Vol. 3 No. 2 (2024): Warfare and Peacemaking Among Matricultures
Research Articles

“Let Your Women Hear Our Words”: Nanyehi’s Negotiations

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Matthew Cerjak
University of Michigan
Bio
Page one of the handwritten Treaty of Hopewell, composed in 1785.

Published 2024-05-09

Keywords

  • Settler Colonialism,
  • Ethnohistory,
  • Cherokee,
  • Matricultural Traditions,
  • Indigenous Feminist Studies

Copyright (c) 2024 Matthew Cerjak (Author)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

“Let Your Women Hear Our Words”: Nanyehi’s Negotiations. (2024). Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies, 3(2), 60-93. https://doi.org/10.60676/k9d4sg81

Abstract

Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Cherokee Beloved Woman Nanyehi attempted to negotiate multiple treaties with Euro-American officials on the behalf of her people. This paper, through an ethnohistorical approach that interweaves contemporaneous reports and transcriptions of her negotiations with oral histories, argues that: (i) the Cherokee and Euro-Americans held opposing worldviews, especially with regards to gender, (ii) that their conceptions of gender came to head during their negotiations and that they were a driving cause of conflict despite Nanyehi's hopes of fostering coexistence, and (iii) that Nanyehi's call for the Americans to ’let your women hear our words’ resulted in the Cherokee matriculture being deemed a subversive threat by American men and subsequently motivated an explicit settler colonial mission to ’domesticate’ Cherokee women. In closing, however, this paper reflects on the survivance of Cherokee women and emphasizes the resilience of the Cherokee matriculture despite oppressive forces. In doing so, this paper underscores the ongoing struggles for recognition faced by Indigenous women, offering insights into the broader challenges confronting Indigenous communities today.

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