Like many other Native American peoples, the Cherokees were masters of metaphor when it came to negotiation with European colonial authorities. Examples abound across generations, expressed in periods of crisis and less momentous occasions. For illustrative purposes, consider a speech made by chief Kanagatucko (Standing Turkey) in September 1761 when Cherokees moved toward peace with the British, South Carolina, and Virginia after a brutal war of two years. Kanagatucko forwarded his talk to Colonel Adam Stephen of the Virginia militia, then quartered east of Cherokee territory and seemingly poised to invade unless English treaty demands were met. The chief’s remarks were put to paper by interpreter John Bench, a corporal who had lived among the Cherokees for several years. So, the written text approximates rather than captures precisely what Kanagatucko spoke.
Article continues after advertisement
Kanagatucko respectfully addressed the English, former Cherokee allies before a breakdown in relations and the war’s ensuing destruction. He hoped for “a peace that is never to be broke, for all our men are tired of fighting with our Elder Brother the English.” In typical Native manner, Cherokees understood kinship, or its absence, as the core of relations. Kanagatucko was pleased to have received “a good talk from our Brother the Governor in Charlestown [Charleston, South Carolina], & now the Path is Streight, and our hearts are Clear, & the Chain is bright, which has been for long black, & we shall live like one people as formerly.” Brotherly bonds with the English could be honorary and emblematic and not literally biological in the sense of sharing a mother’s blood—the life source of Cherokee kinship.
Kanagatucko returned to the idea of light: “now as our Eyes are opened, & the Sky Clear, & we can see our faults.” The intent was not to assume or assign blame but for belligerents to move beyond the war: “We have had a great deal of mischief done on Both Sides, but let it not be thought on….We [Cherokees] have Enemies enough of our own Colour, without fighting the White People.” The Cherokee peace talk, he continued, “is spoke by one and all, and the Hatchet is now buried under ground never to be seen by the English again.”
The Indigenous tenaciously guarded independence and resisted subordination—and for this very reason often sought powerful allies within frameworks of respect and reciprocity.
Kanagatucko’s identification of the English as “the White People” was commonplace among Cherokees and other Native peoples of southeastern North America by the 1720s. This fact is not itself surprising since the English frequently identified themselves as “white” in conferences with those they styled “Indians,” who increasingly referred to themselves as “red” by comparison. Cherokee headman Attakullakulla, a foremost peace advocate in 1761, said to a British officer: “I am a red Man and you are white, but I hope all will be well again.”
When Cherokees referred to individuals as “white” or “red,” they were using words signifying skin pigmentation of contrasting hues rather than making any obvious judgment as to what might be called “race.” Native peoples took pride in their own physical appearance, to be sure. Writing in the 1760s, trader James Adair, who lived for several decades among southeastern Indians, described Native skin tone as “of a copper or red-clay colour.” He added: “All the Indians are so strongly attached to, and prejudiced in favour of, their own colour, that they think as meanly of the whites, as we possibly do of them.” Adair’s assessment does not mean that Cherokees saw skin color as a barrier to mutual respect with colonials.
In fact, the movement to peace was one of bridging divides. Attakullakulla relayed Kanagatucko’s wish to the English that “the road will be clear to white and red” people. A “clear road” meant an open trading path that reflected harmony and goodwill between nations. Attakullakulla’s optimistic view was not universally shared in Indian country. As expansive white settlements became more threatening to Native peoples, the latter increasingly saw their “red” skin as a mark of supernatural favor, a call to unity among themselves and resistance against the colonials.
When the Cherokees made peace with the British in 1761, it did not mean that they would be free of conflict. As Kanagatucko said, “We [Cherokees] have Enemies enough of our own Colour, without fighting the White People.” To place his words in context, we need first to locate the speaker more precisely. Kanagatucko was uku or priest-chief of Chota, the single most influential Cherokee town lying west of the Appalachians. As will be discussed in greater detail, Cherokee villages were situated in widely dispersed river valleys, extending from the foothills of the Blue Ridge, in what is today’s far western South Carolina, to the Great Smoky Mountains of the Appalachians, and still farther west to the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee. Beyond these areas, there was a vast Indigenous geography that impinged on Cherokee lives in war and at peace. Cherokee diplomacy itself had a remarkable physical range and a level of sophistication that were linchpins of communal strength.
In eighteenth-century Cherokee society, peace and war both partook of the sacred but in different ways. To the Cherokees and numerous American Indian nations, for example, white was the color of peace, while red signified war. Both colors, as well as others, had multiple uses in ritual and ceremony. At conferences with colonial officials, Cherokee headmen invariably distributed strings of wampum beads to signify and speak their intent. “Good talks” were “made fast” or strengthened by gifts of white wampum. Fashioned from mollusk shells, wampum was essential to messaging across ethnic bounds.
As James Merrell has written, “no frontier negotiator” of colonial stripe could succeed unless knowing “the language of beads,” whether expressed in simple form or in elaborately woven wampum belts. The Cherokees sometimes placed black beads, signifying darkness or death, on a string with white shells when something was amiss but not at the stage of war. This type of symbolism was well understood when Native peoples communicated in person or dispatched items to friends or foes. In 1726, for example, Cherokees and Creeks inched from war to truce talks by exchanging white bird feathers. The Creeks, meanwhile, sent a string of red wampum to the Chickasaws. The “red” signified Creek hostility aroused by recent Chickasaw attacks.
“White” and “red” were powerful forces in social and cultural counterpoise. As Steven Hahn tells us, these colors had meaning beyond peace and war. To the Creeks (Muscogees), “white signified peace, age, wisdom, and deliberation,” while “red” represented “war, youth, passion, and bold action.” Creek talwas (towns) were traditionally considered either “white” or “red” in character. “White” towns had a reputation as being fit places for consultation and the settlement of disputes among Muscogee factions. “Red” towns customarily leapt to the fore in war deliberations, though all Creek communities had warriors prepared to fight enemies and protect native ground. The symbolic meanings of “red” and “white” shaped communal identity, though without necessarily dictating a particular course of action.
European colonial officials readily picked up on Indigenous metaphoric speech even if its subtleties were often missed in translation. While conferencing with Native headmen, provincial governors talked of brightening “the Chain of Friendship,” clearing “the path,” and called on Indian allies to “take up the hatchet” in war. Shared rhetoric did not itself create trust across cultural bounds. Actions counted. Cherokees were acutely cognizant of what colonial officers had pledged in the past and were expected to fulfill. Indigenous historical memory was an integral part of diplomacy.
Speech and ritual gesture were commonly fused when Cherokee headmen negotiated with colonials over trade, war and peace, territorial bounds, and sovereignty. Performance and protocol were embedded in diplomatic conferences, not unlike formal exchanges between emissaries at European courts. Throughout southeastern North America, British interpreters commonly referred to a Native headman’s speech as a “talk”—a word connoting formal political discourse in which the speaker’s words, gestures, and bearing were the medium of exchange.
Native peoples were attuned to implicit questions raised in diplomatic communication. Would the recipients of a talk bring to mind and heart what was said? Would listeners believe in the speaker’s sincerity, strength of character, and capacity to represent his people? Words had power. So, too, did gifts that spoke in pragmatic and spiritual ways. Gifts displayed generosity while entailing obligations on recipients and expectations of mutual respect. Certain gestures had broad cultural meaning in Indigenous North America. For example, women sometimes accompanied men on peace missions with the intent of showing the hosts that the visitors meant goodwill—and not war.
Diplomatic acuity encompassed the ability to dissimulate as well as to speak literal truth. To palliate wrongs committed by one’s own group—or even to conceal them—was quite as much an Indigenous as a colonial approach to compromising situations. The resolution of crises between ethnicities often called on interested parties to accept half-truths or fictions for the larger purpose of avoiding blowups and escalating violence. Quests for the diplomatic “middle ground,” which Richard White has richly described for French-Indian relations in the Great Lakes region, depended on a rough equivalence of power between contending groups that bargained with some understanding of one another. Significantly, White’s “middle ground” was a precarious state, shaken episodically by interethnic instability and violence. The restoration of balance and harmony often came about through negotiated compromise rather than by an overwhelming military victory or a defeat among the contending parties.
Eighteenth-century Europeans commonly had the idea that American “Indians” were constantly at war with one another. After all, were not young boys in numerous Indigenous nations customarily trained for war? Yes, that was the case, but it did not mean that fighting between ethnicities followed any simple pattern or fell into what could be called a Hobbesian war of all against all. In Indigenous North America, bloody conflicts might be short-lived or persistent affairs, and truces brief or long-lasting. Alliances were subject to change. Diplomacy was often as important as warring prowess to group cohesion and survival. These facts of life were present for centuries prior to European arrival and persisted under new and drastically changing conditions long afterward.
Cherokee relations with intersecting Native and colonial worlds were characterized by assertions of power, tempered by acute awareness of vulnerability. Edward Countryman is on the mark in writing that “whatever value [American] Indians placed on autonomy, they understood that the weak needed the strong.” The Indigenous tenaciously guarded independence and resisted subordination—and for this very reason often sought powerful allies within frameworks of respect and reciprocity. To the Cherokees, such relationships were ideally a bond, implicitly covenantal and not merely contractual.
*
While historical literature on the Cherokees is voluminous, there is still a great deal to be learned about their lives in war and at peace from the 1670s, when they had their first encounters with the English, to the agonizing era of forced removal and the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. This is not at all to suggest that Cherokee history begins with English colonialism. Native traditions and beliefs, long predating European arrival in the Americas, are an essential part of this story. So, too, are archaeological and anthropological insights that tell us about lifeways that developed over time and often had roots centuries before the written historical record begins. Living in an interior and mountainous continental zone, Cherokees had tenuous contacts with British colonials until the dawn of the 1700s—long after many other Indigenous nations were convulsed by the spread of “Old World” diseases, the competition for guns and goods in the fur and deerskin trades, and the havoc wrought by the traffic in Indian slaves. This was a new world in turmoil for Native peoples and not simply for colonials.
Historians of the Native American past face the challenge of getting the big picture right while offering a sense of the daunting complexity encountered along the path. For example, to write of “the Cherokees” as a single nation making decisions regarding war is a simplistic idea for much of the 1700s. Given the dispersed situation of Cherokee towns over a broad landscape, kin and village loyalties governed much of social life. Warriors gave priority to protecting those closest to them. The diffusion of authority made it difficult for disparate regions to unify in warfare. Paradoxically, Cherokee society drew strength from its customary allowance for local autonomy, its capacity to absorb diverse perspectives, and to seek consensus on war and peace through persuasion. Well into the eighteenth century, Native peoples adeptly leveraged Europeans for advantage in their own interethnic rivalries. The Cherokees’ evolving relations with Native ethnicities—Creeks, Shawnees, Iroquois, and other Indian groups—were integral to shaping their diplomacy with colonials well before the birth of the United States.
Crises were part of Cherokee life through most of the eighteenth century. In 1715, Cherokees faced the difficult choice of which side to take in the Yamasee War, an uprising of Native peoples against English South Carolina. The Cherokees knew little peace over decades from the powerful Creeks and Iroquois. Then there was the British-Cherokee War of 1760–1761, the dramatic upsurge of white settlers intruding into Cherokee territory from 1763 to 1775 and the ravages of the American Revolutionary War that followed. That war, in which many Cherokees aligned with the British, witnessed scorched-earth invasions by Southern state militias. Widespread destruction spurred a geographic reorientation of Cherokee communities, marked by the rise of the militant Chickamauga movement that battled American settlers into the 1790s. Given this history of conflict, it is no wonder that “peoplehood and perseverance” is a vital theme for Cherokees and other Native Americans, who continue to draw strength from shared memories of courage and survival against all odds.
*
Cherokee warfare and peace-making strategies evolved in tandem rather than in separate spheres. The white path of peace counterbalanced the red path of war for nearly the entire eighteenth century. This does not mean any simple equilibrium existed between war and peace, but rather that many Cherokees weighed the destructiveness of warfare, its costs in lives to themselves, and the need to dampen the flames when conflagration threatened chaos and exacerbated internal divides. Choices on the war and peace fronts were often wrenching and difficult, especially when increasingly aggressive settler colonialism became an overhanging danger to the Cherokee way of life in the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Cherokee responses to this threat were variable and fluid, involving political and diplomatic strategizing, and not militant resistance alone.
A great deal of Native diplomacy in the early colonial era had the object of acquiring sufficient supplies of European trade goods and munitions—resources vital against Indigenous adversaries. We may deplore the arms race in retrospect, but that begs the issue. To assume that Cherokees and Creeks should have halted their battles of the period 1715–1750 is no more realistic historically than imagining sweet peace between Great Britain and France or Spain in that era. Indigenous conflicts went hand and hand with diplomacy involving the quest for wartime allies or mediators that might further truce talks with foes. Cherokee headmen strived for British mediation at certain critical junctures, while relying on Native friends in other instances. Negotiation was a multifaceted tool, employed as in other cultures to keep enemies at bay as well as to reduce tensions and curtail hostilities.
Through the 1700s, Cherokee peacemaking had a spiritual component—an ideal of reconciliation with adversaries through mutual and purposeful forgetting of past wrongs inflicted on one another. The capacity of Native peoples to forget no less than to remember eased communal healing amid strife, bloodshed, and loss. On occasion, new social bonds arose to signal the close of war. In the mid-1750s, the Creeks and Cherokees solidified a recent peace by recognizing a headman of the opposing nation as one of their own adopted and honorary chiefs. Variations on this theme are evident among numerous Native American peoples for whom condolence ceremonies, gift exchange, and ritual feasts were part of making peace.
Cherokee diplomatic approaches, honed within the Native world, had direct relevance to negotiating postures toward European colonials and later with American state officials and federal authorities. When facing danger, it made sense for Cherokees to seek protection from powerful forces beyond their country. A belief in the “Great King George” as a shielding power was later echoed by the hope that Congress and President Washington would act as the new “father.” Cherokees were not naïve when they collectively decided on what they hoped would be a lasting peace with the United States in 1794 after years of conflict. They harbored few illusions that land-hungry, Indian-hating American settlers would suddenly change their ways. The war’s end came when Cherokee peace factions found common ground with militants that had themselves suffered stinging defeats at the hands of white militiamen. What is remarkable about this state of affairs is that differing Cherokee groups, living at considerable distance from one another, reached a consensus by consultation in the face of peril. Persuasion, not diktat, was the operative rule.
Until the 1790s, the great portion of written documentation on Cherokee diplomacy comes via British or Anglo-American interpreters who made their livelihood as traders in Indian country. These men, who often had Native wives or mistresses, were essential participants at parleys between Cherokees and colonial officials in Charles Town (later Charleston), Williamsburg, and other venues. Interpreters transcribed Cherokee “talks” sent from Indian country to colonial capital towns, not infrequently at distances of 300 to 500 miles. Interpreters were similarly vital when translating governors’ written messages forwarded to Cherokee headmen and warriors.
Trader-interpreter Robert Bunning accompanied seven Cherokee men who made a voyage across the “great Water” (the Atlantic) in 1730 to visit London and see the king. While the work of colonial interpreters was imperfect and subject to misinterpretation of Native meanings, it is still an indispensable historical source. Translation to French or Spanish naturally came into play when Cherokee delegates visited New Orleans or other Gulf Coast venues. This book makes use of all three European languages, English being the most important because of the sheer depth of Cherokee relations with the British and later the Americans. French documents are significant for broadening our geopolitical framework. In a Native world of intricate ties among many nations, French negotiations with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Iroquois shed light on developments in Cherokee country.
*
North America’s Native peoples generally lived without centralized and coercive structures of governmental power at the time that the first European settlements appeared on the continent. Authority within Cherokee society operated through customs and rituals by which individuals, depending foremost on their age and gender, assumed certain duties and responsibilities. Loyalties were founded on kinship, clan identity, and locality. The shared myths and stories told in Cherokee communities deepened cultural allegiance. Like other Indigenous groups, Cherokees believed themselves to be the “real people,” or the true human beings—Ani-Yunwiya. Their sense of the world will be discussed more fully in the chapters to follow. One may begin with a simple statement: Cherokee peoplehood was far from static; it evolved in response to rivalries with other Indigenous groups and the pressures of colonialism.
Bonds of “peoplehood” are not precisely the same as modern nationalism with its diverse components, variously embracing culture, politics, language, ethnicity, and religion. Peoplehood is a way of human connectedness through common beliefs, ancestral myths and narratives of shared origins, and a deep sense of communal belonging and place, often expressed in ceremonial rites. It is generally, though not always, inbred in early youth and passed from generation to generation in lineages and communities, and it is not dependent at its roots on imposition by state or governmental authority. Peoplehood has tribal or particularistic elements, distinguishing one group from another, though it may also have universal qualities. It is fundamentally felt by individuals rather than simply “imagined.”
Cherokee peoplehood was far from static; it evolved in response to rivalries with other Indigenous groups and the pressures of colonialism.
Cherokee peoplehood had various levels of social obligation, depending on the closeness of kin and clan ties between persons living within a certain geographic compass. For example, blood law was a motive force in warfare between Native peoples. If a Cherokee man’s kin were slain by an enemy, his first obligation was to wreak vengeance on the foe. A warrior necessarily harkened to female kin when the latter demanded retaliation for blood relatives who had suffered death in an enemy attack. A victim’s spirit was literally believed to “cry blood” and to haunt his still living clan members; the dead gained rest only when a surrogate visited like punishment on the slayer or someone symbolically standing for him. The same held true among the Creeks and many other Indigenous societies. The ritual torture and execution of enemy captives was only one facet of retributive justice in Native American cultures. Quite as notable was a markedly different choice—the adoption of prisoners by the will of the captors.
Adopted captives, requickened as kin in a new social matrix, had a notable role in Native diplomacy. Whether male or female, they were well positioned to serve as go-betweens because of their broad kin ties and linguistic skills—the ability to speak in both their native language and the tongue of their adopted nation. The Indian adoption of child captives, including whites, is well known. In some cases, children born of an enemy foe even rose to become leaders of their adopted society. By one account, which is admittedly speculative, the renowned Cherokee headman Attakullakulla (“The Little Carpenter” by English name) was a native Nipissing of Canada who was captured as a young boy by Cherokee warriors (or otherwise came into their hands). In midlife, a reverse twist of fate occurred when Attakullakulla was seized by Canadian Indians who, by his good fortune, adopted him rather than put him to the stake. This story is but one example of the rich human dimension of Native American history that often raises enigmas and unanswerable questions.
Cherokee women had a significant influence in war and peace—an impact that receives close attention in this book—and the role of women on these critical matters appears unevenly in the written historical record. For some periods, there is episodic information, while for others such as the British-Cherokee War the sources are astonishingly rich, telling us of individual women who acted according to their understanding of communal needs and often did so autonomously from men. Cherokee women were actively involved in crisis decision-making long before the remarkable Nan-ye-hi (Nancy Ward) became the first Cherokee woman to offer a public address at a formal conference with colonials, in this case Virginia and North Carolina officials, during peace negotiations in 1781.
She did so again four years later, appealing to congressional commissioners: “I am fond of hearing that there is a peace, and I hope that you have now taken us by the hand in real friendship….I look on you and the red people as my children….I am old, but I hope to yet bear children, who will grow up and people our nation, as we are now to be under the protection of Congress, and shall have no more disturbance.” Tragically, there was no true peace, and congressional protection proved a phantom when it came to upholding Native rights.
Nan-ye-hi became known to white Americans of her era as “Nancy Ward” through her marriage to trader Bryant Ward, who lived with her only a few years. Before becoming a “beloved woman” advocating peace, Nan-ye-hi was a “war woman” honored for her bravery in fighting the Creeks in the early 1750s after seeing her Cherokee husband, her first spouse, killed in battle. Living into the 1820s, Nan-ye-hi took part in great changes in Cherokee life during her later years. This was an era in which the Cherokees formed their own National Council and subsequently developed a constitution written both in English and in their own language through Sequoyah’s genius in creating a syllabary for his people’s native tongue.
There was now a Cherokee nation with a central government, something virtually unthinkable just a generation before. A Cherokee elite, composed largely of men with some white ancestry, came to the forefront in diplomacy. Wealthy Cherokees commonly owned enslaved Blacks even if the great majority of the nation did not. Gradations in wealth and status in Cherokee society arose that were foreign to tradition. By 1820, a substantial minority of Cherokees, influenced by U.S. inducements and pressures, had migrated west of the Mississippi. And yet the idea of Cherokee peoplehood, transcending government and even a single national home, endured through unremitting convulsion and turmoil. It is this phenomenon that The Cherokees: In War and at Peace identifies and traces from the late 1600s to the 1830s. The book is undertaken in an open-ended quest for knowledge and understanding, and with a fitting measure of humility.
__________________________________
From The Cherokees: In War and at Peace, 1670-1840 by David Narrett. Copyright © 2025. Available from Harvard University Press.
