"Smithers' account of the Cherokee is a welcome addition to the literature of American history. He brings an uncommon depth to the story of a part of southern American culture that is often either ignored, or glossed over."--Roanoke Times

"Smithers explores the creation and re-creation of a Cherokee national identity from the 18th century to World War II."--True West

"Gregory D. Smithers provides a welcome, valuable description and analysis of a very complex set of historical facts, cultural mores, political realities, and individual decisions that shaped the 'Cherokee Diaspora.'"--Marcia Haag, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

"In Diaspora, Smithers identifies the foundation for a new synthesis of the history of one of North America's most thoroughly studied indigenous peoples."--Andrew Denson, Western Historical Quarterly

"Smithers offers a comprehensive tribal history from the Cherokee diaspora's Revolutionary-era origins through the early twentieth century."--Jonathan Hancock, North Carolina Historical Review

"Smithers draws upon an array of scholarship and extensive archival research to explore the interconnected concepts of migration, memory, and identity."--Tyler Boulware, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Smithers has tried something new, seeking to set the history of Native North America on a different footing that engages with broader inquiry into transnational themes of identity, memory, and history."--James Taylor Carson, Southern Spaces

"Smithers does a tremendous service to both Cherokee historiography and historical memory. No future work will be able to ignore his interpretation. By demonstrating how the oft-separate fields of Indigenous, diaspora, and migration studies can benefit from being in conversation with one another, Smithers offers a fruitful roadmap that future scholars would be wise to utilize."--John R. Gram, Journal of Native American and Indigenous Studies

Finalist in the 2016 Oklahoma Book Award competition in the non-fiction category

Selected as a Best of the West 2016 title in True West magazine

Received an Award of Excellence from the East Tennessee Historical Society

Winner of the 2016 Historical Book Award given by the North Carolina Society of Historians

Winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Awards, in the non-fiction Multicultural Book category

"Showing us the way, Smithers superbly demonstrates the complexity inside the Cherokee Nation moving fire to rebuild in a new homeland. This is a valuable ethnohistorical contribution to diasporic studies."--Donald L. Fixico, author of Call for Change: The Medicine Way of American Indian History, Ethos and Reality

"Cherokee Diaspora asks probing questions about Cherokee identity in the settler-colonizer world. Gregory Smithers's lucid analysis heralds a renewed appreciation of a mobile Indigenous people who proudly negotiated the epicenter of modernity."--Ann McGrath, author of Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

"Gregory D. Smithers places Diaspora at the center of the last two-hundred plus years of Cherokee history--and he does so in startling fashion. Smithers' unique contribution shows how multiple migrations defined for Cherokees not only their past but their present and future as a people of multiple communities. Diaspora and migration shaped Cherokee history not only in the era of the Trail of Tears, but during the era of the American Civil War, and through subsequent decades even into the twenty-first century. This is a groundbreaking study of the Cherokee and of migration."--Alan Gallay, Texas Christian University