Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Green

Abstract

Reviewed by: Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Green Adam Pratt (bio) Keywords Cherokee, Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, North Carolina, Trail of Tears, Indian removal, Slavery Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. By Lance Green. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Pp. 200. Cloth, $54.50.) Lance Green unearths a compelling and complex story in Their Determination to Remain, one that forces readers to reconsider seemingly concrete notions about identity, community, and cultural change. His subject is a small community of Cherokees who resided in western North Carolina after Indian "removal," centered on the plantation home of Betty and John Welch and the nearby Welch's Town, where enslaved Cherokee and Black individuals lived. This "small community's successful subversion of military occupation and subsequent challenges of racial hegemony" (3) is at the heart of Green's book, as he uncovers how Cherokees [End Page 659] who remained maintained cultural practices in the face of U.S. control. To tell this story, Green relies on archival and archaeological sources. This entwined approach allows him to fill in "archival silences" that, in particular, erase women, slaves, and Cherokees from the historical record. Green's analysis unfolds in five succinct chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of Cherokee life and society in the mountains of western North Carolina during the antebellum period. Next, he demonstrates strategies employed by Cherokee communities to resist and evade removal efforts. Chapter 3 highlights the new community that reformed along the Valley River after removal, and the strategies employed by the Welch family, and the residents of nearby Welch's Town, to accommodate themselves to the new U.S. regime. Chapter 4 demonstrates the syncretic culture, including altered foodways, continued enslavement, and changing gender norms that emerged in Welch's Town, while the last chapter deals with government schemes to relocate unwilling Cherokees. Most interestingly, perhaps, is Green's inclusion of a fictional vignette situated between the Introduction and Chapter 1 that takes John Welch's perspective in 1850 as he reminisces about his life. This fictional account incorporates the thematic material as well as historical and archaeological evidence Green compiled to paint Welch as a man who had persisted through profound changes. The book starts off as a mostly conventional story about Cherokee history and society that slowly focuses its attention on the Welch family. In this reckoning, Green shows that much of the post-contact period, Cherokee society was organized around "clan and town structures in the mountainous region," which "continued to organize daily life and formed the basis of behavior within and between communities" (57). Green carefully lays out the importance of town life and its centrality for "traditional" Cherokee customs. That community-centered lifestyle was already under assault by the time forced relocation commenced. Decades of economic exchange and social interactions, along with constant pressure by white land-seekers, forced Cherokee leaders into land concessions and political centralization as a way, some acculturated Cherokees believed, of stymying further American encroachment. John Welch entered the historical record when he took a reserve outside of the Cherokee Nation after the Treaty of 1819, thereby renouncing Cherokee for American citizenship and a 640-acre reserve near the traditional town of Cowee. However, constant encroachment meant that Welch and other reservees had few legal protections, [End Page 660] so he fled back into the Cherokee Nation near the Valley River, a localist stronghold far from the Cherokee central authorities (60). During removal, however, Welch encountered federal forces, was arrested and confined for nearly three months. During his captivity, his health failed and his home, with Betty now forced to act as head of household, was looted by numerous interlopers. With this new role, Betty was thrust into an entirely new set of circumstances that did not relent, even after John was released from captivity. Miraculously, the Welches recovered their property, when their son-in-law purchased their land at auction and then transferred the property to Betty's name. This meant that she was now the owner of the plantation home and...