The Other Cherokee Removal: Property and Dispossession in the Revolutionary Texas Borderlands, 1820–1840

Abstract: This article offers a different point of departure from previous studies of Indian removal, state-building, and settler colonialism in the era of the early republic. The other Cherokee removal provides the ideal story, and the revolutionary Texas Borderlands provides an ideal place, to look beyond discursive ideology and comparatively investigate settler-colonial practices among sovereign-claiming nations that were the inheritors of both Spanish and British imperial traditions. Through an investigation of Cherokee emigrants’ pursuit of property rights within the revolutionary Texas Borderlands from 1820 to 1840, this study considers how Cherokee dialogues with state-building projects influenced the trajectory of the nationalization of dispossession—the process in which state-sponsored property regimes claim exclusive jurisdiction over territory and legitimize land rights for their own people at the expense of others with claims to the same land. Within this context, Cherokee emigrants, or Texas Cherokees, pursued landownership vis-à-vis three different sovereign-claiming nations, by which I mean entities whose claims to sovereignty over territory remains contested—the Republic of Mexico, the Republic of Fredonia, and the Republic of Texas—each with their own vision for the future of Texas lands. While Mexican and Fredonian efforts to nationalize dispossession created space for the Texas Cherokees within the colonial imaginary, Anglo--–Texan nationalization policies did not. Anglo Texans merged property, race, sovereignty, and nationhood together when deciding political and legal membership within their national imagination, which precipitated the exclusion of Indigenous outsiders such as the Texas Cherokees from being landowners or remaining as a foreign political community located within the borders of the new Anglo Texan republic. As a result, the Texas Revolution did more than just facilitate the collapse of the Texas Cherokees’ aspirations to obtain property rights in the borderlands; it also led to their deportation from within the sovereign boundaries of the Republic of Texas.