dissertation examines the responses of four southeastern Indian peoples to the problem of defining who legally belonged to Indian tribes. Although the Pamunkeys, Catawbas, Eastern Band of Cherokees, and Florida Seminoles dealt with similar questions regarding reservation residency, cultural affinity, intermarriage, "blood," and race, each developed different requirements for tribal membership based on their unique histories and relationships with federal and state officials. The varying experiences of these southeastern tribes belie the notion of an essential "Indian," and instead show that membership in a tribe is a historically-constructed and constantly-evolving process. held by Euro-Americans, thereby linking ideas of citizenship with emerging ideas of race. 27 Race became a standard measure of social and political belonging, and the Cherokees even passed a series of anti-miscegenation laws in order to create social distance between themselves and their African slaves. Marriage laws, according to Fay Yarbrough, helped define the boundaries of Indians' national identity because marriage produces citizens. 29 As more Cherokee women began choosing spouses outside of the Nation in the nineteenth century and as an increasing population of foreign men sought Cherokee wives to gain access to resources, Cherokee legislators began policing interracial marriage and interracial sex. 30 The first targets of these new laws were people of African descent, reflecting the Cherokees' internalization of racial discourse. In 1824, the Cherokees passed a law prohibiting intermarriage with blacks. 31 As Claudio Saunt has shown, the Creeks passed similar laws to restrict black intermarriage. 32 The Creek law code of 1818 included a version of the Southern states' black code and it discouraged intermarriage between Creeks and Africans. According to Gary Zellar, the Creeks wrote these laws to assuage white fears in the surrounding areas. 33 To protect 27

Presented at the 80th Southeastern Archaeological Conference:
Through the combination of materials analysis, new AMS radiocarbon data, and Bayesian modeling, this paper expands on the history of Joara, a Late Mississippian chiefdom in Western North Carolina. Much of our current knowledge of this place is drawn from work at the Berry site, the presumed capital of Joara as well as the location of Fort San Juan, a Spanish fortified outpost destroyed in 1568 by Joarans. Moving beyond this dramatic narrative and into other archaeological sites, my paper considers the power of place and history in the persistence of the Indigenous chiefly landscape of Western North Carolina.

This is another of the William Johnston collected manuscripts from the Schoolcraft Papers. Although conflating probably a couple centuries worth of conflicts under Saugemau, a powerful leader with great shamanistic powers, Chusco's tale is of tremendous importance for ethnohistorical research. I have added comments, making what connections I can, though probably the tip of the iceberg. His version of war with the Mascouten should be further impetus for seeking Mascouten archeological sites in NW Michigan.

The Echota trace their roots to the Chickamauga Cherokee of North Alabama. Today the Echota number 22,000 with a tribal council that administers tribal lands, supports a dance team, publishes a newsletter, and supervises an Indian education program. One of the tribe's objectives is to revitalize the Cherokee language. Working with Auburn University (Alabama), the council seeks to establish a database on tribal language resources and attitudes. The ultimate goal is to offer instruction in the Cherokee language through the Alabama public school system. This paper discusses the survey design and implications of the data gathered by a pretest for the future of the Echota language project. Since survey returns are incomplete, findings are only from the pretest. The pretest was returned from 21 individuals chosen by clan chiefs. Ages of pretest participants ranged from 15 to 69; 62 percent were male. Results of the pretest indicate that the survey instrument adequately measures the status of Cherokee language use among tribal members, assesses the linguistic attitudinal climate, and estimates the extent of support and participation that the proposed project will receive. The pretest also indicates that there is some degree of Cherokee language knowledge within the Echota population, and that the Echota envision both social and personal rewards from the reacquisition of the Cherokee language. An appendix contains the survey questionnaire. (SAS)

Colonel William Russell, a prominent militia commander, was said to be "dilatory" when preparing his march to relieve Fort Watauga which was under siege by the Cherokee in July, 1776. A thorough analysis of his situation might help explain why he was thought by some to be procrastinating.

Since the colonial era, the tomahawk has served as a symbol of Indian savagery in American arts and literature. The pipe tomahawk, however, tells a different story. From its backcountry origins as a trade good to its customization as a diplomatic device, this object facilitated European-Indian exchange, giving tangible form to spoken metaphors for war, peace, and alliance. The production, distribution, and use of the pipe tomahawk also illustrated contrasting Indian and European notions of value and utility in material objects, exposing the limits of such goods in promoting cross-cultural mediation and understanding.

For a decade, growing numbers of scholars have interrogated the topics of Native American people of African descent, relations between Native Americans and African Americans, and the enslavement of African people by Native people. These subjects were once familiar mostly to specialists in the histories of the native peoples of the regions we now call the Southeast and Oklahoma. But they have drawn increasing attention from scholars in American studies and related disciplines and have become associated with a number of authors, including James F. Brooks, Jack D. Forbes, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, Claudio Saunt, and Circe Sturm. Indeed, the book reviewed here was published almost simultaneously with a closely related work, Saunt's excellent history of a Creek family with African, white, and Indian roots and branches. Why has a field that some might consider obscure, and some others would prefer to leave in obscurity, come to command such attention?

In June 1898, a group of men gathered in the town of Wewoka, capital of the Seminole Nation, to found the Inter-national Afro-American League. With an eye toward impending changes in the political and social landscape of Indian Territory, they dedicated themselves to mobilizing African Americans to defend their interests.∞ The name of the league is worthy of close examination. The term ‘‘Afro-American’’ proudly proclaimed the enduring identification of these black Ameri- cans with Africa. In the word ‘‘Inter-national’’ we are tempted to hear a related affirmation: that the struggle of African Americans was part of a worldwide struggle of people of African descent. Although this interpretation is possible, another is more likely and more instructive. In the context of Wewoka in the 1890s, ‘‘international’’ often referred to relations among the principal nations of Indian Territory: the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole nations. The founders of the league were inhabitants of these nations. By organizing across national lines and by claiming the name ‘‘Afro-American,’’ the founders of the organization affirmed the racial unity that bound them together. By asserting that this was an international organization, the founders of the league also asserted that the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole nations were indeed nations, and this at a time that the federal government of the United States was threatening to abolish those nations’ political existence. Read in this way, the name of the Inter-national Afro-American League signals the power that the idea of the nation held in late-nineteenth-century Indian Territory.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Native Americans rarely adorned ceramic objects with glass beads, despite the millions of beads introduced by Europeans through trade. Bead-decorated ceramics have been reported from only nine sites in North America, perhaps due to a tendency for archaeologists to overlook or misclassify bead-inlaid pottery. The 40 artifacts represent widely divergent ethnic groups separated from each other culturally, as well as by great distances in space and time. Yet they display a remarkable consistency in the pattern of bead arrangement and use of color. Colored glass beads stand in for human eyes in effigy smoking pipes and white beads encircle the mouths of pottery vessels. Rather than examples of idiosyncratic coincidence, crafters of these objects communicated broadly shared ideological metaphors. These rare artifacts speak to the interconnectedness of ancient Native Americans and to related worldviews developed over centuries of intercommunication invol...

This paper will argue that Grave Houses, sometimes referred to as Spirit Houses, found in various parts of the United States are the result of Indigenous cultural practices. These practices are part of their burial customs and beliefs that existed prior to European contact. The use of Grave Houses traveled with Indigenous people from their homelands to their modern communities in which they live today. There are numerous tribes who share the practice of using Grave Houses; however, this paper will narrow its focus to the history of use by the Cherokee. In doing so, it will give an overview of the region in which the Cherokee lived in the Southeastern United States, their disbursement during the migration of the Old Settlers and forced removal, and their current reservation in Oklahoma. Along with an overview of the settlements and movements of the Cherokee people, a focus will be placed on discussing their burial practices and spiritual belief system as compared to European descendants living in the same regions. In this way, it will establish that Grave Houses found across the Southeastern region are not a European or Appalachian developed practice, but a significant Indigenous one.

Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm" (2-3).

We conduct a synthetic archaeological and ethnohistoric dating program to assess the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches, the first Eurasian domesticate to be adopted across Indigenous eastern North America, into the interior American Southeast by Indigenous communities who quickly "Indigenized" the fruit. In doing so, we present what may be the earliest absolute dates for archaeological contexts containing preserved peach pits in what is today the United States in the early to mid-16 th century. Along with our broader chronological modeling, these early dates suggest that peaches were likely in the interior prior to permanent Spanish settlement in the American Southeast and that peaches spread independently of interactions with Spanish colonizers. We further argue that that eventual spread of peaches was structured exclusively by Indigenous communities and the ecologies produced through long-term Indigenous land management and land use practices, highlighting and centering the agency of Indigenous societies in the socioecological process of colonization.

Reviewed by (Edward J. Vajda) This has been a landmark pair of years for Cherokee linguistics, with the appearance of the first published full-length reference grammar (Montgomery-Anderson, 2015, for which see my review in WORD 63.1, 92-97) and now this comprehensive study of tone and accent. The two books offer a wealth of innovatively analyzed datamuch of it gleaned from earlier publications, the rest newly recordedthat will make this typologically interesting language more accessible to linguistics of all profiles. Both authors also contribute to preserving and revitalizing the language through their deliberate choice of transcription and exposition features that focus specifically on practices familiar to the community of Cherokee native speakers. Finally, these books are valuable for highlighting many still unanswered questions about Cherokee language structure that will undoubtedly stimulate further scholarly research. This study of Oklahoma tone and accent grew out of the author's unpublished dissertation under the same title (Uchihara 2013). It tackles what is perhaps the single most complex problem in Cherokee phonology: the phonological nature and functional roles of the language's pitch-based distinctions. The book's focus is threefold , with serious attention paid to synchronic description, the historical development of tones, and the place that Cherokee prosody occupies in a broader cross-linguistic typology. Its results are indebted to Feeling (1975), the first extensive dictionary to accurately mark the language's surface pitch distinctions, as well as to previous attempts (Lindsey 1987; Haag 2001; Johnson 2005) to explain the distribution of tones and offer conclusions about their nature. Much of the data came from Feeling (1975) or Feeling et al. (2003), some also from the Cherokee-English Dictionary Online Database (http://www.cherokeedictionary. net/). Many other forms analyzed in the study were elicited during the author's own fieldwork with Oklahoma Cherokee speakers in 2011-2013. The origin of every example word or sentence, whether recorded during elicitation sessions, taken from a previously unpublished database, or cited from earlier publications, is carefully credited, which helps track minor dialectal differences between speakers. The introductory chapter contains pitch traces of all phonetically distinct syllabic tone and accent types found in the language (2). The analysis is therefore firmly based on precise machine measurements, which largely corroborate previous descriptions of pitch-based distinctions in Oklahoma Cherokee. The introduction also details the merits and drawbacks of different transcriptions used in important studies of Cherokee since 1975 (11-16). Underscoring the lack of established practice, Uchihara himself uses two different tone marking systems in

The Cherokee Nation has been able to preserve their culture and traditions over the years, even after facing numerous challenges, including displacement, relocation, and assimilation. This research paper seeks to prove the hypothesis that Cherokee Nation's cultural continuity can be traced through the examination of pottery. This study aims to explore the cultural continuity of the Cherokee Nation by analyzing the pottery artifacts found in various archaeological sites. The research will provide a better understanding of the Cherokee Nation's cultural heritage, look for verification of cultural evolution over time, and analysis any perceived evolution or cultural shift by measuring culture changes in a timeline that features carbon-data pottery artifacts associated within a given period in the tribe’s history.

Cofitachequi vanished? It was conquered?  The chiefdom fell? Not at all; the "disappearance" of Cofitachequi is from ink and paper, and is an example of the long and well established historical practice of revisionist history told by non-tribally affiliated writers and researchers writing about another's history. Cofitachequi was simply re-documented as Wateree and Congaree Indians and then conveniently written out of history with ink and paper. The descendants of this tribal land were forced away and their ancestral land stolen by the Government to establish Fort Jackson military base. Resettled without any assistance, the remaining Cofitachequi were renamed by non-Natives again to become known today as the Pine Hill Indian Tribe.

Conference paper updating compendium of Mississippian spiders from 1990 paper. Explores and overviews meaning in broader Mississippian societal context. Vigorously agrees with the conclusion of Knight, Brown and Lankford (2001) who have asserted SECC art is uniformly otherworldly and primarily cosmological.  A probable corollary would be that SECC art portrays caricatures from “common” myths only insomuch as those creatures are also of larger cosmological significance (e.g., horned serpents, thunderers…).  If SECC subject matter is limited to microcosms of over-arching cosmologies, then we have but one more reason why spider gorgets in the eastern Tennessee region cannot be a water spider, but must be a local iteration of a more cosmic version of an orb-weaver spider in alignment of some large degree of meaning held in common by various Mississippians.

Kelvin Sampson and Duane Esarey.  Mississippian contexts in Illinois have yielded nearly a full complement of the breadth of Southeastern Ceremonial Complex material. This paper attempts to summarize embossed cop­per plates, unusual copper-covered artifacts, and decorated copper-covered artifacts found in Illinois and compare them to similar SECC items found elsewhere.

In _Inkface_, Miles P. Grier traces productions of Shakespeare's Othello from seventeenth-century London to the Metropolitan Opera in twenty-first-century New York. Grier shows how the painted stage Moor and the wife whom he theatrically stains became necessary types, reduced to objects of interpretation for a presumed white male audience. In an era of booming print production, popular urban theater, and increasing rates of literacy, the metaphor of Black skin as a readable, transferable ink became essential to a fraternity of literate white men who, by treating an elastic category of marked people as reading material, were able to assert authority over interpretation and, by extension, over the state, the family, and commerce. Inkface examines that fraternity’s reading of the world as well as the ways in which those excluded attempted to counteract it.

The history and cultural geography of Native North America has always been a complex socio-political landscape, one which shaped the successes and failures of both Native people and later European colonial projects. This dissertation expands on the centuries-long development of Joara, an Indigenous polity which would rise to its height of regional power in Western North Carolina during the sixteenth century. Much of our current knowledge of this place is drawn from work at the Berry site, which was the presumed capital of Joara as well as the location of Fort San Juan, a Spanish fortified outpost established in 1567 and destroyed 18 months later by Joarans. Moving beyond this dramatic narrative, data from several sites across
the region are investigated to better understand the development of the Joara polity and its neighbors across the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. The position of Indigenous history and the artificial separation of “prehistory” and “history” are considered throughout this project, structuring its methodology. This dissertation applies a combination of archaeological
methods including a detailed ceramics analysis, original field work, new AMS radiocarbon data, and Bayesian modeling to consider the long-lived landscape of Joara. This work demonstrates the power of place and time, both for archaeological methodologies and interpretations, as well as for the salient socio-political structures which allowed Joara to persist through time.

The Buffalo herds have gone; they have succumbed to the rifles of the hunters. The antelope droves are nearly gone; hound and lead were too much for them. The blacktail bands have dwindled before axe and fence. The ancient dwellers of the Badlands have faded like snow under the new conditions, but the Coyotes are no more in fear of extinction. Their morning and evening song still surrounds from the level buttes, as it did long years ago when every plain was a teeming land of game. They have learned the deadly secrets of traps and poisons, they know how to bajfle the gunner and the Hound, they have matched their wits with the hunter's wits. They have learned how to prosper in a land of man-made plenty, in spite of the worst that man can do.