Wayne E. Lee - "The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800"
Title: Wayne E. Lee - "The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800"
Start: June 6, 2025, 12:00 pm EDT
End: June 6, 2025, 1:00 pm EDT
Address: 100 Broadway St. Frankfort, KY 40601
Cost: FREE
This event is offered both in-person and/or in a virtual format. Choose the virtual option when registering, and you will receive instructions on how to connect.
Incorporating archeology, anthropology, cartography, and Indigenous studies into military history, Wayne E. Lee has argued throughout his distinguished career that wars and warfare cannot be understood by a focus that rests solely on logistics, strategy, and operations. Fighting forces bring their cultural traditions and values onto the battlefield. In this volume, Lee employs his "cutting-off way of war" (COWW) 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.
Indigenous people lacked deep reserves of population or systems of coercive military recruitment, and as such, were wary of heavy casualties. Instead, Indigenous warriors sought to surprise their targets, and the size of the target varied with the size of the attacking force. A small war party might "cut off" individuals found gathering water, wood, or hunting, while a larger party might attempt to attack an entire town. Once revealed by its attack, the invading war party would flee before the defenders' reinforcements from nearby towns could organize. Sieges or battles were rare and fought mainly to save face or reputation. After discussing the COWW paradigm, including a detailed examination of Native logistics and their associated strategic flexibility, Lee demonstrates how the system worked and evolved in five subsequent chapters that detail intra-tribal and Indigenous-colonial warfare from pre-contact 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. His work The Cutting-Off Way won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award for 2025.
*TECHNOLOGY: This event will be accessible via Zoom, an online meeting platform. For an optimal experience, guests should connect using a device with a screen, speaker, and keyboard (a web-enabled camera is also nice, but not necessary). To accommodate guests who may not have access to this technology, a phone number will be provided at registration to dial into the event and listen to the presentation from any landline or mobile phone. Need help using Zoom? Check out this short video. You can also contact us at KHSeducation@ky.gov or call 502-782-8112.
