Dr. Kelley’s talk will offer an overview of his new book, Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country, published in 2025 by the University of Oklahoma Press. The book demonstrates how Chickasaws and Cherokees successfully held on to their lands for decades by combining their existing understandings of land and property with new notions of landownership brought by European inhabitants of early Tennessee. Moreover, Dr. Kelley also will explore how Native Americans’ resistance to American expansion led the region’s white residents to create a series of local governments to pressure Great Britain and then the United States to acquire territory from the Cherokee Nation and the Chickasaw Nation.

About the speaker

Born and raised in East Tennessee, Dr. Lucas Kelley is currently an Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he teaches courses on early American history, Native American history, and public history. He received his PhD in history from the University of North Carolina and his MA in history from Virginia Tech. While an undergraduate at Centre College, he worked for one summer as an intern for the East Tennessee Historical Society.