Tennessee's Indian Peoples

Hernando De Soto's invasion of Native lands in 1540 marked the onslaught of great change in the lives of Tennessee's Native Americans. Although these first Tennesseans boasted a cultural heritage of thousands of years, only three centuries of contact with the white man elapsed before their population was decimated and the remnants driven out. The Indians were a settled people when de Soto visited, not the savage or exotic woods creatures so often depicted. Tennessee's Indian Peoples, then, is a story of the ways the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Creeks, Shawnees, and other Indian peoples lived, reared families, farmed and hunted, worshipped, played, fought, and governed themselves. He describes also the eventful destruction of their societies-destroyed not only by external pressures for Indian lands, but also by internal change wrought by increasing dependence on the white man's trade goods.

Ronald N. Satz (1944-2006) was Provost and Vice Chancellor and taught history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In addition to numerous articles and book reviews, his published work includes American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975) and Chippewa Treaty Rights (1991), which was used as evidence in a 1998 US Supreme Court case involving the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. He received fellowships from both the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Satz served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Indian Quarterly.