ABSTRACT
The Lower South was not just a society engaged in colonialism. It was a settler colonial society, a place suffused by colonization in everyday life. Slave majorities, white settlers, and powerful Native American communities interacted across a contact zone that occupied and transformed the homelands of Cherokees and Creeks. Learning mediated power struggles. Colonials used Indigenous and African knowledge to their advantage. Newly arrived Africans and their descendants, as well as Native Americans, learned to hybridize colonial knowledge for meaning and strategies to survive in a world shattered by colonization. Colonials became interested in and suspicious of formal education for poorer whites, as well as missionary education among Indigenous and African communities.
