David Center for the American Revolution Seminar: “Metawney of Coweta, Muscogee Women, & Historical Erasure in the Eighteenth-Century Past and Our Present,” with Bryan Rindfleisch

The Fall 2021 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar Series will launch on Wednesday, October 27, 2021 at 3:00 p.m. on Zoom.

The presenter will be Dr. Bryan Rindfleisch. Dr. Rindfleisch specializes in Early (Colonial) American, Native American, and Atlantic World history. He is the author of two books – George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: Intercultural Family, Trade, and Colonialism in Early America and Brothers of Coweta: Kinship, Empire, & Revolution in the Eighteenth-Century Muscogee World. He has also published articles in the Journal of Southern History, Early American Studies, Ethnohistory, Native South, Journal of Early American History, The American Historian, History Compass, XVIII: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth-Century, etc.

His current book project explores the intersections of Muscogee and Cherokee peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. They intermarried with one another, waged war against – and forged peace with – each other, shared their languages and cultural practices, hunted and lived alongside one another on the fringes of their territories, along with many other connections that illustrate how intertwined their communities and histories were. My hope, then, is to change the ways in which historians understand the complex and interdimensional histories of Native Peoples and regions in Early America.

Dr. Rindfleisch will be presenting a chapter titled “Metawney of Coweta, Muscogee Women, & Historical Erasure in the Eighteenth-Century Past and Our Present.” 

A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom. 

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Adrianna Link, Head of Scholarly Programs, at [email protected].

“Metawney of Coweta, Muscogee Women, & Historical Erasure in the Eighteenth-Century Past and Our Present” 

This paper explores the critically important roles that Muscogee women like Metawney of Coweta played within their eighteenth-century worlds, despite the fact Euro-Americans deliberately erased the roles and influence of Indigenous women in the past. This is why we only have fleeting glimpses of Metawney's life, and barely that. Yet by utilizing the scholarly consensus related to the history of Indigenous women (and specifically Muscogee women) in the eighteenth-century, along with such fleeting glimpses, we can piece together the pieces of how Indigenous/Muscogee women were the heart and soul of Indigenous worlds in the past (and present).