The Treaty of Paris signed over lands that Native nations still controlled

Evidence

After the war, as American political leaders prepared to form a new national government, they knew that they had a significant problem. The British did not control most of the lands signed over in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution—Native people did, and some of the aggrieved Cherokee men continued to fight against the Americans in the interior. The road map for living alongside unpredictable Native American nations and, furthermore, for accessing those coveted lands that Native peoples claimed and actively defended, was not clear-cut for the leaders of the infant republic. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 465

Categorization

• XREF: The gap between paper sovereignty and actual Native control parallels how the nation’s origin story treats law versus reality.