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The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story Kindle Edition
by Tiya Miles (Author)

But first, we wanted to talk about one of the many complicated stories that involve race and heritage. While it is well-known history that slavery was a common practice in the Deep South before the Civil War, less well known is the fact that it wasn’t just white families that were slave owners.

Some well-to-do Native Americans also owned slaves. In fact, the late Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller wrote in her autobiography that, quote, “The truth is that the practice of slavery will forever cast a shadow on the great Cherokee Nation,” unquote.

Indeed that shadow continues today in the latest iteration over the debate over just who to include as members of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Supreme Court has stripped some of the slave descendents known as freedmen of their Cherokee citizenship in the decision last month.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, James Vann, a Cherokee chief and entrepreneur, established Diamond Hill in Georgia, the most famous plantation in the southeastern Cherokee Nation. In this first full-length study to reconstruct the history of the plantation, Tiya Miles tells the story of Diamond Hill’s founding, its flourishing, its takeover by white land-lottery winners on the eve of the Cherokee Removal, its decay, and ultimately its renovation in the 1950s.

This moving multiracial history sheds light on the various cultural communities that interacted within the plantation boundaries—from elite Cherokee slaveholders to Cherokee subsistence farmers, from black slaves of various ethnic backgrounds to free blacks from the North and South, from German-speaking Moravian missionaries to white southern skilled laborers. Moreover, the book includes rich portraits of the women of these various communities. Vividly written and extensively researched, this history illuminates gender, class, and cross-racial relationships on the southern frontier.