Chickasaw Surveyors, Cherokee Soldiers, and American Speculators: Marking Native Borders in Early Te

Dr. Kelley’s talk will offer an overview of his new book, Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country, published in 2025 by the University of Oklahoma Press. The book demonstrates how Chickasaws and Cherokees successfully held on to their lands for decades by combining their existing understandings of land and property with new notions of landownership brought by European inhabitants of early Tennessee. Moreover, Dr. Kelley also will explore how Native Americans’ resistance to American expansion led the region’s white residents to create a series of local governments to pressure Great Britain and then the United States to acquire territory from the Cherokee Nation and the Chickasaw Nation.

Lectures are free and open to the public

You may also like the following events from East Tennessee Historical Society:

• This Wednesday, 3rd September, 12:00 pm, Knoxville’s Music History in Knoxville