Incorporating archeology, anthropology, and cartography into military history, Wayne E. Lee's research has been a standard for scholars of Native–settler-colonial wars in the early modern, colonial, and early Republic eras, especially European-Indigenous wars and intra-tribal wars in eastern North America. In this volume, Lee revisits and updates his "cutting-off way of war" paradigm to recast Indigenous warfare in a framework of the lived realities of Native people rather than with regard to European and settler military strategies and practices.
In a mix of classic and new essays, Lee shows that Indigenous people lacked deep reserves of population systems for coercive military recruitment and as such were wary of heavy casualties. Instead, they generally sought to surprise their targets, and the size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might only seek to "cut off" individuals found getting water, wood, or out hunting, while a larger party might aim at attacking a whole town. Lee demonstrates how this unfolded in practice via case studies that detail intra-tribal and Indigenous-colonial warfare from precontact through the American Revolution.
Wayne E. Lee is the Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
An ambitious and thoughtful reassessment of Native American war-making before and after permanent European settlement in the early 17th century...Lee draws upon extensive new evidence to engage with existing scholarship and investigate previously unexplored territory."—Wall Street Journal
One of the benefits of studying the military histories of non-European groups is that it reminds us that there are very different means of waging war, as well as reasons for doing so. In The Cutting-Off Way, Wayne E. Lee argues that the fluid, Native American style of war was quite alien to the European soldiers who encountered it . . . . The aims of their wars were also different, argues Lee."—New York Times Book Review
