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 which made it virtually impossible for them to give up their lands and sell them. Most even found it hard to trade the land for other lands of equal value because of the teachings of their religion and the demands of their culture. This is what is not understood by most anthropologists and historians today; the traditional region of the Mound Builders greatly influenced 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 hunting as well as protection for 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 for the Chickamauga to fight in a proxy war between the Spanish and the United States.
Second, it is imperative to understand the vast amounts of land used by the Chickamauga and other Southeast 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 rivers of the Ohio River and on the East / West Axis, they traveled from the Appalachians to beyond the Mississippi to at least Spiro, Oklahoma on the Arkansas River. The Chickamauga understood these lands to be theirs for hunting, fishing, gathering, and practice of religion.
Now, on top of the traditionalism of the Chickamauga, throw in 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 basically included everything west of the ridge of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River below the Ohio River and excluding Mississippi, south Alabama, and South Georgia. These two Treaties gave rights to protect their lands from invaders and they honored their Treaty rights to the British and 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 they keep and protect their land.
Traditionalism also put the Chickamauga into direct opposition to the appeaser, Cherokee. The reason the Chickamauga could not get along with the Cherokee, is because they were not Cherokee and the Cherokee were not Chickamauga. The Chickamauga were traditionalists and the Cherokee were greed inspired appeasers. 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 they entered the Southeast Woodlands in the mid to late 1670s. 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, they were forbidden by their religion 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 concubine. They burned homes and crops, chopped down tens of thousands of trees in orchards, and stole thousands or bushels or 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 numbers 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 seek to receive the promised services from the United States for their people.