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John Stuart had been working for three years in his new appointment as Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Southern District when he wrote a long memorandum in 1765 to his superiors at the Colonial Office in London . He struggled to try to bring home something of the reality of the Native American cultures he dealt with daily. “The whole business of Indian life,” Stuart began, “is war and hunting.”1 Folios of interoffice correspondence echoing this view of Indian society make up one of the legacies of the British imperial presence in North America. Neither in Stuart’s personal explication of the nature of native Southeasterners two hundred years ago nor in these files does the core of the internal Cherokee economy appear. Cherokee agriculture and the women who had charge of it are omitted from the record. Yet farming was as important to the tribal as to the colonial economy , and tribal women were more directly connected to political and economic decision-making than were their colonial counterparts. Although men took part in it, farming among the Cherokees was largely women’s work.2 And whereas these first Appalachian farmers were changed by their encounter with Euroamerican culture during a three-hundred-year colonial period, the experience of Cherokee agriculture during this time contrasts sharply with the dislocation of the traditional occupations of Cherokee men, brought about by the European demand for peltry and leather. Cherokee agriculture was out of the bounds of colonial trade, at least until the last decades of the eighteenth century, but it was not unchanging. It was becoming even more closely tied to a distinctly female village economic sector. By examining Cherokee farming in some detail, deliberately isolated from its interconnections with trade and hunting, we can gain a new perspective not only on what was happening to the women of the tribe but also on the economic and political conflict faced by native and colonial societies during the century. Inasmuch as the Cherokees had emerged by the late seventeenth century as the largest indigenous people within the Appalachians and a powerful player in the geopolitics of the eighteenthCherokee Women Farmers Hold Their Ground tom hatley    cherokee women farmers hold their ground century South, their story must be included in any history of the region. Native American history—cultural and agricultural—which extends back thousands of years and into the present within the southern mountains, provides an essential reminder of the long time scales and deep prior contexts prefacing the colonial “beginnings” of the region. A recent parade of unexpected archaeological discoveries has left old assumptions about the antiquity of human occupation in the South—as across the New World—behind. With advent of humanity now more plausibly placed in eastern North America at 20,000 bp (before the present) or more, rather than 10,000 or 15,000 bp, the old fences in our thinking about paleoeconomies, including cultivation whatever its form, also need to be removed. The rough edges of the real history of this time are irretrievably smoothed at such a great distance, but there is no doubt that this deep past was a turbulent one, with humanity providing for itself against the odds of climate change, faunal replacement, and its own political and demographic ups and downs, including tidal waves of ancient migration sweeping through the continent at wide intervals. According to Cherokee religious tradition, their people emerged from the Kituwah mound. While the scientific tradition could be seen at odds with this view, at such a distance of time the distinction between “migration” and “origin” begins to bleed together. At such a distance, myth trumps history. Myths and stories offer some recent perspectives as well. The Cherokees recalled the mythical female origins of their agriculture in the story of Selu, a woman whose name means “corn.” In the legend, Selu and her husband, Kana Ti, or “Lucky Hunter,” had two sons. These children became suspicious that their mother was a witch and spied on her through a crack in the cornhouse chinking. “They saw Selu standing in the middle of the room with the basket in front of her on the floor. Leaning over the basket, she rubbed her stomach—so—and the basket was half full of corn. Then she rubbed her armpits—so—and the basket was full to the top with beans. The boys looked at each other and said, ‘this will never do; our mother is a witch. If we eat any of that...

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