Tyler Boulware, Teaching Fields: Early America, Native Americans, Frontiers/Borderlands, Colonial and Mountain South. Research Interests: his first book centers on the Cherokee people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains. In Deconstructing the Cherokee Nation (2011), he explore the localism and regionalism of Cherokee life during the eighteenth century. For much of the colonial period, Cherokees from different towns and regions encountered varying geopolitical circumstances, situated as they were on the different “frontiers” of Cherokee country, and accordingly safeguarded their own interests by pursuing diplomatic, military, and economic agendas that could often be at variance. At the same time, however, Cherokees demonstrated an ethnic awareness, grounded in kinship, that strengthened through increased interactions with non-Cherokee peoples. As these cross-cultural exchanges became more volatile, Cherokees were forced to confront powerful adversaries which demanded a more unified response. Much of his book therefore examines how border conflict, especially during the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution, altered Cherokee conceptualizations of community. The result, he argue, was that while town and region remained important markers of Cherokee identity and sociopolitical organization, a broader ethnic and national awareness crystallized in response to these dramatic events, which laid the foundation for the emergence of an institutionally-based Cherokee Nation in the early nineteenth century. His second book manuscript, currently titled Next to Kin: Native Americans and Friendship in Early America, explores the concept of friendship among Native peoples from contact to the removal era (c. 1500-1840). His initial research shows that Native Americans attached deep and varied meanings to friendship, and these ideas, customs, and obligations influenced both informal and formal relationships within Native communities and between Indians, Europeans, and Africans. He is especially concerned with how the cultural meanings of friendship – both Indian and European – influenced Native American and Euroamerican understandings of diplomatic alliances and treaties. Ultimately, my manuscript reveals how native and newcomer solidified personal relationships and inter-group alliances, and how ideas about friendship and its obligations contributed to the violence that erupted between individuals and communities.
