Revealing Indigenous Voices on European Maps as Primary Source Material for Understanding Cherokee Coalescence

Cherokees and other Indigenous groups provided European colonizers with geographic knowledge of the Native South in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Information originating from Indigenous groups found its way onto French and British maps. Alongside oral tradition and archeological sources, the nomenclature on European maps provide insight into the processes of Native coalescence in the Southeast. Scholars have used the term coalescence to describe the poorly understood process by which culturally unique Native communities, under colonial pressure, formed mixed communities that became culturally distinctive. This study uses the etymology of toponyms on early American Southeastern maps to investigate the processes of coalescence in the Cherokee homelands. The etymology of Indigenous toponyms on European maps indeed reveals that Cherokee coalescence happened over just a few generations and was often driven by demographic ascendency rather than violence. Cherokee oral history and archeological evidence support the changes in toponyms on the maps as Cherokee culture became dominant in areas occupied by diverse Indigenous groups.