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

The story Cynthia Cumfer chronicles in her book Separate Peoples, One Land is the story of the appropriation of Indigenous lands, power, and sovereignty by settlers who eventually became citizens of the United States. It is also a story of nation building, the enslavement of African people, and the inevitable social and cultural change that occurs when the lives of individuals from foreign nations intertwine. Cumfer's analysis of this dynamic and contentious period of U.S./Indigenous Nations history distinguishes her work from many other scholarly interrogations. First, she situates her study on the Tennessee frontier, an area she identifies as both a frontier and a borderland, often overlooked as a meaningful site of social, cultural, and intellectual exchange among European settlers, Indigenous Nations and enslaved Africans. She argues that the ideas, imaginative worlds, cognitive and cultural logics of the Cherokee, Tennessee settlers, and enslaved Africans on the Tennessee frontier transformed as each encountered the others. She also asserts that ideas on the frontier helped to shape British colonial thinking and "civilizing" programs within colonial settlements around the world, citing the settlers and the United States as "early advocates using the doctrine of civilization to justify the colonization of the first peoples" (8). She relies on extensive primary sources from treaty negotiations and explores the intellectual back-stories that informed approaches to diplomacy and social structures for Tennessee settlers and the Cherokee Nation, the largest Indigenous Nation in the area during her period of study.

This book is divided into two parts and spans the period of 1768–1810. In part one, Cumfer juxtaposes the Cherokee-centric cultural logics that guided their international politics with Eurocentric notions employed by Tennessee settlers, who were typically European immigrants of English, Irish, Scottish, and German descent. The fundamental differences alone could have certainly promoted a clash of cultures, but the aggressive tactics used to acquire land as more immigrants arrived and the pernicious attacks against Indigenous sovereignty would plague the relationship for centuries to come. Cumfer acknowledges Cherokee dissenters along with the Women's Council, Nan-ye-hi, and other "Beloved Women" who distinguished themselves as wise patriots within the nation for their vital role in diplomatic relations. She examines the cognitive changes their interactions and broken treaty negotiations produced, and concludes this section by describing the "largely unexplored triangular relationship" among the Cherokee Nation, the state of Tennessee (as of 1796), and the United States federal government (75).

Part two of the book continues to delve into cultural logics, but the focus shifts to family structures, local governments, and economies within each society, including African American communities. The chapter "'The Nigger-Trade Bought Me': African American Community" examines the social negotiating of free and enslaved African Americans. It emphasizes the economic ingenuity within the African American community as enslaved African Americans created commercial opportunities and manipulated laws on adverse possession, for example, to their advantage. Cumfer identifies the transitions from an African-based patronage to patriarchy and paternalism within the African American community. In addressing the complexities of social interaction between enslaved African Americans and white slave masters, she writes:

[S]laves interacted with whites more powerful than themselves in many settings. . . . Black boys . . . played . . . marbles on Sundays with white boys. . . . At corn huskings . . . slaves . . . "raised the corn song," . . . As elsewhere, some slave women had sexual relationships with white owners."

(133-134)

Given the extensive scholarship on slavery, including personal narratives by enslaved African American women which document rapes and pervasive physical violence, I doubt the author intends to equate the moral, physical, and psychological consequences of "sexual relationships with white owners" with boys playing marbles together. Not until the final chapter of the book does Cumfer address the economic advantages of slavery, which help explain the significance of sexual relationships between enslaved women and their white masters. Although she briefly discusses the intersections of African Americans and Cherokees, a more thorough...