Hutchins Lecture: Gregory D. Smithers on the Cherokee Diaspora

The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Professor Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838–39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.

Gregory D. Smithers is an Associate Professor of Native American History at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of The Cherokee Diaspora(Yale University Press, 2015) and Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History  (University Press of Florida, 2013), and the co-editor (with Brooke N. Newman) of Native Diasporas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

This lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in 039 Graham Memorial Hall. Light refreshments will be served.