Editorial – Guns, Land, and Religion

To riff on Barack Obama’s “God, Guns, and Religion” quote, it makes a great segue into understanding the Traditionalism of the Chickamauga.  During the 1700s, Great Britain and her colonies failed to understand the culture of the Chickamauga.  The traditionalistic religion of the Mound Builders created a culture that made it virtually impossible for them to give up their lands and sell them.  Many even found it difficult to trade the land for other lands of equal value due to the teachings of their religion and the cultural demands.  This is what is not understood by most anthropologists and historians today: the traditional region of the Mound Builders had a profound influence on their daily lives.

First, the Chickamauga traded in pelts and furs with the French and Spanish.  The French and Spanish traded firearms to the Chickamauga for both hunting and the protection of their people.  The firearms of the period were crude by today’s standards, but were an improvement over the bow in warfare.  The gun quickly became an indispensable tool in the life of the Chickamauga in the 1700s. Transitioning from the mid-1700s to the late 1700s, the Spanish began providing large quantities of firearms to the Chickamauga to fight in a proxy war between Spain and the United States.

Second, it is essential to comprehend the vast tracts of land utilized by the Chickamauga and other Southeastern Woodland Mound Builder tribes for hunting, trading, and Mound exploration. The Chickamauga were canoe people who traveled extensively throughout the Southeast.  On the North-South axis, they traveled from the Gulf Coast at Pensacola to the northern watershed of the Great Lakes rivers that drain into the Ohio River. On the East-West axis, they traveled from the Atlantic seaboard to beyond the Mississippi, along the Arkansas and Missouri Rivers and their watersheds.  The Chickamauga understood these lands to be theirs for hunting, fishing, gathering, and the practice of religion.

Now, on top of the traditionalism of the Chickamauga, add two different treaties: the Whitehall (British) and the 1785 Hopewell (United States), which granted the Chickamauga the right to kill any colonist who illegally migrated and squatted on their lands.  What were their lands?  Their lands essentially included everything west of the Appalachian Ridge to the Mississippi River, below the Ohio River, and excluding Mississippi, southern Alabama, and Southern Georgia.  These two Treaties gave rights to protect their lands from invaders, and they honored their Treaty rights to the British and the United States by killing illegal invaders who were coming to take their lands. Land and Religion are vital in understanding the reasons the Chickamauga vehemently defended their rights to their lands.  Their religion required them to keep and protect their land.

Traditionalism also put the Chickamauga into direct opposition to the appeaser, the Cherokee.  The reason the Chickamauga could not get along with the Cherokee is that they were not Cherokee, and the Cherokee were not Chickamauga.  The Chickamauga were traditionalists, while the Cherokee were driven by greed and a desire for appeasement. The Cherokee had no ties to the lands of the Southeast or the Mounds because they were from the Great Lakes region and had been Christianized before entering the Southeast Woodlands in the mid-to-late 1670s at the earliest.  Since the Cherokee had no ties to the land and they did not practice the ancient Mound Builder religion, they sold and relinquished lands to the Colonists.  This is what is lost in most modern understanding of the Chickamauga; their religion forbade them from selling or relinquishing their lands. They had no choice but to fight to protect their lands from the illegal immigrant, colonial squatters.  

The colonists and citizens of the United States who intentionally, illegally violated the apex of the Appalachians and were attacked by the Chickamauga appealed back to their states and nation to protect them against the murderous, Indian savages.  So, in violation of the 1785 Hopewell Treaty, the colonial and state militias of the United States declared war on the Chickamauga in late June and early July of 1776.  The United States paid the colonial and state militia men to commit genocide against the Chickamauga in a time of war.  They killed the elderly and some of the women and children while taking other women and children to “trade” as sex slaves and concubines. They burned homes and crops, chopped down tens of thousands of trees in orchards, and stole thousands of bushels of corn and other crops.

What the United States illegally did to the Chickamauga was deplorable.  Only if the King, Presidents, and Generals had lived up to the Treaties they signed, the number of Chickamauga alive today would be in the tens of millions.  While the Chickamauga know the Treaties and promises of the United States are not worth the paper they are printed upon, they still hope there are men and women in places of authority who will finally do the right thing for the Chickamauga.  They still seek protection from continued ethnic cleansing, and they still desire to receive the promised services from the United States for their people.