Gregory D. Smithers. The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity.

Abstract

In this remarkable study, Gregory D. Smithers tackles the formidable topic of examining Cherokee diaspora. He frankly considers the intersecting concepts of Cherokee migration and resettlement, memory, and identity with the “aim of peeling back the layers of Cherokee history and revealing an even deeper, more complex, and richer past” (7). Smithers accomplishes exactly this in his treatment of Cherokee movements, voluntary and forced, from the 1760s to the 1940s. Smithers divides The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity into two parts, “Origins” and “Diaspora.” He organizes the first part into four chapters that address Cherokee origins and colonialism, the formation of a distinct Cherokee identity, the forced removal of the largest segment of the Cherokee population to the trans-Mississippi West, and the antebellum era. The weakest link in the flow of this otherwise strong study is Smithers’s cursory treatment of Cherokee movements in the colonial era. He pays little attention to the loss of their entire southeastern Lower Towns region, which resulted from their struggle to maintain individual town sovereignty and regional solidarity in the wake of epidemics, warfare, and colonial land cessions. Smithers does acknowledge that many of these displaced Cherokees found homes in other regions or soon became part of a movement to establish a new Lower Town region of five towns from which to conduct an armed resistance against intruding white settlements. Again, the author’s treatment of this incredibly important event is surprisingly not given more weight. The loss of an entire region (along with one of the Cherokee dialects) and the later establishment of another region deserve more consideration, particularly with respect to Cherokee identity, since the label the resistance took, the Chickamauga, was as new as the region itself.