The Cherokee Struggle to Maintain Identity in the 17th and 18th Centuries by William R. Reynolds Jr. (review)

This book is about the Cherokee people and their interactions with the British empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with an emphasis on the period between the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War. According to William R. Reynolds Jr., his “goal for this book is to impart an understanding on the reader of the complications that arose for the colonial Cherokee and how the lack of reciprocal understanding on the part of the British snowballed until the Cherokee lost their ancestral lands” (p. 5). In addition, the author wishes to transport “the reader back to the complicated world of the colonial Cherokee to foster knowledge and understanding of how the Cherokee Bands ended up where they are today” (p. 5). The only problem is that this book paints a very black-and-white, uncomplicated portrait of Cherokee history, culture, and society, despite the good intentions of the author.

At its heart, Reynolds’s book is a story. It unfolds as a linear narrative told from European-authored primary sources that privilege certain individuals—such as the Cherokee headmen Attakullakulla, Dragging Canoe, and Doublehead—and certain events, particularly the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Further, this story serves as the author’s personal reflection on his genealogical connection and “powerful kinship . . . with [his] Cherokee ancestors” and his attempts to come to terms with the brutal history of colonization that his Euro-American forebears perpetrated against his native ones (p. 1). For this perspective, the author is successful and should be commended.

However, Reynolds’s story is a very problematic one. First of all, there is no central argument, and the title is very misleading; at no point does the author attempt to define a Cherokee “identity” or to explain how Cherokee conceptions of themselves, their towns and communities, or their society and nation evolved throughout two centuries of interaction and conflict with Europeans. Reynolds also ignores the very rich scholarship on Cherokee history by historians like Theda Perdue and Tyler Boulware. Similarly, the Cherokee people whom Reynolds depicts are very static actors who seem destined for destruction at the hands of the English. He writes, “We cannot ignore the colonial Cherokee mistakes that contributed to the demise of their nation”—the standard declension narrative about Native American history— which Reynolds blames on “older chiefs” like Attakullakulla who “constantly gave in to settlers’ demands” and “personally got too close to the whites” (pp. 2, 340). In contrast, Reynolds heaps praise on “younger Cherokee warriors” like Dragging Canoe and Doublehead, who “began to see the bleak future of their Nation,” “refused to buckle to the older chiefs,” and “led the true Cherokee Nation in terms of the traditions” (pp. 113, 137, 191).

In essence, Reynolds reduces the colonization experience—along with the political, commercial, generational, gendered, and religious transformations that shaped Cherokee society over two centuries—to a black-and-white dichotomy of “good chiefs” versus “bad chiefs.” There is no consideration given to the fact that Attakullakulla and like-minded Cherokee leaders operated within a colonial context in which they sought nonviolent means to navigate European colonization. Moreover, Reynolds glorifies the violent resistance of Dragging Canoe and the Chickamaugas as the only true form of resistance to the English, which in itself is a moral censure of the “mainstream” Cherokees who did not join the Chickamaugas, a statement that has loaded implications for the Cherokee people today (p. 261). While the author has good intentions and a compelling reason to research and write this book, he ultimately struggles to understand the “complicated world of the colonial Cherokee” that he set out to recreate.