Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

History

Major Professor

Dr. Christopher Magra

Committee Members

Dr. Kristen Block, Dr. Brooke Bauer, Dr. Derek Alderman

Abstract

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maps of the Cherokee homelands in the Southern Appalachian Mountains spanning present-day Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northwest South Carolina, and Northwestern Georgia documented and facilitated European settler colonialism’s accretion in the region. I argue that from the 1750s until the early nineteenth century, ecological destruction resulting from the invasion of settler populations from British colonies and eventually the U.S., who established plantation-style agriculture, drove changes in the Cherokee’s agricultural practices, social connections, and cultural identity directly tied to an incremental land loss of nearly all of their vital spaces. The deracination of Cherokees from their agriscapes and cultural anchors proved significantly more transformative than more overt forms of European conquest in the Cherokee homelands.

My project helps define settler colonialism by demonstrating it is a collective substantiation of land tenure by individual colonizers entrenching on Indigenous lands. My dissertation uses maps as primary source material to detail the entrenchment of European settler colonialism in the Cherokee homelands during the eighteenth century. Early modern European maps were meant for European audiences, but they were more than European productions. Diverse groups of people contributed to colonial cartography. Indigenous communities provided Euro-American informants with geographic knowledge regarding regional hydrography and topography. European mapmakers repurposed Indigenous geographic knowledge of the land to market land speculators’ claims. Indigenous nomenclature for areas with good fishing waters and rich hunting grounds became Baroque royal fantasies, such as Jamestown and Charleston, to attract European buyers. Maps empowered land brokers and enticed settlers to occupy interior territories permanently. Collectively, these groups’ activities would diminish the land’s viability for Cherokee agrarian practices. Maps demonstrate that Cherokees developed multiple strategies for combating colonial entrenchment. As a series of larger-scale maps of the Keowee frontier region reveal, Cherokee women became a source for preserving Cherokee land tenure amongst the destructive environment of colonial agriculture. Cherokees employed their hand-drawn 1785 [Cherokee Map of their Territory] to assert their territorial sovereignty. However, by the final decades of the eighteenth century, every territorial facet of the Cherokee homelands became an untenable amalgamation. Maps from the early nineteenth century that confidently display solidified state boundaries and neat integration of Cherokee towns into the Euro-American landscape belie the enduring battle within.

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