That was one of the friendlier responses. When I inquired at a service station in Ducktown, Tenn., I was directed to a young man with tattoos and a Mohawk, who was said to have a command of tribal history. When I mentioned her name, his face darkened. “I’m not going there,” he said, and stalked out.
The Forgotten Power of Women
Historians I approached resisted both narratives, the Pocahontas one and the traitor one.
For one thing, the Cherokees vested women with sweeping authority over the treatment of captives, over land cessions and over the decision to go to war. In 1776, many Cherokee women resisted the drive to war, said Julie Reed, an associate professor of history and anthropology at the University of Tulsa.
That authority would fade after independence, she added. “Cherokee people today have forgotten the power of women,” she said. “She wasn’t acting as a traitor, she was acting as a Cherokee woman with matrilineal power.”
Also, Nancy was hardly alone in building a strategic alliance with white people. Dragging Canoe was receiving muskets and ammunition from Britain, which hoped the Cherokee would serve as a firewall against settler expansion.