Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (review)

Titles can be deceiving, and that applies to the title of Cynthia Cumfer’s book. Separate Peoples, One Land implies a bounded geographic place occupied by divided peoples. In reality, however, the book traces the linkages among groups living in frontier Tennessee, as well as Tennessee’s place within transatlantic networks of knowledge, capital, and power. Beginning in the 1760s, when white settlers and enslaved blacks encountered Cherokee communities in what would become Tennessee, and ending in 1810, when the new federal government transformed the connections among white settlers, black slaves, and Cherokee peoples, Cumfer’s book spreads across disciplines and theoretical arguments. At once an intellectual history of the groups that resided in Tennessee during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries; a political history of their understandings of sovereignty, nation, community, and civilization; and a trans-Atlantic history of their ideologies and cultural formations, Separate Peoples, One Land draws on scholarship from postcolonial studies to political theory to examine how transcultural contact, and the subsequent mixture of ideologies, in frontier Tennessee socially, politically, and ideologically transformed the three groups on which the book focuses.

Cumfer’s book draws on a range of historical texts to argue that during this period, Cherokee peoples participated in a defensive nationalism that culminated in the 1810 National Council designed to counter white settlers’ expansionist nationalism and an emerging federal state. In making this argument, she charts the development of a binary between a white state and society framed as “civilized” and a Native-American social and political system framed as “savage.” Into these white-native interactions or, more accurately, alongside them, Cumfer places the social structure and community practices of blacks, a people “without sovereignty” in this context.

Structurally, Cumfer’s book works through two parts that are book-ended by an introduction and conclusion. Part One examines how Cherokee peoples and white settlers understood and encountered each other through diplomatic negotiations over treaties, land claims, and other aspects of frontier life. Organized around three chronological periods, it lays out the complicated triangulation among Native Americans, white settlers, and the emerging federal government in struggles over how to define white and native sovereignty and who could claim Tennessee’s physical and political territory. Part Two coheres loosely around intracommunal relations for whites, blacks, and Cherokees. Three chapters focus on social, civic, and economic relations among whites, with remaining chapters focused on Cherokee and African-American community and identity politics. As Cumfer notes, separating the discussion of each group foregrounds the complexities of community formation. It also, however, produces chapters that largely stand alone.

Chapter One examines interactions between Cherokees and white settlers from 1768 to 1788. Highlighting the dissonance between a Cherokee ideology of intercommunal kinship and a white epistemology of legal contracts, it shows how both groups understood and responded to indigenous sovereignty, particularly in the context of what constituted legitimate claims to land and how women influenced these negotiations. Chapter Two continues a focus on white-native interactions from American independence in 1776 to Tennessee statehood in 1796. It pushes in multiple directions but is strongest in the discussion of what Cumfer describes as “a kaleidoscope of shifting governments” (p. 65) and how white settlers ‘denationalized’ Cherokee polities to bolster American nationhood through a discourse of civilization. Chapter Three rounds out Part One, with a discussion of interactions among white settlers, Native Americans, and the federal state. As white settlers and Cherokee peoples strengthened their relationship with the U.S. nation-state, they redefined their relationship to each other, ultimately reaching an impasse between a Cherokee ideology of balance and a Euro-American ideology of hierarchy.

Part Two begins with Chapter Four’s discussion of shifts in Cherokee nationhood and intra-community negotiations between Cherokee and Chickamaugan towns. Chronicling efforts to create a unified Cherokee identity amidst rapid political and demographic...