In Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, Lance Greene provides an important account of the lives of Cherokee people who evaded forced removal by the US government from Cherokee homelands in the southern Appalachians during the early nineteenth century. The book, which is part of the University of Alabama Press’s Indians and Southern History Series, is written in a style favored by historians with detailed footnotes, but it is accessible to academic and nonacademic readers alike. Greene’s research focuses on three periods—the Early Republic (late 1700s through the early 1830s), Removal and the Trail of Tears (1836–1838), and the antebellum period from Removal to the start of the Civil War in 1861—exploring the gendered and racial dimensions of Cherokee life in North Carolina. This important book will be a source of engaged discussion in courses in historical archaeology, archaeological method and theory, Native American studies, Appalachian studies, or American history more broadly.

Greene provides glimpses into the material lives of Cherokee people, such as Chewkeeaskee and John Christie, but he focuses on John and Betty Welch. John Welch, a Cherokee, married Betty, a White woman, and he took a reserve outside the Cherokee Nation with the Treaty of 1819. He renounced his Cherokee citizenship for US citizenship, but doing so provided neither legal protection nor US citizenship during the removal by the US government of Cherokee people to Oklahoma. After the Welches’ son-in-law purchased their land at auction, the Welches recovered their property, which was recorded in Betty’s name because her husband could no longer own land. She became a wealthy and powerful plantation owner. The Welches assisted roughly 100 Cherokees hiding in the mountains and provided land for them to rebuild a new community, Welch’s Town. Members of Welch’s Town experienced a transitional period in which they had no formal tribal government or clear citizenship, yet they reestablished the townhouse, stickball fields, and dance grounds. Greene uses archaeological and archival evidence to provide these personal stories and examine the racial and gender violence faced by the Cherokee people while highlighting their resilience.

Building on the work of archaeologists such as Janet Spector and historians like Marissa Fuentes and Tiya Miles, Greene follows the introduction with a fictional account of life at Welch Plantation in 1850 to set the scene. He uses archaeological and archival sources to imagine how the Welch family, the African American people enslaved on their plantation, and the people of Welch’s Town came together in 1850 to dismantle the kitchen building that was the focus of archaeological excavations. Introducing the monograph in this way helps the reader envision the relationships among the inhabitants of Welch Town. His analysis follows in five chapters.

In the first chapter, Greene provides an overview of Cherokee life and society in the mountains of western North Carolina during the Early Republic. He uses archaeological and archival sources to provide a glimpse into the lives of the Cherokee, with a detailed look at four households and the different ways they negotiated the introduction of commercial goods and government interference into their lives. In Chapter 2, Greene then demonstrates strategies used by Cherokee communities to resist and evade removal efforts between 1836 and 1838. Chapter 3 highlights the new community that formed along the Valley River after removal and the strategies used by the Welch family and the residents of Welch’s Town to remain in the North Carolina mountains. In Chapter 4, Greene demonstrates the syncretic culture, including foodways and changing gender norms that emerged in Welch’s Town. Chapter 5 highlights the ways Cherokee people evaded government efforts to relocate them.

Greene notes that the archival record privileges White and elite Cherokee perspectives, but he perhaps overstates the extent to which the archaeological record he draws on “challenges archival silences” and can “escape the political biases that guide the creation of historic documents” (p. 4). Like the archival record, the archaeological record privileges those who had more things to leave behind and who lived in more permanent structures—in this case, the Welch family. Archaeologists make decisions about which sites to excavate and which stories to tell that privilege certain voices. Greene provides a look at the archaeology of households before Removal, so the reader can see the material manifestations of the choices made by Cherokee families, such as continuing to make and use Qualla pottery or splitting domesticated animal bones to remove the marrow during the Early Republic period. He attempts to provide information about the lives of Phillis, Isaac, Nelly, Jane, and Claire, the people enslaved on Welch Plantation, but the two cabins in which they lived were not excavated nor were the households of the Cherokee people who lived in Welch’s Town. As a result, Greene is not always able to offer the rich portrait of the Cherokee households in Welch’s Town or of the enslaved people living on the Welch plantation that he does with Betty, John, and the Welch children. Additional archaeology on sites from the antebellum period could challenge the archival silences and provide more insight into the ways people responded to capitalism, White supremacy, and patriarchy within US society. A comparison of the material manifestations across the three time periods might provide a more intimate look at the nuanced ways in which Cherokee and African American women preserved long-standing values and practices through their everyday resistance, survivance, and residence.

Although this study focuses on the Cherokee’s response to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, it is broadly applicable to historical and anthropological inquiries across the globe. It is recommended reading for courses on colonialism and resistance or race and gender. With its interdisciplinary methods, the book would also be an important source for discussions on anthropological, archaeological, or historical methods and theory.