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Dans une société américaine multiculturelle et multiraciale, la question de l’identité indienne est aujourd’hui l’objet de beaucoup de contestations et de polémiques. Souvent liées au métissage ou au quantum sanguin des individus, ces contestations poussent les tribus à redéfinir leur identité pour préserver leur souveraineté. Initialement identifiés comme l’une des cinq tribus dites « civilisées » par les Européens, qui jugent leurs efforts d’adaptation et leur recherche d’un consensus comme le signe de leur acculturation fulgurante, les Cherokees se battent au fil des siècles pour sauvegarder l’identité tribale et la souveraineté à laquelle le gouvernement américain a toujours voulu les faire renoncer. Ces attaques les amènent en 2007 à radicaliser les critères d’appartenance à la tribu et à exclure certains membres sur la base de quantums sanguins empruntés aux Européens, et qu’ils étaient jusqu’alors l’une des seules tribus à n’avoir pas adoptés. / Native American identity has always been a highly controversial issue, all the more so in today’s multicultural and multiracial American society. The questions raised are often based on intermarriages, race-mixing or blood quantum, prompting the tribes to redefine their tribal identity to preserve their sovereignty: a high native blood quantum supposedly correlates with cultural authenticity or ethnic identity, while race mixing is inevitably associated with cultural loss. Originally identified as one of the five “civilized” tribes by the Europeans, who regarded their efforts to adapt and reach tribal consensus as a sign of the rapid acculturation of the tribe, the Cherokees have been fighting ever since to preserve their tribal identity and sovereignty. They chose in 2007 to adopt more radical requirements for tribal membership and disenrolled some of their long-time citizens, on an Indian blood quantum basis that they were one of the last tribe not to have considered a valid criterion for identification.

<p>In 1760, when British victory was all but assured and hostilities in the northeastern colonies of North America came to an end, the future of the southeastern colonies was not nearly so clear. British authorities in the South still faced the possibility of a local French and Indian alliance and clashed with angry Cherokees who had complaints of their own. These tensions and events usually take a back seat to the climactic proceedings further north. I argue that in South Carolina, by destabilizing relations with African and Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians raised the social and political anxieties of coastal elites to a fever pitch during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Threatened by Indians from without and by slaves from within, and failing to find unbridled support in British policy, the planter-merchant class eventually sought to take matters into its own hands. Scholars have long understood the way the economic fallout of the French and Indian War caused Britain to press new financial levies on American colonists. But they have not understood the deeper consequences of the war on the local stage. Using extensive political and military correspondence, ethnography, and eighteenth-century newspapers, I offer a narrative-driven approach that adds geographic and ethnographic breadth and context to previous scholarship on mid-eighteenth century in North America. I expand understandings of Cherokee culture, British and colonial Indian policy, race slavery, and the southeastern frontier. At the same time, I also explain the origins of the American Revolution in the South.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis analyzes the specific journalistic conventional practices of newspapers in Georgia as they focused on the “Cherokee Question” in 1828-1832, the critical period during which the state considered the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia. The research compares news and opinion texts in five Georgia newspapers with news and opinion texts in the newspaper launched by the Cherokee nation in 1828,the Cherokee Phoenix. While the conventional practices in the white-owned press tended to legitimize removal, the Phoenix adopted some of the same conventions in order to defend and negotiate Cherokee culture and issues.

My dissertation, “Africans, Cherokees, and the ABCFM Missionaries in the Nineteenth Century: An Unusual Story of Redemption,” assesses the experience of American missionaries in the Cherokee nation and in Western Africa during the nineteenth century. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), founded in 1810, was the first successful foreign missionary society in the U.S., and its campaign among the Cherokees served as springboard for its activities in “Western Africa”—Liberia, Ivory Coast, Gabon, and South Africa. Although the Cherokees and the West Africans were two different peoples, the ABCFM used the same method to Christianize them: the Lancasterian method with which the missionaries planned to “civilize” the Cherokees and West Africans before Christianizing them. Scholars such as William McLoughlin and Theda Purdue studied the missionary perspective and the Cherokee perspective as separate entities and convincingly maintained that the Cherokees embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program partly to relieve the pressures on their lands and partly to adapt to the cultural pressures of their times. However, as my dissertation argues, the conversion story of the Cherokees takes a different turn if told simultaneously from the missionary and the Cherokee perspectives. Regarding the West African experience, authors such as Lamin Sanneh and Richard Gray have recently exposed the missionary and African sides of the stories with new questions that had been waiting to be asked for a long time. My dissertation, taking a unique comparative perspective, reveals first that West Africans did not face the same pressures as those faced by the Cherokees, yet, they still embraced the ABCFM’s civilization and Christianization program, though with a lesser sense of urgency and with more assertiveness than did the Cherokees despite the white missionaries’ racism. More importantly, by way of a method I call parallel agency, my dissertation offers a revisionist interpretation of the history of missions, which has traditionally emphasized the power of the white missionaries by calling into question the very assumption that the white missionaries had significantly more power than did their Cherokee and African converts.